Agents of Change

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

  Change Management   Organizational Project Management  

Organizations are like people. They have distinct personalities and behaviors. When you hear someone say, “That’s just the way we do things around here,” that’s what they’re talking about. They’re talking about corporate culture. Understanding an organization’s culture--and in particular what forces shape it--is now considered to be an important element in how organizations develop, grow and respond to change.

Perhaps provoked by some kind of millennial anxiety as to which companies would survive the impending doomsday of the Y2K bug, in the late 1990s business academics focused their attention on looking at how organizations responded to change. What were the forces that exerted pressure on organizations to change? And what was it that enabled some companies to adapt to change more successfully than others?

It should come as no surprise to project managers that organizations that are most adept at responding to change do so in a structured, planned and actively managed manner. However, this is only one of the necessary elements that need to be brought together in order for an organization to implement change successfully.

The common goal of all projects and programs is to introduce deliberate change into an existing, steady state in such a way that the intended benefit of the change is realized without disruption to the …

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