The Anchor for Leadership Within Organizational Change

 

Continuing the series for this month's Leadership theme...

If major organizational change is occurring and your project is a part of that change, you need a powerful anchor  to keep your project from becoming adrift. That anchor is the vision of the business strategy, the goal, or the end point (however it has been described by leadership). Information on the strategic goal should be clearly stated in your project business case.

Having such an anchor allows you to be much more effective in routine and problem-solving situations. It allows you to "get out in front" and stay there - a critical leadership characteristic to be described in a related article this month.

There are special leadership capabilities associated with managing through significant organizational change. Three of these can be inferred from the bullets in the last post:

• Communication within the project
• Collaboration with stakeholders
• Resolving extra-project Issues

So as your activities early in the project are most influential, you'll want to incorporate the strategic goals of the organizational change into your project planning thusly:

• The Communication Plan will need to incorporate the goal(s) of the business strategy and be a part of the general communication of these goals. Among other benefits, this will inoculate your project  from some frustrating push-back.
• The Stakeholder Analysis will need to identify those stakeholders who will be "adversely" affetced by the organizational changes. Of course this will have to be stated carefully, but it will allow you to be ready for likely conflicts as your project progresses.
• And finally, any part of the project plan that will deal with issue resolution or change management should state specifically that decisions must be consistent with the goals of the wider initiative. This will help you "trump" other arguments which will likely come from stakeholders and others.

Your resulting action after such planning will be much more suited to a successful project.

What You Said . . . In my first post in this series, I asked if any organization out there was preparing project managers for the skills they need to manage in pervasive change. Commenter William Ruehle reported that his IT organization is getting projects coordinated under the Strategic Planning Office and even has an IT Division of Change Management, but, if I may infer and summarize, the effort has not generated training for PMs to deal w/change management yet.

My position is that few IT organizations are preparing their PMs adequately for managing through significant organizational change. Do you agree? What about your org?