How Do Projects Deal with Constant Change?

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  

In the last few years, it’s started to feel as though everything is changing all of the time. The periods of stability between changes have been getting shorter and shorter, whether we’re referring to a project subjected to frequent change requests, a piece of technology that is constantly being updated or replaced, or operational procedures that are being continuously refined. Change really is becoming a constant, and that’s going to require us to change how we think about it in our projects.

We’re seeing the early signs of that already. Organizations embracing continuous delivery for software development are starting to replace project structures with permanent teams and a product-based development model. That allows for functionality to be delivered to the production environment as soon as it is approved without the arbitrary packaging and release cycles that are implied by projects. That’s an environment where change is literally almost constant—potentially with multiple production releases a day in some environments.

Elsewhere, things haven’t quite got to that point; but increasingly, there is a shift away from major change initiatives and toward a process of ongoing evolution. Instead of implementing a major process overhaul or technology infrastructure upgrade every few years, the adjustments are happening on a much smaller…

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