Process > Change Management

A new book emphasizes the integration of project management and change management to improve the chances of success for business, IT and other organizational initiatives.

Promoting, marketing and branding your internal projects are key elements of successfully implementing change management within the organization--and social media tools are the answer.

While many organizations now have standard processes for managing change, effective change management needs more than just a process. Most projects have room for improvement, and in this article we look at how a PM can lay the foundation for strong change management right from project initiation.

It's important to engage your stakeholders early on in the project process and work with them to understand their perspective. In this article, we will examine some of the key things to consider when making certain that your project engages and captures the perspectives of your stakeholders to ensure that project results are sustainable over the long term.

Change management requires us to think about the project and the results of the project from the standpoint of the unaware. This is often a challenge for us. How can we think about a known idea from the point of someone who doesn’t know about our project or the product we are producing?

Most project managers think of changes to a project to be related to change requests that modify the scope of deliverables. But changes to projects go far beyond mere scope changes, so it's important to have a change management process in place that can address any manner of project change. While the majority of organizations have fairly mature change request processes in place, most lack similar processes to handle event-driven changes.

A new survey from Project Management Institute identifies key trends in project, program and portfolio management, including a renewed focus on talent development and increased use of agile methods. The results also point to critical success factors, among them clearly defining expected benefits, ensuring top-level management support, and creating a career path for project participants.

Anyone who has been a project manager for a while will have run into an organizational change management project--and has likely experienced some of the unique challenges that they present. We all know that there is no such thing as an easy project, but making fundamental changes to the company or department in which we work presents a whole new set of potential pitfalls. Successful organizational change management needs careful planning and execution--and here we help you prepare for this tricky time.

Ignoring the people side of change is perilous — to budgets, timelines and, ultimately, project success. Recent research points to three leading change management success factors, built on a foundation of active executive sponsorship and open communication.

Supporting project delivery across project, program, PMO and portfolio management processes, BrightWork is a SharePoint-based collaboration tool that can be adapted to each organization’s capability and maturity level without overwhelming users with unnecessary functionality.

The key challenge to organizational PM is that companies tend to view projects in isolation by ignoring the obvious (and sometimes not-so-obvious) linkages. Here we present a list of essential factors to ensure the organization can begin to not just benefit from the discipline of project management, but be able to maximize the benefits that organizational PM can provide.

What does the future of PM have in store? Three trends have the potential of being very powerful for project management and the organizations that continue to pursue the discipline.

An international IT project management veteran (and poet) shares some thoughts on the importance of change management, including why so many companies do it poorly and how it can enhance instead of stifle creative thinking. Indeed, embracing projects in flux is the only way to move your agenda forward in turbulent times.

How can organizational change be implemented with a minimum of distress? Change frequently results in unrest, uncertainty and concern caused by nothing more than fear. People lose focus, become less productive and potentially seek out alternative employment because of the fear of something that is not going to happen. In this article, we look at how we can manage those situations more effectively.

While all project planning should account for the possibility of change, Agile projects live by it. They can also die by it if team members don’t embrace change as part of the process and work collaboratively to manage it.

We are connected on a global scale these days and--with few exceptions--everyone is competing to get the customer. As a result, we have all been tasked to embrace change or else someone will gladly take our place in the industry.

Consider for a moment the roadblocks we encounter on projects. The most common and toughest to resolve are always people related. A large portion of the missing part of project success is Emotional Intelligence, and the EI skills most needed by project managers are explored here.

In many organizations, process comes before people, and function over feasibility. No wonder people resist. And all the change management in the world won’t help if the stakeholder community lacks the skills to execute a new process. Here is guidance on putting people at the forefront of your process design efforts.

The project manager’s critical success factor will be leadership skills, according to a global panel of consultants and senior executives assembled by ESI International.

Even in the face of need, awareness and involvement, project results fail to get used. Implementations are resisted. People refuse to adapt their approach or shift their habits. This may seem ludicrous, irrational and unreasonable. That’s not the point--it happens, it is real and it is consistent. Even in the face of compelling reasons why change makes sense, it doesn’t necessarily occur. Why?