How to Leverage Organizational Change Management in Your Projects

Projects drive change, so good change management is important for delivering project objectives successfully. Integrating project management with organizational change management means  that you manage the development of deliverables while also  making sure that stakeholders can use those deliverables to deliver business value. Here’s are some tips for  leveraging change management in your project plans.

• Assess your organization’s change readiness. Success won’t be achieved if your organization isn’t equipped to handle the change that your project will introduce. One challenge for successful change is too few internal experts to both run the business and participate in the project rollout. Another challenge is change fatigue, which ambitious management teams often ignore. Your change manager should conduct a readiness study to ensure expertise is available and change fatigue won’t hamper your project.
• Appoint technical experts as change agents. The change agent role often falls to the best communicators in the organization. This makes sense, because communication from and feedback to the project team is vital. However, technical experts have some advantages as change agents. Their technical expertise gives them influence. When they share their rationale for a change publicly, it carries weight with employees and management. If public speaking isn’t their strong suit, ask your change manager to help construct and deliver the technical expert’s message.
• Leverage milestones. Like a project, change management is a journey. And just like a project, change management plans should include milestones to indicate progress. Change models such as ADKAR* have natural points for milestones, which you can include in your project plans. Emphasize the importance of reaching those milestones to make progress in your project schedule.
• Deploy specific change-readiness criteria. Completion criteria are important for the change components of your plan. Tailor completion criteria (or readiness criteria) for different stakeholder groups who must absorb different types of change. Overall criteria like “the organization is ready” aren’t enough. Look at what each stakeholder group that’s absorbing change must accomplish. And create specific change readiness criteria for each group. Discuss the importance of meeting these criteria with management in advance. This will make it less likely for management to push out a solution without proper change readiness.

For more about change management models, check out the ADKAR site.

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