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How to Integrate Solid Organizational Change Leadership Approaches in Your Project

Overview

Today’s business climate is increasingly more project-oriented. As defined in the Project Management Institutes’ A Guide To the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMI Standards Committee, 1996), a project is a “temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.”

Paul Dinsmore (Dinsmore, 1984) provides another definition of projects and project management: “A project is a unique venture with a beginning and an end, conducted by people to meet established goals within parameters of cost, schedule, and quality. Project management is the mixture of people, systems, and techniques required to carry the project to successful completion.

Change projects encompass all of the characteristics of projects, but they tend to have immediate and lasting effects on the lives of the individuals involved. For this reason additional skills and techniques over and above the agreed upon science of project management are needed for change project success.

The question is, how do we integrate solid change leadership approaches into our projects?

A System for Change Project Management

In the book Change Project Management – The Next Step, The System For Change Leaders, (Canterucci, 2002) Transition Management Advisors has laid out a sequence of tools to be integrated into the project management approach for any change project or program. The diagram in Exhibit 1 highlights the tools. Following is a brief description of these tools.

• Stakeholder Analysis – Stakeholder Analysis involves the identification and recruitment of all the key players who will be affected by the change initiative and development of a strategy to maximize the contribution and support of each stakeholder.
• Change Planning/Monitoring Workshop – This tool identifies resistance, assesses the change leadership team, and identifies organizational impacts of the project.
• Building the Foundation for Change – The foundation for change is a concise, repeatable message based on logic and valid research. It appeals to the values and concerns of stakeholders, showing a sense of urgency, and making a clear call to action.
• Launching the Communication Campaign – Change communication is defined as information that changes behavior. A concerted campaign with that goal in mind is required.
• Change Breakthrough Analysis – This tool is designed to move constituents from their heart to their head as quickly as possible. This process helps people balance emotional chaos and think clearly and logically, increasing productivity.
• Change Readiness – This approach helps ensure that associates and the workplace are ready for the change and capable of performing their duties in the new environment.

 The Sales Process

In most organizations we encounter, some of the organizational change approaches are being used throughout a project but usually sparingly and inconsistently. A deep understanding of the tools is necessary. In effect, the introduction of these tools is a change project within a change project. It may be argued that senior management agreement and support is necessary to implement solid change leadership techniques into a project management methodology. Of course, this is true to a certain extent, especially if you require outside assistance to introduce and teach the skills. However, we find that the most successful approach is to simply begin using the tools. By exercising the techniques and approaches you are able to model the benefit to project and business leaders. With their support it is possible to integrate change leadership techniques within all projects throughout the organization. A key is to translate the organizational change activities into tasks that can be added to the project plan. The change tasks may seem more difficult to define, but once defined can be managed just as any other project task or activity is managed.

The inherent difficulty in regards to justifying change related activities is in relation to opportunity cost. Without change tasks, we can get by and even meet the project deadlines, budget, and defined quality, but what are we giving up? Perhaps we successfully converted data from one system to another, but did the process engender an increased trust between business and technical resources? Was the cause of the delay in getting input from an important stakeholder avoidable?

My personal experience includes fourteen multi-year, multi-million dollar change initiatives. A delay in those projects (many times directly attributable to inadequate attention to organizational change techniques) cost approximately $600,000 per month. With focused attention to organizational change many of these seemingly unavoidable hard dollar and other costs can be minimized. The problem is, unless you’ve experienced good organizational change woven into a project, you really don’t know what you’re missing. It’s incremental but significant.

Analyze Change Complexity

Each change project is unique. Depending on the degree of complexity of the project and the change to the organization, varying levels of intensity can be applied to the use of the change tools. A portion of the Change Planning/Monitoring Workshop (a section of the Change Project Management System) is allocated to analyzing change complexity.

This process evaluates various questions such as the history of similar change projects within the organization, the perceived difficulty in communicating the change message, and the impact on employees. Analyzing change complexity has many uses for the change leader. The analysis is sure to generate a lively discussion within your project team. By recording the perspectives of the various constituents, a clear picture of the potential difficulty in implementing the change is evident. This data can then be used as a communication tool when addressing senior management as well as constituents. Analyzing change complexity also helps identify scope issues and areas where special attention is required. For example, if it is clear that similar projects have not been successful in the past, effort can be taken to ensure that the same mistakes aren’t repeated. If you determine that the new product is difficult to describe you may decide to create a prototype earlier than originally planned. Most importantly, articulating the complexity of your change effort in a clear way is extremely valuable in keeping senior executives and other stakeholders grounded in what you are doing.

Change Breakthrough Analysis

Many of the change tools outlined in Exhibit 1 take place behind the scenes with a small number of change project team members. Change Breakthrough Analysis however is a very public tool. Change Breakthrough Analysis is a process to help constituents reconcile the change and is coupled with a communication event. It is possible to perform Change Breakthrough Analysis early in the project, and, throughout the entire project life cycle. This provides an opportunity to show an attention to organizational change in a tangible way.

The Role of the Change Leader

Change leadership is truly every project team member’s responsibility. However, medium to large projects require a full-time project resource with change leadership responsibility. This resource should be a fairly senior level employee. They frequently must provide coaching to the highest level executives and will need to influence others to attend to change related issues in which they may not be familiar. The project change leader should have a place at the table as a member of the core project leadership team. When project activities are moving quickly someone must raise their hand to consider the organizational change impact of all decisions or actions.

Project communication is very closely tied to the activities of change project management and it may be wise for the designated change leader to also lead the communication function. This allows the change perspective to be represented in all aspects of the project.

Conclusion

Change projects, those that have an impact on people, require the layering of the art of change leadership over the science of project management. Obtaining and communicating results is the best way to promote change leadership. Results are only obtained by implementing the various tools of change project management.

Click here to receive our Change Complexity Assessment Form.