Change Starts With You

Beth Spriggs' professional career began in information technology in 1999. As a certified PMP with over a decade of project management experience, she has combined her love for tech and project management by focusing her career on managing technology projects and portfolios. She is author of The Project Manager's Little Book of Cheats.

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Topics: Career Development, Change Management, New Practitioners, ProjectsAtWork

With all the effort and attention we spend on getting stakeholders and teams to accept change, how much attention are we paying to ourselves? Here’s a guide to examining your own response to change, which will, in turn, sharpen the context and understanding you share with others.

We spend a lot of time, effort, and energy learning about and skillfully managing change. We work hard to get users to adopt our new system or process, to get people to buy in to the changes that come with our projects, and conducting organizational change analyses to determine change thresholds. Our ability to get people to accept the changes that result from our projects is, in large measure, how we determine project success. If a process or system is put in place and nobody uses it — if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it — did it happen?

With all the effort and attention we spend on getting our stakeholders to accept change, how much attention are we paying to ourselves? What if the change management problem you’re facing isn’t getting someone else to accept a particular change, it’s getting yourself to accept a change?

Have you found yourself in a situation recently where change was handed to you and you had to get on board? Perhaps you were pulled off a project or client. Maybe the goals or requirements of your project shifted dramatically and a lot …

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