Maintenance culture and management of change: Intermediate report 2004

Change management has emerged as an important topic in safety-critical organisations. A lot of knowledge on change management exists, but still lot of projects fail and the safety consequences of various changes are unclear. It seems that the problems of change management are interdisciplinary, but still solutions tend to only from one perspective (e.g. technical or personnel management). There also exists empirical evidence that change has been experienced as stressful in the nuclear power plants. The cultural perspective taken in this paper strives to combine technical approaches to human resources approaches. It raises new questions that are not usually explicitly taken into account in change management. Financial pressures, change of generation and other changes in the environment have forced many organisations to reorganise their practices (e.g. downsize, outsource, and develop team-based organisations). These changes have had an impact on the culture of the organisation (and the organisational culture has mediated these changes in the first phase).