Cultural Change in Process Management

Organizational change management is an important task in the context of Business Process Management (BPM). Organizational change covers a broad range of topics, from strategy to corporate culture and performance management. BPM is at the center of change initiatives as the main lever for implementing change through process engineering. Yet, especially the cultural aspects of organizational change have not been systematically integrated into the principles of BPM. Since organizational change is mainly driven by projects, an integrated change method would be helpful to support the business process manager to achieve the goals of change. Existing methods, however, are often rather inflexible and do not cater to the situational needs of a change project. Moreover, they tend to focus on specific topics of change, for example, either strategy or processes or culture. This leads to a disregard of the interrelation of the relevant topics, and with this, the complexity of organizational change. As a consequence, an approach is required, which first of all supports the holistic analysis of an organizational change project, and secondly provides a method construction process which allows for a situational design of the change method integrating the relevant dimensions of organizational change as well as the involved “hard” and “soft” factors. This chapter introduces a corresponding approach.