Projects drive change, so good change management is important for delivering project objectives successfully. Integrating project management with organizational change management means? that you manage the development of deliverables while also? making sure that stakeholders can use those deliverables to deliver business value. Here’s are some tips for? leveraging change management in your project plans.
- Assess your organization’s change readiness. Success won’t be achieved if your organization isn’t equipped to handle the change that your project will introduce. One challenge for successful change is too few internal experts to both run the business and participate in the project rollout. Another challenge is change fatigue, which ambitious management teams often ignore. Your change manager should conduct a readiness study to ensure expertise is available and change fatigue won’t hamper your project.
- Appoint technical experts as change agents. The change agent role often falls to the best communicators in the organization. This makes sense, because communication from and feedback to the project team is vital. However, technical experts have some advantages as change agents. Their technical expertise gives them influence. When they share their rationale for a change publicly, it carries weight with employees and management. If public speaking isn’t their strong suit, ask your change manager to help construct and deliver the technical expert’s message.
- Leverage milestones. Like a project, change management is a journey. And just like a project, change management plans should include milestones to indicate progress. Change models such as ADKAR* have natural points for milestones, which you can include in your project plans. Emphasize the importance of reaching those milestones to make progress in your project schedule.
- Deploy specific change-readiness criteria. Completion criteria are important for the change components of your plan. Tailor completion criteria (or readiness criteria) for different stakeholder groups who must absorb different types of change. Overall criteria like “the organization is ready” aren’t enough. Look at what each stakeholder group that’s absorbing change must accomplish. And create specific change readiness criteria for each group. Discuss the importance of meeting these criteria with management in advance. This will make it less likely for management to push out a solution without proper change readiness.
For more about change management models, check out the ADKAR site.
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CM is everybody's job; hence it becomes nobody's job, but it's got to be somebody's job! Explore the triangle that integrates Change Management foundational systems.
1 年We need a third leg between project management and organizational management, the one that can work with technical teams, communication teams, HR, end-users, top management and relevant function teams. Big chunk of the value must come from managing transitions. The role must be capable to know how bad or how good the change is and make it work through all the conflicts and constraints for as long as there's well understood net gain from the change or the anticipated evolution from it. Change can be truly bad and may not fit at the beginning. Decisions and the basis for decisions can never be always perfect. But there's always a way to keep something we can build upon and current roles may usually struggle to identify and make it visible when we deal with changes that even the makers claim they do not fully understand.
I help building cities, shaping lives | Project Management | Workplace Trainer | Sustainability l ICP-ATF | ICP-ACC | CSM?
1 年Love this good read Bonnie Biafore
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1 年Impressive post! Organizational change management is a crucial aspect of project success. It ensures smooth transitions, stakeholder engagement, and ultimately, positive outcomes. As a professional in this field, I understand the value of strategic planning, effective communication, and fostering a supportive culture. Feel free to connect with me to exchange insights on leveraging organizational change management for project excellence.
Always Great Tips ??
Teach Project Management courses to technical graduate students
1 年Nice high-level summary on organization change! Sounds like all the changes are based on expansion of project scope or product features, performance requirements, quality requirements and/or an expansion of completion dates which would increase costs and time for the project. If you had reduction of the mentioned items, you should have a corresponding reduction in resources, time and costs. One metaphor for the change process is that it's like dropping a large rock in a pond. The waves reach across the entire surface. Even small changes can have a similar impact.