Don’t let bad change happen to good projects. Your Challenge You are starting a project or program that will depend heavily on users and stakeholders to: Adopt new tools and procedures. Comply with new policies. Learn new skills and behaviors. Understand and support new processes. Organizational change management has been a weakness for IT, which puts your current project(s) at significant risk of failure. IT project planning tends to fixate on technology and underestimates behavioral and cultural factors that inhibit change. You need to institute organizational change management best practices to ensure projects aren’t merely completed, but that benefits are realized. Our Advice Critical Insight Completed projects aren’t necessarily successful projects. IT projects are justified because they will make money, save money, or make people happier, etc. Without managing organizational change, IT might get the project done, but fail to achieve the intended benefits. “Change” is changing. Agility and continuous improvement are good, but can degenerate into volatility if change isn’t managed properly. Organizational change must be planned in advance and managed through all project phases. Organizational change management must be embedded as a key aspect throughout the project, not merely a set of tactics added to execution. Impact and Result As project/program manager I worry about the “soft” factors of organizational change that increase the chances of project failure: Users might refuse or fail to adopt new systems and policies. Costs might rise due to post-implementation help desk volume, retraining, ongoing design, or functionality change requests (or worse, full roll-back). Eventually, inability to effectively manage change will erode IT’s ability to work with the business. Managing organizational change more effectively will help me build credibility to manage both business and IT projects.

1. Adopt Organizational Change Management Best Practices
Don’t let bad change happen to good projects.
You are starting a project or program that will depend on users and stakeholders to give up their old
way of doing things. In some cases change will force people to become novices again, leading to lost
productivity and added stress.
IT projects are justified because they will make money, save money, or make people happier, etc.
Without managing organizational change, IT might get the project done, but fail to achieve the intended
benefits.
Organizational change must be planned in advance and managed through all project phases.
Organizational change management must be embedded as a key aspect throughout the project, not
merely a set of tactics added to execution phases.
Agility and continuous improvement are good, but can degenerate into volatility if change isn’t
managed properly. People will perceive change to be volatile and undesirable if their expectations aren’t
managed through communications and engagement planning.
Failures in change management would typically be foreseen if only the project/change manager has
considered the full range of impact. Instead we hear, “I hadn’t thought of the multiple time zones as an
issue”, “we didn’t realize that the pricing was different in the west”, etc.
Resistance to change is commonly provided by people who are upset about not being involved in the
communication. Missed opportunities are the same: they usually could have been provided easily had
somebody known in time.
Project and change management has traditionally focused on a defensive posture because organizations
so often fail to mitigate risk. Good change managers also watch for opportunities to improve and exploit
the outcomes of the change.
Change is an ongoing process. Your approach to managing change should be continually refined to keep
up with changes in technology, corporate strategy, and people involved.