Change can be and often is a significant source of risk for organizations. That's why managing risk resulting from change is one of the most important risk measures to introduce and continuously improve over time. In highly-regulated, high-risk industries this process is called Management of Change or MOC. However, its application is of value to all organizations looking to be more resilient with their operations and improve the probability of mission success. Management of Change is a means by which new and latent risk can be identified and treated when organizational, procedural, regulatory or process change occur. MOC processes act as preventative measures against adverse events due to risks introduced by change. It does this by helping to expose weaknesses in the underlying practices and tools across safety-critical processes and systems. In practice, Management of Change will touch and interact with all safety-critical and many mission-critical processes within an organization. In this capacity, MOC provides companies with a pulse and an earlier warning of the level of uncertainty across the organization. This is very much needed during times of disruption such as what is happening now during the COVID pandemic. For this reason MOC is an important risk control that should be one of the first to implement as part of any risk management program. Companies with mature MOC capabilities experience additional benefits similar to those resulting from applying LEAN to improve process flow. Instead of removing waste, MOC programs help to remove sources of risk lowering the probability of safety incidents over time. This has a side effect of improving the certainty that planned changes create the desired outcomes while avoiding undesirable effects. Do you have a change management process in place? Does it effectively manage risk due to planned changes? Is it being used to give you a risk pulse of the measure of uncertainty within your organization?
More information about Management of Change can be found here.