The Effect of Change Management Practices on the Implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning At the United Nations Office, Nairobi

Abstract

Application of change management practices to strategy implementation processes has become critical to achieve success. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation results in major changes in the organization, which touch on the strategy, structure, systems, software, skills, style and shared values of the organization. Empirical studies have exposed conceptual gaps in that whereas they acknowledge that change management practices are vital for strategy implementation, few studies have researched on the effect of change management practices on ERP implementation. Moreover, the context of non-governmental organizations in relation to change management and ERP has not been sufficiently researched. Existing studies have small sample sizes, hence limiting the inferences made by the researchers, considering that ERP touches across the entire organization. These gaps necessitated the current study which sought to answer the question: “what is the effect of change management practices on the implementation of ERP at the United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON)?” The study was anchored on three change management theoretical frameworks namely: the Kurt Lewin’s theory of change management; McKinsey’s Seven ‘S’ framework and Kotter’s eight (8) step change management theory. The broad objective of the study was to determine the effect of change management practices on ERP implementation at UNON. Primary data was collected through a census, by sending questionnaires electronically to 146 staff of the division of conference services in UNON. There was a response rate of 87% and the collected data was summarized using the mean and standard deviation as the descriptive statistics. For inferential statistics, Pearson’s correlation and regression analysis were used. The findings indicate a significant statistical relationship between the independent and dependent variables. This study therefore concluded that strategic vision, strategic leadership, communication and staff empowerment all have positive significant relationships with ERP implementation. It was further found that staff empowerment had the strongest positive correlation with ERP implementation. The findings of the study are expected to guide both managers in their day to day operations and policy makers to make more informed decisions. They are also expected to build on the body of knowledge in relation to the concepts of change management practices and ERP implementation. This study recommended that future studies could seek to examine change management from the perspective of staff empowerment to understand how various measures of staff empowerment can affect the success of ERP implementation.