Change: A Recipe for Disaster – Part 1

All of us who have participated in projects and project management have witnessed failure in projects.  The failure may have been in differing process groups such as planning, execution, or monitoring and controlling areas.   PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) says that the process groups of project management are Initiating, Planning, Execution, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing.   PMBOK also says that the most important area of project management is Planning.  Thus, are we to assume that if a given project fails, that it was due to poor planning?   Of course not, and PMBOK never says that either.   We can have the greatest plan but if execution is poor or monitoring and controlling is poor, then the project has a greater risk of failure, maybe even likely to fail.

Change management is critical to the success of any project.   Change management in the context of this discussion is not related to managing change to the project scope as part of the planning group.   This change management is not a process group  such as planning or monitoring and controlling.  This change management is related to process changes such as an engineer implementing a process change and the related impact to the human side of that change.  Change management is a systematic approach to dealing with change, both from the perspective of an organization and on the individual level.  In my opinion, this is the most important aspect of project management.  It is this human side of change that has a great risk of failure if not planned for and managed appropriately.  

Change management has been characterized as having three stages, Unfreezing, Changing, Refreezing.  Looking at change management a little more analytically, you can characterize change management as problem finding and problem solving.  Now some folks prefer not to use the word “problem” but rather the word “opportunity.”  In this discussion, the “problem” is nothing more than something that requires an action but the solution is still unknown.   The goal is to identify a solution and action that will solve the problem.   You will find this definition in an article written by Fred Nickols called “Change Management 101: A Primer”.

Change impacts people in many ways.  Change may have political impacts, analytical impacts, system impacts, or  staffing impacts.  Change may be organizational or systems related.  In either case, people generally don’t like change for fear of the impacts and what must happen at an individual level to implement and adjust to this change.  In short, change takes people out of their comfort zone.   Mitigating risks due to change must occur very early in the project process.  This means that even the planning process is too late for mitigating this project risk.  Our next discussion will focus on ways to mitigate risk due to change management and where this must start in the life of a project.