Imagine you are a manager responsible for implementing a significant cybersecurity-related technology change within an organization. What are the potential reactions to this change?  Indicate one way in which you would minimize the impact of adverse reactions within the change management process. Provide support for your recommendation.

The best way to minimize a bad reaction to a lot of change is to teach about the benefits. Harvard Business Review lists 3 things people consider most when change is involved. Difficulty is vital as people would like to know how it will affect them, but also if it is easy others will add more headache and responsibility. Ensuring a smooth transition is essential ensuring that this befits the staff and even the customers. The Cost of reward involved for others is also taken into consideration. Is this change going to benefit the company or make things more complex and confusing?  The big picture of why is next as they would like to know if this is a result of an incident, a new safety precaution, or overall how is this beneficial not for the difficulty or cost, but whether this is something worth implementing. 

For example, the DoD changed to a new system of MHS Genesis due to the DHA. The training involved was very unhelpful as not enough people and even the trainers had answers to the questions. The system transitioned from the West to the East Coast over a year time and there were still many issues with the system. People had to spend more time learning the confusing system due to it being such a big change than doing their jobs for a while. To this day people are struggling or finding issues. For new people to the base or such have to go to so many training to have access to their assigned roles and still have to wait months before they can even access it themself. The benefit was that due to all bases using the system records did not have to be taken from base to base as all the information was in one place and everything was standard. the transition was not smooth making wait times dreadful for patients and staff being booked months out. The people involved care more about the numbers involved they do not bother to care about the situation affecting this causing many problems with scheduling and morale at an all-time low.

References:

Andersen, E. (2023, April 3). Change is hard. here’s how to make it less painful. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/04/change-is-hard-heres-how-to-make-it-less-painful