Change Readiness: The PM’s New Priority

Change Readiness: The PM’s New Priority

Andy Jordan

– July 15, 2020

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at andy.jordan@roffensian.com. Andy’s new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

One of the areas that has evolved most in project management in recent years is the concept of organizational change management. Businesses have increasingly recognized that project success is significantly impacted by the way in which the outputs of a project are integrated with the business operations that will consume those outputs. The obvious examples are things like system changes for operations functions where the ability to get up-to-speed quickly—and with minimal loss of productivity—is critical.

But the issue is still important for other types of projects. A new product offering will impact the work of sales, marketing, customer service and finance functions—and depending on the nature of the product, may significantly disrupt production lines, engineering teams and similar business areas.

Organizational change management has not only looked to understand these impacts and prepare them for the release of project outputs through change readiness programs, it has also considered factors like change fatigue, normalization periods and other factors that can impact deployments—and ultimately project success.

As businesses evolve to a more project-centric model with more projects being completed and changes occurring more frequently, this organizational change management concept becomes ever more important. It becomes something that the …

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Published at Wed, 15 Jul 2020 04:00:00 +0000