Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Viewing Posts by Peter Tarhanidis
10 Tips for Sustainable Change Management
Categories:
Change Management
Categories: Change Management
| In my experience, project managers must accept change management disciplines as part of their project management plans in order to reduce the risk of an initiative failing. And in recent posts, I've discussed how:
In this post, I'll discuss how project managers have an opportunity to make a long-lasting impact on an organization by indicating where change disciplines integrate with project management. That's because the keys to successful change management lie in the project management process groups. By leveraging the project management processes and activities across the project life cycle, we can build in and ultimately sustain change. Here are 10 ways to address change in your project management plan:
As a management consultant, I used this checklist of tips to help me move from strategic planning to tactical implementation to sustainable operations. For example, I once had a client organization that deployed a new service management provider to improve its delivery and cost of IT operations. As the client introduced the new provider, the service delivery measures were not improving and were starting to miss the ROI expectations of the business case. I was hired to review the business processes that underpinned IT service delivery, and develop an improvement plan to restore the service delivery organization and meet the business case expectations. I started by conducting a prime value chain analysis and conducted stakeholder reviews to gather requirements. Based on my evaluation of best practices and the activities that hurt service delivery, I developed an initial management improvement plan. This plan was based on process reengineering, redeploying resources and reorganizing governance. During the implementation planning, I used every one of the steps above to ensure I was leading through the change, engaging stakeholders and staff while ensuring the organization would be able to sustain the new ways of working after my assignment ended. Which of the above steps do you find most valuable in ensuring sustained change? For more on change management, purchase PMI's Managing Change in Organizations: A Practice Guide. |
Taking Competitive Advantage of External Change
Categories:
Change Management
Categories: Change Management
|
In recent posts, I've discussed how project managers can become agents of change, and how managing change can drive their organization's business goals. In this post, I'll focus on the external events that can affect business -- and how project practitioners can help their organizations derive value from these changes.
Over the years, I have witnessed organizations incorporate external forces, such as fluctuating market conditions or the advent of new technology, into their business planning process to much success.
A few years ago, I was part of a project team that helped harness external change. I was employed at an organization at the top of its industry, but one that was also facing shifting customer demands across its portfolio of products. The organization had to consider how to meet the demand changes, increase revenue and address the variability of the business plans.
The organization defined a new strategy that would allow us to weather economic headwinds, advance our value creation by integrating new products and services, and increase shareholder value. That strategy relied heavily on investing in a multi-year journey to execute mergers and acquisitions. And to succeed in this strategy, we needed to adapt internally to incorporate newly acquired companies into our operations.
That led to the creation of a Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) integration team, and I was invited to participate in building up this capability. Management selected a core project team that included high performers, particularly those who demonstrated strong IT skills and solid project management experience.
Right from the beginning, our core project team focused on setting clear goals, based on how we would provide benefits to our organization's customers -- and shift the market demands back to our favor. We drove several goals-setting sessions to establish a project timeline and identify opportunities for synergy savings (syncing expenditures to reduce administrative costs).
Then, we selected the rest of the M&A integration team members -- mostly various subject matter experts and business analysts who were well versed in project and change management. This helped us deliver multibillion-dollar integration on time and closely aligned to strategy. We were able to do so because of our team members' clear roles and expertise, but particularly because of these standout team characteristics:
Over the next three years, this same project team was called upon to develop knowledge and competence in the area of internal change. My organization dedicated a small M&A office to develop integration tools and codify our knowledge. We were even asked to continue to work together to build on the initial strategic goal: to help the company maintain its leadership position in the industry. That required us to support post-merger integrations by leading work streams and mentoring junior teams. Our competence increased in managing people across matrix teams, and the use of change management prepared us to lead and sustain other major initiatives of the organization.
How do you identify external change and help turn it to your organization's advantage? For more on change management, download PMI's Managing Change in Organizations: A Practice Guide, currently available for free download for a limited time only. Explore PMI's Change Management Resources.
|
Effect Change, Drive Business
Categories:
Change Management
Categories: Change Management
|
More times than not, change leads to new competitive environments -- and project managers who are able to adapt quickly tend to survive and capitalize. In such an environment, one of the most important tools a project manager has is the ability to effect change to drive an organization's competitive advantage, its ultimate goal. However, as I discussed in my previous blog post, change is always met with resistance and uncertainty.
Not only do project managers have to deal with resistance to change from team members, but they must also plan for and overcome general pitfalls of implementing that change. To do so, consider incorporating better change methods into your daily practice. Below is a list of 10 design principles -- culled from a list created by Booz Allen Hamilton consulting principals, which I expand on with personal experience -- that should be part of our overall change plans efforts:
What change methods do you use to provide your organization with a competitive advantage?
PMI's new title, Managing Change in Organizations: A Practice Guide, is currently available for free download for a limited time only. It contains knowledge to help project and program managers identify change elements and account for them in their project/program plans, as well as create clear and powerful strategies to guide organizational development. Explore PMI's Change Management Resources. |
From Project Manager to Change Agent
Categories:
Change Management
Categories: Change Management
| Employees who adapt quickly are an organization's change agents. Project managers have the potential to be great change agents — and in that role, enact change at the project team level. But that requires helping an individual accept change in the first place. To do so, I often start by looking at U.S. business consultant Charles Rogel's method, the SARA model. It describes how individuals react to change:
I have had to employ the SARA model many times, for major changes — from outsourcing to mergers and acquisitions — that have led to organizational changes and restructuring for my teams and me. As a leader, empathetic to my team's uncertain future, I have used SARA to help me guide them toward visualizing an end state that they can accept, even if it requires more time and effort than I had originally scoped for it. I have even provided placement assistance to help some individuals find their next role outside of my team. In the end, you just have to remember: You cannot force people through the process. But learning to guide them through it helps you improve your leadership ability by aligning teams and stakeholders to a common vision. What model do you use to help guide your project team toward acceptance of change? For more on change management, visit PMI's change management portal. |
The Customer Mindset Is Always Right
| In most cases, project managers are assigned to projects after the development of strategic initiatives and project charters. Seemingly, we have little to do with strategic planning and more to do with operational implementation. Although I agree that the latter is an important element of our profession, it is also a reactive one. Our value proposition is not fully used in the strategic planning needs of the organization. I increasingly expect project management to go beyond being a reactive role and become proactive. And one method of doing so is becoming customer-service-oriented. Now, I am not referring to the traditional definition of "customer," but rather defining the organization itself as the project manager's single true customer. Thus, becoming customer-service-oriented enables project managers to evolve into business leaders by:
The diagram below illustrates the concept of increasing the customer approach to project management. The project manager gains experiences and increased value by being customer-service-oriented. The repetitive experiences add up to knowledge that project managers need to, over time, drive customers to better outcomes and experiences. The focus on customer service ensures project managers are aligned with the interests of a project and an organization's purpose. According to the research of Dr. Jay Kandampully and Dr. David Solnet, a "service vision" improves an organization's overall performance. They illustrate two case studies, Dell and Southwest Airlines, of companies that used service orientation to create a competitive differentiator in their industries. Project managers can do the same for the profession. Once they harness a customer-serviced-oriented mindset, they can put it into practice to proactively interpret organizations strategy, align leadership and rationalize organizations' critical projects. The first steps toward redefining the profession as proactive instead of reactive are to offer services with this approach in mind, such as:
In my own experiences in leading the business transformations of multiple organizations, I have noted they tend to begin with an initial reactive approach of a cost reduction effort. They then mature to designing a service culture to offer global end-to-end processes, with service-level agreements that ultimately enable it to achieve its strategic growth plans. What other approaches do project managers need to redefine their role from being reactive to proactive? |