Strategic Change Management In Childfund Kenya

Organizational change management is normally eminent in all types of organizations \nirrespective of their form during their lifetime. The research objective was to determine \nthe context, nature and practices of strategic change management that ChildFund Kenya \nhas adopted over the last eight years and the challenges it has faced during the process. \nChildFund Kenya is part of ChildFund Inc., an international child development \nOrganization with it’s headquarter in Richmond, Virginia and having operations in more \nthan 35 countries. ChildFund started working in Kenya in 1960 and the National Office is \nin Westland Nairobi was established in 1973.This was a cases study since the unit of \nanalysis was one organization. Both primary and secondary data collection methods were \nused. The researcher had a face to face interview with the country director, finance \ndirector and program director. Content analysis was employed to analyse the \ndata.ChildFund Kenya has a strategic plan for years 2012-2016.All staff participate in the \nformulation of the strategic plan. Any strategic change done is communicated to all staff \nand they all participate and are involved in the process thus they own the process. \nRestraining factors that the organization has experienced during change are limited \nfinancial resources, resistance to change, community change fatique and lack of human \nresource capacity, that is, some staff could not comprehend the purpose of the change. \nThe study also established that to minimize challenges of change management that arose \ndue to organization design, organization culture, resource limitation and staff resistance, \nthe management defined the agency values and developed training modules that instilled \na sense of collective commitment to agency values, staff were continuously educated and \nplan awareness workshops organized. The structure was also changed to accommodate \nthe changes and communication of the changes made to staff at all levels. Benchmarking \nnumber of processes with peer organizations who had undertaken similar change \nprocesses is also done. Helping employees cope with change is one of the most critical \nsuccess factors in change management. Although ChildFund Kenya conducts trainings \nand organizes workshops to make employees own the changes, one thing that did not \ncome out clearly from the study is how the organization motivates staff to keep the newly \nacquired behaviour going including rewarding performance, encouragement and \nrecognition.