Amela Consulting specializes in developing and implementing transformational business processes, system procedures, and leadership rules for large and small businesses change initiatives. The firm works with clients and offers services that assist them in optimizing their strategic IT implementations, professional growth, and change management efforts. Amela Consulting also offers organizational change leadership through training and project management solutions with a vision to provide an open and collaborative forum for learners.

In an exclusive interview with Manage HR, Dr. Pamela D. Andrews, founder of Amela Consulting, gives her valuable insights on the challenges in the market space and how the firm’s services and solutions help clients tackle them. She also talks about her company’s value proposition and how it stays ahead of the curve in the world of change management.

The Existing Challenges

A major hurdle in organizational change management is finding the right internal and external resources that can support the transformation. It is challenging whether you bring people together with the skills to implement change or spend the time planning and training clients throughout the process to ensure they are ready to adapt the change and make it sustainable. Depending on where knowledge is available regarding organizational structure, business processes, information system, and infrastructure, this information determines how best analyze systems, change impact, and other financial factors.
Other challenges are the cost of implementing change management and adapting to technological advancements. Cost is a consistent factor hindering change efforts due the business, technical and infrastructure challenges coming from both external and internal factors. Organizations are focusing on reducing costs and looking at what are priorities for the business, what can be streamlined, and what will bring the biggest impact. Managing enterprise-wide change requires exploring layers of complexity and the uncertainty due to rapid technological advancements. Adding to the challenges, iteratively adapting to new and emerging information about structures, systems, people, and culture takes time and money to properly assess to ensure changes are effective and sustainable.

The Approach for Implementing Solutions

We identify the current position of organizations and their desired outcome through several change models. Amela Consulting incorporates change management best practices, adult learning strategies, and project management principles to support business drivers by creating impactful, collaborative solutions. Furthermore, we deconstruct some of the organizational complexity and segment the work required to meet the goals or milestones into various tasks or day-to-day processes. For our approach to succeed, we need trustworthy relationships with our clients. Our consultants with clients to establish open communication and collaboration on the issues, challenges, risks and a potential range of solutions to meet performance goals and objectives set forth.

We use the Weisbord six-box model to perform the organizational diagnosis and identify the changes to be implemented. Apart from following the model, we analyze the problem’s urgency, the solution’s sustainability, internal leadership development strategies, and provide implementation tools, and to assist organizations in achieving their final goals. We also use experiential learning, networking, and collaborative leadership practices to address emerging change and uncertainty.

Project Management and Training Leadership Services

Amela Consulting offers services in support of improving business operations, technical infrastructure changes, and software application implementations through three primary streams of services: Research, Education and Leadership. We support project management with a focus on technical changes and project leadership needs in the organization. We also provide services strictly dedicated to training management, where we focus on optimizing the training processes adopted by a firm.

Our learning solutions are customized and designed based on end users’ locations, cost, learning style, and complexity of the topic. We assess the learning environment and provide the best solution for that organization in the form of a blended model, classroom, online/elearning services or in multiple formats so the learner can pick the model they are most comfortable.

Why Amela Consulting?

Amela Consulting brings together the practical and theoretical aspects of change. Rather than focusing on the technical or business aspects, we incorporate learning models around change management into our solutions to better impact a business in its transformation. While supporting organizations with change management, we focus on adding value by minimizing the complexity of their issues. We deconstruct these complexities to understand what is needed to fill the gaps and mitigate risks. This helps us ensure we successfully meet their performance goals or initiatives.

We build strong relationships with clients and quickly adapt to their environments. Acting as a part of their environment, we create connections that help us build meaningful relationships and focus on the positive aspects of change to improve adaptability and transformation. We become the organization’s partner in its change efforts.

Key to our services-leadership is our ability to remain positive in environments with a high-level of uncertainty and flux. We have become adept at operating in ambiguity and complexity. We maintain the positive vision to help keep stakeholders focused on positive outcomes during the change process.

A Change Management Case Study

Amela Consulting provided leadership in developing the training management strategy and framing a budget for the resources the client needed to implement enterprise-wide change. The client was a large healthcare organization formed by the merger of two large companies that were not merged completely in terms of their technologies and cultures. We brought a team of ten managers and sixty trainers to lead and manage the training for 29,000 employees. We put together an on-site plan with classroom, instructor-led and facilitated learning models. This was a massive organization-wide change as we were altering the application in which clinicians and operational providers documented and managed patient care services. Plus, we moved data and processes from three different systems to one centralized system.

When the pandemic unexpectedly came into the picture, an already complex healthcare implementation became increasingly challenging. Like school districts and university systems, our team had to quickly convert the entire training to online, virtual, and self-directed learning models. At an executive level, Amela Consulting communicated and demonstrated the daily changes and created a path to success for healthcare providers, nurses, and clinicians who were accustomed to classroom training Essential to the process was to develop numerous communication channels and collaborative relationships, provide leadership with assurance, offer incentives for individuals who completed their training, and partner with other leaders to champion urgency and manage the day to day flux and high-level of uncertainty. Providing leadership for the incremental and emergent changes required the utilization of many change management principles along with other project management and adult-learning tools we used to construct positive outcomes for this client.