Change is unavoidable and important for any business to keep up with the market, competitors, and customer needs. A business transformation or change initiative can have a huge, positive impact on the way your organisation runs, making it more efficient and profitable. 
If it sounds so easy, why do change transformations sometimes fail? It is a common misconception that these two concepts are the same thing. Understanding the difference between business transformation and change will be valuable when planning your organisation’s business improvement processes. Before defining the difference between the two approaches, it is necessary to clarify what each one represents.

What is Change?

Change is a continuous, evolving set of activities focusing on improvement. It is a systematic and structured way of streamlining work practices to enhance productivity, quality, service, and labour. It involves incremental changes to business processes and functions, and adjusting the way things work. This technique includes both proactive and reactive initiatives implemented within the existing business processes to reduce costs, improve service quality, and enhance employee satisfaction.

Change management is, in turn, the process of ensuring that people are ready, willing, and able to make the necessary changes needed to achieve successful outcomes.

What is Business Transformation?

Business transformation refers to rethinking and reshaping the organisation with a focus on innovation. It is not simply a matter of implementing enhancements or modifying processes and procedures. 

This method involves developing a new business model based on a vision to make the organisation leaner and more focused on its core business values. It consists of re-engineering the entire organisation’s purpose, core capabilities, operations, and structure. As such, they require much deeper integration across business functions and disciplines.

The goal is to create new opportunities to compete in an environment where customer demands and technology evolve rapidly.

The Difference Between Transformation and Change

Business transformation and change are two terms that are often used interchangeably by businesses today, but there is a critical difference between them. Both techniques operate within the same parameters and key characteristics of process improvement; both are used to improve a business’s performance and quality by reducing costs or increasing revenue. But they differ in scope, intensity, and the mechanism used to achieve improvements.

Here are some key differences:

• Where change is conducted to improve processes within an existing organisational structure, a transformation is conducted to make drastic changes that allow the company to shift from conventional thinking or approaches, usually producing large-scale change.

• Change is a preventative practice that is applied as a principle to all businesses regardless of the presence or absence of problems, while transformation is used to prevent imminent catastrophes.

• Change is commonly seen as an ongoing repair and maintenance activity. It is mainly used to achieve quick improvements, whereas transformation concentrates on redesigning of the entire business operations system requiring more time to achieve the goal.

Business transformation is a much more radical approach and, consequently, involves much more risk. Moreover, change management can be incorporated into transformation projects, but not vice versa. And even if some changes lead to significant progress in a number of processes, it does not guarantee the success of the overall transformation.

Consequently, we can conclude that while change aims to transform concrete functions inside the organisation, transformation seeks to redesign the whole company. 

Transformation is a tricky process, one filled with potential mistakes and pitfalls. 

If you don’t have enough experience or aren’t sure you can handle it on your own, use the business transformation consulting services or an expert who has extensive experience and will help you make changes to your business or transform it completely.