Where Does Accountability for Change Management End?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Change Management  

For most of my career, when you spoke about change management in the context of projects, everyone knew what you meant. In the early days, the perception was that it was going to be disagreement about whether something should change and if so, what the implications were—as much change prevention as anything else.

More recently, it was about how necessary changes could be incorporated with minimal disruption, and perhaps also whether changes proposed by the project team should be considered.

No matter how much the definition had evolved, change management was still seen as something directly related to the project. But now, that’s changing. The idea of organizational change management—the discipline focused on implementing changes into how an organization operates—has been moving closer to project-style change management for a while. That’s happened as organizations have recognized that simply delivering a successful project isn’t enough. The outputs of that project have to be integrated with the rest of the organization.

That is where organizational change management has played an increasingly important role, especially in operational areas where changes impact the way that people are working within the enterprise. The discipline helps with communication and training ahead of changes being made; with the process of acceptance and …

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