How Process Mining supports Change Management ?

Change Management and Process Mining

Change Management: a crucial issue for companies

The landscape of large industrial groups is changing rapidly and drastically. Giant companies like Kodak, which has not been able to take the digital turn, or Blackberry, which has suffered from the arrival of new disruptive players on their markets, are examples among many others, which show to what extent agility and the ability to change is essential for the competitiveness and survival of organizations.

The analogy with the Navy Seals, a famous American commando, is interesting here. They say that they evolve in a VUCA environment: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, which strongly resembles the challenges facing every organization today, especially in the digital era.

The ability of a company to transform and change is therefore vital. It is with these challenges in mind that “change management” was born. Forbes defines it as a set of professional processes that aim to facilitate adaptation within each company.

Obstacles to change

However, change management is not easy and is often doomed to failure. According to McKinsey, 70% of transformation programs fail. It is therefore important to see what the keys to success are for a change management program and how to conduct it well.

Many theories have been written on this subject, but they all agree on one point: the success of change projects depends essentially on people. As we have seen, too many transformation projects fail and the result is a fear of change. This fear is often very personal: the individual is afraid for his or her place in the organization, for his or her compensation, for his or her skills and for his or her future.

The conditions for a well executed change

A change management project always seems ambitious for the individual, but to be successful, it must seem feasible. To do so, it must be based on clear tasks and processes whose evolution is easily identifiable and measurable. This is certainly the best way to accompany the human being in this transformation process and to succeed in a change management strategy.

3 conditions seem key:

  • The change must be based on a precise diagnosis that is consistent with reality. It must be able to give meaning to the need to change and transform.
  • Before any change, it is also necessary to be able to measure the “gap analysis” that separates point A (the initial situation) from point B (the ideal situation after the change) in order to better measure the steps and efforts to be made.
  • It is then necessary to be able to measure and control the implementation. Successful change projects are most often those that are able to identify and value the benefits regularly during the project.

How does Process Mining meet these conditions?

Process mining will be able to support the company on these 3 key elements. Indeed, process mining is a technology that allows, thanks to the logs present in the information systems, to visually represent the reality operated on the ground.

This technology will therefore allow to:

  • make a precise diagnosis. Indeed, one of the uses of process mining is the discovery of processes operated in the field in real time. Thanks to the logs, we can easily reconstruct the processes globally but also by unit. For example, we can visualize the path of parcels, invoices or even tickets in a global process of the company. This discovery phase highlights bottlenecks, rework and anomalies in the company’s processes that need to be improved and optimized.
  • The second added value of process mining is to evaluate the conformity of the processes operated in the field in relation to the way they were initially conceived and the benefits that were expected. By focusing on the deviating elements of the processes, it will facilitate the analysis and understanding of the changes and actions necessary for better performance. It will help to visualize the current situation and the efforts and changes needed to reach an ideal situation.
  • Finally, process mining has a temporal dimension that facilitates measurement and control. Indeed, it can compare the past, the present and, thanks to AI and Machine learning, also gives a future projection of the evolution of the processes. The control is therefore systematic and even projective, and measures the benefits and advantages of changes in the organization.

 

Change management is vital for the company and must enable it to gain agility and performance to remain competitive in changing markets. Process mining is a technology that will enable this change by providing a precise diagnosis of the reality on the ground and of the actions and efforts to be made to achieve an objective. It will also allow to measure and control the benefits of the change in order to reassure and engage the employees throughout the process.