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Increasing market pressures require organizations to rethink the development of change capability. Building a sustainable and flexible organization capable of responding in a timely manner to quickly changing customer demands without compromising technological excellence and quality is a complex task. This chapter builds on a five-year study of transformation efforts at a product development unit of Ericsson. The complexity of designing and managing learning mechanisms as both a transformation engine and a way to improve new product development is captured. The chapter points toward the challenges of designing and managing learning mechanisms that enhance organizational agility.

The study aims to explain the process of management accounting practices and organizational change aspects in the public sector’s response to environmental pressures. Specifically, it discusses the interaction process between management accounting practices from one side and culture, leadership and decentralization from the other side.

This study adopts qualitative research approach and an interpretive case study. The study uses the triangulation method of data collection, including interviews, annual reports, documents and archival records. A theoretical lens informs it of the contextual/processual approach for interpreting interaction processes between management accounting and organizational change aspects, including culture, leadership and decentralization.

The findings confirm that a change in organizational culture has an important impact on accounting change, which has played a central role in the desire to initiate and accept such changes by the organizational members. Similarly, the new leadership style created a unique culture that was considered a solid platform to introduce new accounting systems by enhancing the trust between IT staff and management accountants and their trust in themselves to accept the change. The paper concludes that the relationships between the change aspects at the organizational level, and accounting practices at the inherent organizational and accounting levels are both recursive and two way, with the two concepts inextricably interwoven.

The study has some limitations as the data is limited to only a single country – more explanation for Jordanian Customs Organization quantitative understandings of governance improvement. The study has important implications for practitioners and customs officials by showing that different government regulations and customs reforms have varied influences on the public sector. These reforms have included most modifications to the accounting and organizational configurations. This study contributes to institutional theory development and refinement by exploring the interface between external influences and internal origins in the accounting change process.

This study uses a categorical association between organizational changes and accounting in the public sector as most prior studies have been conducted on the private sector due to competitive and technical pressures. It also contributes to organizational change and accounting literature by discussing the relationship between accounting from one side and culture and leadership from another side.

The purpose of this study is to determine the influence of project critical success factors (CSFs) on change management in the context of business process management (BPM). Despite widespread interest in BPM, the existing literature is insufficient in addressing the antecedents that contribute to change management in business process projects.

Key factors of change management success in BPM projects were initially identified in a systematic literature review (SLR) and were used as antecedents of change management through a structural equation modeling (SEM) with 464 business project stakeholders. Next, a neural network analysis allowed the key factors to be ranked non-linearly. Finally, a latent class analysis (LCA) was performed to determine the sample's heterogeneous groups based on their project management characteristics.

Project management, top management support and technological competencies were the main CSFs identified as having positive effects on change management. The most important factor is project management, followed by top management support, which plays a crucial mediating role in enabling change management. Although relevant, technological competencies were secondary in the study. Regarding project management CSF, four heterogeneous classes of individuals were determined.

Although this study provides an opportunity to observe CSFs, it does not address the need to analyze the phenomenon in different classifications of projects, regarding maturity, complexity, project management approach and other aspects that differentiate projects in a meaningful way.

The study allows practitioners to understand the critical factors underlying change management and take necessary actions to manage it, recognizing that individuals have heterogeneous profiles regarding project management.

This study pioneeringly discusses the CSFs of change management BPM projects to enable successful change management, ranking the main factors and mapping heterogeneous profiles.

In this paper, a preliminary framework for the assessment of change management is developed, based on recent research and case interviews at three consulting companies. The framework distinguishes between efficiency and effectiveness measurements on change management, and evaluates the management methods and outcomes of the change projects separately. The framework is applied to analyze and compare the change projects in three Finnish manufacturing companies. The results indicate that the preliminary framework can explain the difference between successful and less successful change management in manufacturing processes. By applying the measurement framework in practice, organizations can continuously improve their change management capabilities. More empirical research is needed to test the framework further.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate in-depth the current approach of managing client requirements in construction and to highlight the significant factors, which contribute to the complexity of managing the requirements in order to define a better approach.

A case study of a leading international global built asset and engineering consultancy organization was conducted over two years. The case study was conducted principally using semi-participant observations supplemented with other qualitative data collection methods (i.e. interviews, questionnaires and document analysis). Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data.

The results highlight major factors associated with the complexity of managing client requirements information, which include: mechanisms for documentation, storage and access, distribution of requirements information between stakeholders and across lifecycle phases of a project, traceability management and the provision of effective change management incorporating dependency checking and impact analysis.

The main limitation of the research is the use of an in-depth study of a single organization, which applied the same project management method across all the projects they managed. Further work is planned to develop the proposed framework fully, and develop a software platform to operationalize and evaluate its industrial applicability with construction projects.

The implications of this research is that a better approach to managing requirements information is needed, which will facilitate the design, construction and operations of buildings within budget and time. An integrated framework and an associated tool are suggested to implement the approach.

This study identifies major research gaps and problems in the architecture, engineering, construction and facilities management industry; proposes and presents Electronic Requirements Information Management framework to facilitate lifecycle management of the requirements.

Current processes to manage changes are subject to failure since they are heavily dependent on human discipline. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and quantify the difference between levels of automation of change management processes and to provide input for determining the use of automation systems for change management.

Three generations of change management processes are defined to represent progressive practices used in major capital projects over the past few decades. Discrete event simulation was used to model these processes to capture their behavior and compare their performance according to time and compliance metrics. An oil and gas megaproject served to validate the findings of this modeling and analysis.

The results showed that automated processes can bring more compliance and real-time traceability, but not a significant time reduction in the change process. This contributes to the understanding of the impact of workflow-based automation on construction process performance. The validity of the conclusions are limited by the breadth of sectors studied and the inability to capture off-line time allocations of the personnel involved. Future research may build on the work presented here by studying additional processes such as requests for information, project change notices, requests for scaffolding, and interface management in various industry sectors.

A new approach for modeling and evaluating construction management process automation is contributed and the specific results of the paper indicate that automated workflow-based change management processes should be implemented in megaprojects.

Like it or not, change is inevitable if you are to survive. Far better to instigate change than allow other people to inflict it on you. To anticipate the future has to be good to allow time to implement change rather than having to react to it. This appears quite simple, but is it? This special themed issue of Management Decision contains a number of examples of how organizations have managed change. Lessons can be learned from other industries than your own with regard to best practice and basic principles which can then be applied to your own organization..

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process of management accounting change within an Egyptian organization that implemented an extranet.

Old institutional economic (OIE) theory and Hardy's model of power mobilisation are chosen as a theoretical framework to inform the analysis of the case.

The results show that the extranet facilitated changes in information availability and business process re‐design. The findings confirm that management accounting practices have changed in the case under study and show how management accountants have become more involved in planning and control. The case highlighted some factors that facilitate the natural processes of routinisation and institutionalisation over time.

It could be argued that one limitation of this research is related to the gap between the change in leadership in TexCo (1993) and the timing of the visits (2001, 2002, 2003 and 2005). However, this problem has been minimized by crosschecking memories of events through interviews. Another limitation of this study is that the author was not allowed to review some of the financial documents in TexCo. However, the author tried to verify the financial figures given by them through inter‐subject checking.

This paper fills a gap in the literature as it focuses on the process of management accounting change associated with the implementation of business‐to‐business (B‐to‐B) e‐commerce. The findings, indicate that the B‐to‐B e‐commerce has facilitated the change in the management accounting practices towards decision support and control. Implementing the B‐to‐B e‐commerce system in TexCo facilitated greater control over inventory and invoicing. It improved the planning process through providing the accountants with accurate and real time information about sales, receivables, cash collection and inventory turnover. The system also facilitated the settlement process, the performance evaluation of TexCo's exhibitions; and saved the time and effort of the accountants during the stocktaking process. The case suggested that there are some factors that may facilitate the processes of routinisation and institutionalisation.

This paper suggests that there is a natural tension between operations managers and management accountants. This tension is particularly evident when decisions are being made about process change. Semi‐structured interviews with 40 operations managers revealed that accountants were only involved in about half of change processes. Surprisingly this proportion was the same for both continuous and radical change programmes despite the latter involving greater risk and capital investment. Six case studies were then used to identify the factors which underpin the degree of involvement where there was close interaction between accountants and operations managers. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for operations managers and some suggestions for further research.