Sustainable change

Abstract

Change management is a relevant issue for organizations, and several studies and models can be found in the literature. Massive resources are invested in projects and programs to improve processes or services to make the organization more effective and efficient. Nevertheless, sometimes, even when the change is well implemented, new products and processes vanish, stop generating benefits and fall into disuse. So, how to ensure the sustainability of the change? This research evaluates the tendency of a proposed change to remain valid and effective after the implementation, without requiring further significant new change investment. For a practical evaluation, it was chosen the Financial Citizenship Program (FCP) from Central Bank of Brazil. The program aims to promote a change in internal process and strengthen external partnerships in order to reach an improvement on financial welfare of Brazilian society. This Capstone Project, so, has two main purposes. First, a general one: to find out the most relevant aspects to achieve a sustainable change. And second, a specific one: how these aspects behave in a real change. By doing this, this research answers the following questions: how sustainable does the FCP tend to be? And how to potentiate the sustainability of the change? It was adopted a qualitative methodology. First, consulting the current literature about sustainable change to systematize the best practices and to draft a framework for sustainability assessment. Second, the FCP was evaluated against the framework. The evaluation took into account the program documents, decisions, emails, PowerPoint presentations, internal rules from Central Bank of Brazil and interview with the staff.