Managing Change: Whose Job Is It, Anyway?

Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.

  Business Case   Change Management   Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

Managing organizational change is one of the big, hairy elephants in the room when we manage projects. It is one we all recognize and know about, but that we struggle to deal with effectively--or even sometimes to discuss. Why this is, and why this should be, is a bit of a mystery. Change is the nature of projects. Projects are, by design, a source of change for the organization. So you would think that we would be a little bit further along in how we deal with it.

Unfortunately, the traditional definitions of project management don't really acknowledge or address organizational change that well. In point of fact, the term “organizational change” doesn't appear once in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide). There is lots of discussion of change as a process for managing evolution of the plan, and virtually no guidance for how the results of the plan should be managed in guiding change within the organization. There is recognition that projects and operations integrate in some way, but how that actually occurs is not discussed.

A significant part of the challenge is in determining how organizational change occurs, and who is responsible for managing it. In the world of project management as currently defined, the project manager is responsible for getting acceptance of the deliverables that the project produces, …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.