When Does Organizational Change Management Start?

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   Communications Management   Organizational Project Management  

One of the most positive outcomes of the recent growth in strategic portfolio management has been the improvement in how organizations communicate strategy. Many of the tool vendors have focused heavily on roadmap functionality to help organizations plan and communicate, and these roadmaps have allowed organizations to quickly share upcoming plans for key initiatives in an intuitive, easy-to-consume manner.

As a result, employees across all business areas are able to see the kind of changes that are headed their way, along with at least a high-level indication of when those changes are going to occur. That’s a positive development, but it does create some requirements to do more. Employees may have questions that need answering, they will need to be updated if things change, they will expect to receive additional details as time goes on, and so forth.

These are all things that fall within the realm of organizational change management—and as strategic communication becomes more transparent across an enterprise, organizational change management must start earlier.

Changes in approach
Traditionally, organizational change management would operate as part of the work of the discretionary investment—program, project, etc. It should have dedicated resources (it’s a very different thing from project change management and requires specialist skills), …

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