ENABLE CHANGE TO ACHIEVE THE ENVISIONED FUTURE STATE

Figure 3-13. Enable Change to Achieve the Envisioned Future State

Remaining relevant in today’s business environment is a fundamental challenge for all organizations. Relevance entails being responsive to stakeholder needs and desires. This requires continually evaluating offerings for the benefit of stakeholders, rapidly responding to changes, and acting as agents for change. Project managers are uniquely poised to keep an organization prepared for changes. Projects, by their very definition, create something new: they are agents of change.

Change management, or enablement, is a comprehensive, cyclic, and structured approach for transitioning individuals, groups, and organizations from a current state to a future state in which they realize desired benefits. It is different from project change control, which is a process whereby modifications to documents, deliverables, or baselines associated with the project are identified and documented, and then are approved or rejected.

Change in an organization can originate from internal sources, such as the need for a new capability or in response to a performance gap. Change can also originate from external sources such as technological advances, demographic changes, or socioeconomic pressures. Any type of change involves some level of adaptability or assimilation by the group experiencing the change as well as the industries with which the group interacts.

Change may be implemented by and have consequences for stakeholders. Enabling stakeholder change is part of facilitating the project to provide the required deliverable as well as the intended outcome.

Enabling change in an organization can be challenging. Some people may seem inherently resistant to change or risk averse, and environments may display a conservative culture, among other reasons. Effective change management uses a motivational strategy rather than a forceful one. Engagement and two-way communication create an environment in which adoption and assimilation of change can occur or identify some valid concerns from the resistant users that may need to be addressed.

Project team members and project managers can work with relevant stakeholders to address resistance, fatigue, and change absorption to increase the probability that change will be adopted or assimilated successfully by customers or recipients of project deliverables. This includes communicating the vision and goals associated with the change early in the project to achieve buy-in for the change. The benefits of the change and the impact on work processes should be communicated to all levels of the organization throughout the project.

It is also important to adapt the speed of change to the change appetite, cost, and ability of the stakeholders and the environment to assimilate change. Attempting to create too many changes in too short a time can lead to resistance because of change saturation. Even when stakeholders unanimously agree that change will produce more value or enhance outcomes, they often still have difficulty working through the actions that will deliver enhanced benefits. To foster benefits realization, the project may also include activities to reinforce the change after its implementation in order to avoid people returning to the initial state.

Recognizing and addressing the needs of stakeholders to embrace change throughout the project life cycle helps to integrate the resulting change in the project work, making a successful outcome more likely.

More information on organizational change management may be found in Managing Change in Organizations: A Practice Guide [4].