Change management

Managing change processes

It is critical in ensuring the long term sustainability of projects. It happens far to often that significant effort gets expended for something that goes back to the old ways in just a few months. How can this happen? A short project may change processes but often fails in sustainably changing the mindset of the people involved.

Sense of urgency

This first step is also a critical one. Too often it is dismissed as a bureaucratic exercise only to be surprised later that different parts interpreted the scope and the goals of the project in different ways. It is a small investment to create a clear project charter and (try to) agree on it. If there is disagreement it is better now rather then months into the project. This will also help you to prevent mission creep and back you up when later disagreements arise.

Get the best people on board

Put some thought into this to define who needs to be in the core team (which is driving the day to day work) versus the Steering Committee where progress gets reported to the sponsors and larger decisions get made. Especially for the Steering Committee you need to think about who needs to be on board to be able to get the decisions needed versus who just needs to be informed.

Define the base line

This depends very much on the project. In some cases it is very clear cut while in some others it is needed to first work together with the organization to identify all of the areas that need to be included. In both cases one should group related smaller sub projects together into larger work packages. Depending on the number of work packages it can be helpful to segment them into several work streams that are chaired by senior managers.

Benchmarking

There are many tools available to track project status. From more or less sophisticated Excel models to highly specialized project management software. This really depends on the specifics needs of the project. Personally I like tools that require little work to update and are easy to understand and manage also by the organization.

Develop mission / vision

If you have a big project with many activities, work packages and work-streams you will also need substantial organizational resources. Often it is just not feasible to start everything at the same time. It is important to think about the priorities and then develop a phased plan that has a fair chance of succeeding because it also leaves enough time for the normal day to day work everyone will have to do as well.

Identify the gap

It happens to often that projects get started without a clear agreement on what is really needed resource wise to make it succeed. this is an important discussion to have before the project gets kicked off. If you don’t get the resources needed this will give you the opportunity to agree on the changes in timelines or a change in goals with the reduced resources.

Develop strategy to close the gap

Make it public, make it big and create some excitement around it. When the team commits itself publicly it helps everyones motivation to pitch in to actually make it succeed instead of having it wither away.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Schedule your project reviews so that the core-team is slightly ahead of the Steering committee assuring alignment ahead of the Steering committee. This also allows you to reduce preparation time instead of having to redo everything if there are some weeks in between them.

Empower people

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Celebrate success

When the project is finally done give it a proper send off. Celebrate the work that you have done together as a team and what has been achieved. Make an “after action review” to identify what worked and what did not so it works better the next time.