Response 1:

I am a Senior Software Developer. I am responsible for developing websites, automating workflows and providing IT solutions to our clients. I have experience with functional domains like Finance, Internet Marketing, Insurance and Health Care.

I live in Chicago. I come from a nuclear family and strongly believe in family values.

I am married and my wife is also working in IT industry. My hobbies are reading, running and hiking. I believe in improving myself daily and learning something new from everyone I meet.

Identify and describe a change initiative at your current or former organization that failed

When I started my career back in 2005, I was part of research lab in a technology firm.

Our technology lab is like an incubation center where ideas are groomed to develop a minimum viable product to attract investors.

Once the MVP finds itself few investors it will be converted to a full blown commercial product.

During this time, I worked with a team of five people to develop an Stock Market Order Matching Engine using some cutting edge technologies available back then.

We worked around six months to build MVP and found ourself an investor who was interested in that product and we continued our effort next six months with changes suggested by him.

After an year it was jsut me and my manager on the team. Soon we lost the investor and finally the initiative was dropped.

Explain why the change initiative failed

After reading first chapter in Kotter's Leading Change, below are the key reasons why initiative failed

Under-communicating the vision by multiple of 10 (Kotter, 2012)

I feel our manager did not communicate the power of vision to our team to right magnitude. All knew was I build something cool and getting chance to work on new technologies. But my manager could have given me reasons on how this product could make a difference in market and to the organization.

Declaring victory too soon (Kotter, 2012)

When we found ourself an investor (actually potential investor) we celebrated our victory too soon. We did not identify that we found ourself a supporter not investor and we should keep looking who would really invest money into the initiative.

Permitting obstacles to block the vision (Kotter, 2012)

The moment we realized the investor dropped our team gave up which is like obstacle blocking the vision (Kotter, 2012) we had one the product.

Response 2:

Kotter (2012) states eight main errors that organizations can make which would cause change initiatives to fail:

Allowing too much complacency

Failing to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition

Underestimating the power of vision

Undercommunicating the vision

Permitting obstacles to block the new vision

Failing to create short-term wins

Declaring victory too soon

Neglecting to anchor changes firmly in the corporate culture

I will proudly say that we haven't failed at any major and strategic change initiatives in our recent history but one change initiative that has failed so far is the introduction and implementation of CRM in our company.

CRM can be important but how it is implemented and integrated into the operation and sakes function in the company is not less important. It is what can determine its success or failure.

I have learned one important lesson from this ordeal, the goal is not implementing and installing the tool but rather figuring out how this tool will be used by the team and how it will enhance the business.

I believe CRM has failed so far in our company because it has been implemented in a way that is isolated from the operation.

In other words, it is not needed the way it was installed in our system. For example, the team doesn't need the CRM to produce any of the required reports. Nor is it necessary to prepare and send our quotations to our customers. So, it was implemented in a way that didn't make it necessary for work to happen.

Our ERP on the other hand was implemented in a way that made it necessary to run the business such as creating and sending out orders to suppliers, producing sales reports, and releasing Sales Orders to issue invoices to customers. So it was implemented in a way that addressed business function necessities.

For CRM to succeed, we need to look at it again and integrate it into the operation in a way that makes it necessary to run the business to improve the business.

We need to approach it in a way that prioritizes the business and not the implementation of the tool itself. So the business is the priority and not the implementation of the tool itself.

As I have mentioned, producing our quotations through the CRM tool and running sales reports from it are some functions that can make the CRM tool relevant and necessary and in turn can enhance the business through its usage.