Everyone is Change Management
Change ManagementOne of the most difficult pieces of large-scale projects is conveying the importance of what many consider intangible. Those functions and activities not directly tied to primary tech deliverables, like design, architecture, and the actual developed product.
Functions like project management and change leadership are at the top of this list. Businesses will often spend the least amount of money possible on project managers and may not hire a change lead at all. The problem with this is these roles exist for a reason. Good project management and change leadership will drastically decrease your risk of losing large amounts of money on your implementation, or failing entirely. Today, we will focus on the change side, which is by far the most neglected aspect of projects. And organizations that do invest in it still tend to make one critical mistake.
The Quantifiable Case for Change Management
The value is there. You just have to know where to look.
It is difficult to convince businesses to invest money in change leadership since it is hard to quantify the value. Or is it? Prosci is one of the top change management organizations on the planet. They collect data from countless projects every year to gain insights on trends and to understand what works. Their benchmarking research, spanning thousands of projects, finds that initiatives are seven times more likely to meet their goals when effective change management is implemented.
An effective change plan starts at the change lead. It is their job to study the project and organization to understand change impacts, risks, and remediations. To accomplish a successful change strategy, an experienced change lead must be allocated full-time (depending on project size), as it is a full-time job.
The Mistake Most Teams Still Make
Hiring a change lead is not the finish line.
But here is the mistake most project teams make even after they get this right: they treat the change lead as the sole person responsible for change management. Everyone else considers it someone else's problem. This is wrong.
Every member of the project team is an agent of the project. Negative comments, poor presentation, inadequate demos, and many other activities conducted by members of the team can have devastating impacts on the success of the project and adoption of the new system or process.
Members of the project team must avoid argument in front of stakeholders. Comments about the system should be positive in nature. When presenting to end users, members should be polished and well spoken. One moment of poor judgment can have serious implications.
The SME Risk
Peer credibility cuts both ways.
This is especially important for project SMEs, who may not have experience on change projects and may not think about any of this. They are also often colleagues of end users, which means they carry two compounding risks: high exposure and peer credibility. End users trust them. If an SME casually undermines the project in conversation, in a demo, or in how they answer questions, end users will believe it. That perception becomes reality, and it will directly undermine your change strategy regardless of how well everything else is executed.
What To Do About It
Start at kickoff. Never stop.
To avoid this, you must communicate the concept of everyone is change management and remind all members of the project how much power they each hold over project success, simply by what they say and how they act. Start this communication at kickoff and reinforce it for the lifetime of the project. When you observe risky behavior or comments, address it immediately.
Every person on your project team is either building confidence in the change or eroding it. There is no neutral.
