projects and change
A lot of organisations use projects to deliver business change; whereas the most practiced change management method in the US (prosci) shows how to add business change to projects. So either a project delivers change (as most organisations want it to) or it doesn’t (which is where prosci make their money)? Is there a difference?
click to find out
Small Change Projects
When training in organisations I often come across line managers who are running quite small change projects. They typically involve only 2-4 staff (mostly part-time) and some IT resource. A typical scope might be:
Discussions reveal that these small change projects are running, without control, in most organisations. The worrying thing for me is that the project managers don’t see themselves doing change.
click to see why
In a recent posting on their web site Prosci have discussed their ADKAR model for describing how an individual makes a successful change. Towards the end of the article they provide data from a recent webinar in which they ask which stage of the model poses the biggest challenge. Just over two-thirds of the respondents said the Desire stage was the biggest challenge of the five stages. Is this a surprise?
We have a focus for all of our training on change: delivering benefits to our clients. We also use a similar mantra with our clients to help them be successful in change which is:
How does that affect the benefits?
It is intended to focus every interaction, from the top down, on the benefits and the risks to achieving them. If your correspondent can’t identify an impact on the benefits then you should stop the conversation and have one that does affect the benefits. Using a simple technique like this it doesn’t take long to make a change become benefits focused. Making sure everyone understands the benefits and is focused on delivering them is a simple, but essential, technique to focus behaviour on success. click for more
An example change curve diagram
I am sure many of you will have heard or know of the change curve. This is the idea that all humans go through a series of emotions as a result of a change. The curve shows the different emotions and plots time (x-axis) against a number of different measures including performance, morale, impact, and competence of the individual affected by change. click for more
