by Kevin Taylor, PMP
There are at least two definitions of Change Management in the Project Management field. One refers to the Change Control Board of a project or program that approves or denies changes to a project. The other definition refers to a corporate change initiative focusing the “people side” of change. The PMBOK refers to the second definition in terms of Enterprise Environmental Factors and Human Resource Management.
What is Change Management?
First, let us have a word or two about business process management (BPM) and business analysts (BA), as they are very similar domains. BPM is focused on making incremental improvements to business operation workflows and improving efficiency in ongoing operations. If you need to adjust interdepartmental workflow, then a BPM expert should bring useful skills to bear on those issues. You might think of BPMs related to UX/UI designers with some additional business acumen. Business analysts, on the other hand, may focus more on gathering requirements. BA’s follow a BABOK modeled after the PMBOK.[i] Both domains can stand alone, but they are more successfully implemented as part of a formal project led by a project manager.
Change management means to “apply a systematic approach to helping the individuals impacted by “the change” to be successful by building support, addressing resistance, and developing the required knowledge and ability to implement the change (managing the ‘people’ side of the change.)”[ii]So, any company initiative that requires cooperation from the employees to make a lasting change regarding how work is performed on an ongoing basis may require a change management project. This may involve the project manager and sponsors coordinating a communications plan with the human resources department.
Why Involve Human Resources?
People can sometimes be resistant to change either directly or indirectly. It is important to work with team members to understand why changes are happening in order to get the best effort from the team and avoid possible sabotage of the project efforts. Depending on the nature of the changes and the severity of the resistance, human resources can react quickly to overcome anxiety associated with changes. In a worst-case scenario, human resources can remove or reassign people who may resist the change effort. You might think of this as “Big Stick Diplomacy” as in “speak softly and carry a big stick.”[iii] This means you provide a number of incentives to do the right thing, but reserve the ability to replace or remove individuals who hurt the team effort underway.
Where Can I Get More Information on Change Management?
“Leading Change” by John P. Kotter is a great starting point to discover how change management principles work in large organizations. It examines why transformation efforts fail and hopefully what you can do to avoid the same pitfalls. Any good project provides a post-mortem or lessons learned documentation as part of the closing process. You might think of Mr. Kotter’s work as a summary of many lessons learned over several large change projects.
[i] The Project Manager vs. the Business Analyst
http://project-pro.us/2012/06/04/pm-vs-ba/ [Accessed 6 April 2014]
[ii] Definition of Change Management
http://www.change-management.com/tutorial-defining-change-management.htm [Accessed 6 April 2014]
[iii] Big Stick Ideology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Stick_ideology [Accessed 6 April 2014]
Kevin Taylor has worked in a variety of Silicon Valley’s tech companies for 18 years. For the last 10 years he has performed legal support and customer support roles with related projects for companies including Yahoo!, Google, and Qualcomm.
Kevin is a PMP certified project manager with a Masters in Project Management from the University of Adelaide and BA in Behavioral Science from San Jose State University. He has also earned a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) certificate and a Project and Program Management certificate from UC Santa Cruz, California.
Kevin is a Singapore Permanent Resident and lived there for more than 4 years. He has traveled extensively throughout the APAC region. While he is currently contracting in the USA, Kevin welcomes project management and change management opportunities around the APAC region.