Change Management

Change management is the practice of tracking and administering changes during the development of a product or service and is a key part of project management.

Controlling Change Requests in Projects

Changes requested once a project is underway are an inevitable part of any project. They can either be the result of external changes in the business or they can be internal changes requested because the original aims of the project were not clearly defined or understood. Change requests resulting from external factors are usually beyond the control of a project manager and there is usually little choice but to deal with them.

What is Change Control?

Change control is an important part of the project management process. With the pace of change today, it is almost certain that projects will face the demand for change during their life. While change may help ensure projects are aligned with business needs, it important that each change is carefully considered and approved.

Three Characteristics of Transformational Leaders

I work with many companies aiming to become customer-centric organisations. These efforts are never easy, and they always require a multi-year journey. In order for an organisation to sustain a change agenda over that span of time, the senior management team needs to actively lead the effort. What does that mean for those leaders?

Making Change Stick

Are you tired of hearing people say the only constant is change? I think we all need to keep saying it to remind ourselves we have to always be ready to keep changing. Here's the rub: how do we make change stick? How can you, as a project manager, use your skills to create business processes that have staying power?

Change Management: The Horror of it All

The failure rate of all significant change initiatives is approximately 70%. A recent reader of an article on my website challenged me regarding the source of that often quoted statistic. This is a brief summary of a cross section of sources that I sent her and that reveal the horror of it all.

The Change Control Myth

You can always spot the project managers who have just received their PMP, they are eager, idealistic, and prone to proclaim at length the necessity for "Change Control" as if it were the cure for all project management evils. Don't get me wrong, I am glad that the level of training new project managers receive is increasing, and I am glad they are learning that change can derail a project; however, new PM's appear to have a naïve view of how projects work in the real world, and I would like to do my part to correct that.

Nothing Stays the Same: Leadership Techniques to Empower People During Change Initiatives

Every organisation is affected by change, especially during times of economic volatility. However, project managers tasked with leading change initiatives are all too aware of the alarming failure rates that can occur. The critical missing piece is largely the failure to take into account how change affects an organisation's people. According to a study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, research shows that nearly 75 percent of all organisational change programmes fail because they don't create the necessary groundswell of support among employees.

Common Project Management Mistakes: Badly Handled Changes

No matter how well a project is planned and how well the requirements are defined, there will always be requests to change something about the project, usually the product being delivered. There are good reasons for this; business doesn't stand still while your project is going on so we expect that ongoing business will trigger the need for changes to the system being built to support that business. These changes are mission critical to the project in many cases. If the system isn't changed to reflect business needs as they will be when the system is implemented, your project will succeed in building a system to support business as it was done 6 months ago!

Three Myths About Organisational Change

Our beliefs about what change is and how it works can influence our willingness to take on the challenge appropriately. Change agents who believe these three myths might find their initiatives stuck in a rut. If you feel like your change initiative is getting stuck, challenge these myths and look at change from a new perspective.

Change Management: 3 Key Reasons for the Catastrophic 70% Failure Rate

Failure reasons in change management are many and varied. But one thing is painfully clear. Any organisational initiative that creates change, or has a significant change element to it, has a 70% chance of not achieving what was originally envisaged. There are 3 main reasons for this catastrophic failure rate.

Controlling Change Requests

Project Managers can accept the fact that all projects need to change in some way during their life cycle, but sometimes changes can get out of hand and end up derailing the project! In this article we provide you with tips on controlling the requested changes so that you can prevent them from taking up excessive time and still implement the ones that add value to the project.

Using Change Management and Change Control Within a Project

Setting up a systematic and common approach to change is vital, and this article outlines the approach and steps needed for change management and hence ultimate project success. The approach taken is central to the PRINCE2 Methodology and includes a general summary drawn from PRINCE2 and several project management bodies of knowledge.

How to Deal with the People Factor of Change Management

A 2008 survey by McKinsey of 3,199 executives around the world found that only one in three organisational transformation or change projects succeeded. This situation occurred mainly due to the people factor that is involved in any type of any quest for change, and the irrational side of human behaviour, according to Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller, authors of the paper "The Irrational Side of Transformation" (McKinsey Quarterly, 2009). When changes such as new technologies, new processes, new groups (e.g., consultants) are introduced to the work environment, workers have counter-intuitive ways of interpreting these changes and may act differently than expected.

Predicting the ROI of Change

Process Simulation Modeling (PSIM) can provide real business value to organisations that are trying to change processes. When companies use the appropriate software simulation, designed for their industry to evaluate process performance, these organisations can improve their operations and achieve higher levels of process maturity with the integration of CMMI. However, regardless of what changes a company is considering, there are always costs and risks involved with any type of change.

Creative Problem Solving Leads to Organisational Innovation

The words "creative problem solving" have almost become more like buzzwords tossed around the workplace and never really landing anywhere. Everyone knows intuitively that creative problem solving can work, and it's the "thing to do" in a participatory organisation, but exactly what does it mean and what benefits can be obtained?

Strategies for Managing Change: The Project Manager

The title of project manager (PM) is used to mean different things in different companies. Fortunately there is a standards body called the Project Management Institute which provides excellent guidance around the role and function of a project manager. Some will disagree, but I don't care if your project manager is PMI certified or not. You need to care about having a project manager with the skill to carry out the role as the Institute defines it. It's your change management strategy, and it's your reputation on the line.

Managing Change Successfully: Six Layers of Resistance

Why is there resistance to change? Are people just naturally perverse, or are there concerns which if understood and correctly dealt with will create the buy-in required to turn resisters into supporters and generate the momentum needed to overcome the gravitational pull of the status quo?

Making Change Happen

Managing change requires a leadership team with project management, communication and analytical skills with a high degree of results orientation. The latter is important as when a journey of change is embarked upon, the environment in which the change is being implemented immediately changes. A changing environment often calls for changed tactics to achieve the same result.

Push-Me Pull-You Projects

You have a concept, a plan and a team, and now you're about to start your project. But hold on a second: are your objectives coherent, or are you trying to change an organisation in two completely different ways. Are you about to start a Push-Me Pull-You Project?

Change Management in Practice: Why Does Change Fail?

Sadly most significant change fails to meet the expectations and targets of the proposers. The failure is given the catchall name resistance, yet resistance can be principled and creative as well as from vested interest.

Persuasion and Perception

Every year, between forty and seventy percent of all corporations and public sector bodies attempt to make strategic change. Overwhelmingly, formal projects are the preferred structure used to organise such effort, regardless of whether the underlying goals are defined in terms of business process re-engineering (BPR), technology upgrades, mergers and acquisitions, due diligence or similar concepts.