The Matrix of Change

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Just as total quality management owes much to tools like statistical process control and the “house of quality,” business process reengineering can benefit from tools to supplement and focus managerial intuition.1 Unfortunately, current tools for managing change don’t do the job.2

Effective change management depends on recognizing complements among technology, practice, and strategy. Interactions play a critical role in affecting outcomes, a role that leads to new analysis and theory.3 In developing a theory of complements, Milgrom and Roberts showed mathematically how interactions can make it impossible to successfully implement a new complex system in a fully decentralized fashion.4 Instead, managers must plan a strategy that coordinates the interactions among all the components of a business system. In particular, because information technology and new organizational paradigms eliminate time, space, and inventory buffers, operations may become more tightly coupled. These linkages further aggravate change management problems and process interactions.5

In this article, we introduce a new tool, the “matrix of change,” that can help managers anticipate the complex interrelationships surrounding change. Specifically, the tool helps manage concerns about feasibility (stability of a new system of practices), sequence (which practices to change first), location (greenfield or brown-field sites), pace (fast or slow), and stakeholder interests (sources of value added). The matrix of change was inspired by formal analyses of Milgrom and Roberts and also draws on the established design principles of Hauser and Clausing.6 The implementation steps may already be familiar to anyone acquainted with quality function deployment (QFD) or the house of quality. The resulting support for process design, analogous to product design, becomes formal and systematic but remains managerially relevant and intuitively accessible.

The Landscape of Change

An old proverb states that “you can’t cross a chasm in two steps.” The same wisdom applies to many organizational change efforts. Advances in information technology (IT) and rising competition have led to new modes of organizing work. Many of these new organizational forms are complete departures from past practice instead of incremental improvements. The resulting gains for companies can be substantial. Hallmark, for instance, discarded sequential product development in favor of cross-functional teams and reduced new-product introduction time for one greeting card by 75 percent. After reorganizing, Bell Atlantic cut service order rework and saved $1 million annually, while simultaneously improving product quality.

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References (76)

1. J. Hauser and D. Clausing, “The House of Quality,” Harvard Business Review, volume 66, May–June 1988, pp. 63–73.

2. T. Davenport and D. Stoddard, “Reengineering: Business Change of Mythic Proportions?” MIS Quarterly, volume 18, June 1994, pp. 121–127.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Miriam Avins, James Champy, Kevin Crowston, Michael Gallivan, Debra Hofman, Mary Pinder, Jack Rockart, Robert Sombert, Michael Tushman, the referees, and numerous anonymous individuals at “MacroMed” for helpful comments and insights, while retaining responsibility for any remaining errors in the paper. They also acknowledge the Leaders for Manufacturing Program, the Center for Coordination Science, and the Industrial Performance Center at MIT for generous financial support.

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