The Project Manager as Change Manager

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   Organizational Project Management  

When you talk about change management with a project manager, they instinctively think of change requests and late changing requirements. Those are changes, but they aren’t the sort of change that I want to address in this article. Instead, I want to consider the role that a project manager has in ensuring that the changes created by their project are successful, specifically with internal projects.

If we distil a project down to its most fundamental concept, it’s about changing how an organization does a part of its business. The project outputs will change one or more elements of the way the company operates. As such, project rollout is an exercise in change management, and yet this element is rarely considered when we define project scope.

In extremely large projects, where change management is formally recognized as a work package, there are frequently dedicated change management professionals tasked with preparing the organization for change. In recent years, there has been growth in the discipline of organizational change management to apply discipline and best practices to large-scale change.

Clearly then the importance of change management is recognized, but if it will benefit large projects it must also follow that smaller projects--where dedicated resources aren’t supplied--will also benefit from the concept. That’s where project…

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