Coherency Management has its focus on how to make the organizations work smarter. By that the business processes have to be altered which will leads to changes in the Information Systems and changes in the organization hierarchy.
When such changes occur then the employees and the managers have to work together in a different way which means that the organization culture and the organization subcultures will be challenged. Thereto such projects needs support from the top and middle management and various other stakeholders to succeed.
Since Coherency Management can’t be achieved in one single project and the organization has to develop its architecture (and coherency) over time then the program has to be continuous where various projects are defined and implemented over time.
To be able to win over the guiding coalitions then a Coherency Initiation Plan has to articulated. The Coherency Initiation Plan has to consist of these elements:
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A Stakeholder Analysis and Plan.
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A Plan for coping with the political struggles within the organization (the opposing factions)
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A Communication Plan.
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Lobbying for further change e.g., to the management, stock owners or other internal as well as external stakeholders e.g., via the press.
When the “Coherency Initiation Plan” has been articulated then it is necessary to work with how the organization is designed in the way culture, technology, processes, structure and management interact and how they create value for the organization.
The Coherency Architect has to take this into account and therefore should the “owners” of the processes be won over to believe that they can and will gain by the process changes. As mentioned in Coherency and Organizations then the employees and the managers are key to success. This means that the Coherency Architect has to make sure that he or she understands how the various departments, employees and managers influence the processes in the organization. This can be achieved by the Coherency Architect map the processes in the organization and identifies which departments that handles the various subprocesses and then investigate who are in charge of the processes. The processes can be identified by using a flowchart diagram. The persons who are in charge needs to be involved in the process change e.g., by applying the Soft Systems Methodology or the Coherency Architect use extensive interviews to form a qualified opinion.
It is important that the Coherency Architect continues to communicate to the stakeholders so the funding and the support in form of goodwill towards the Coherency Program are kept intact.
To investigate how the organization can create value then it is necessary for the Coherency Architect to investigate how the architecture of the company is designed. Remember that the point of Coherency Management is to make the organization reach its goals in a smarter way and therefore should the Coherency Architect work with several different tools to investigate the processes, organization culture, organization structure, management and technology (some proposals for how to do so will be handled in a future blog post).