Change management, according to the new PMI practice standard, is “a comprehensive, cyclic, and structured approach for transitioning individuals, groups, and organizations from a current state to a future state with intended business benefits.”
The new PMI practice standard, Managing Change in Organisations: A Practice Guide, is over 130 pages long and aims to complement the other PMI standards. Change management can be managed in projects by a separate change manager, but it is more and more common for project managers to have to adopt this role as part of their own responsibilities on projects. It’s a skill set for project team members and project managers and it covers leadership, business awareness and technical change management skills.
All of these are covered by the new practice standard which looks at these areas, amongst others:
- The change life cycle framework
- Managing change in an organisational project management context
- Change at project, programme and portfolio levels.
The change life cycle
The guide sets out the change life cycle framework. This covers 5 steps:
- Formulate change
- Plan change
- Implement change
- Manage the transition
- Sustain change
As you can see, if you’ve been involved in change management before, or even project management where change has only been a small part, these steps will sound very familiar. The guide describes these in a little detail, but you can flesh out what they mean for your business and your project environment. Here’s a bit of background about what each of these steps could cover.
Formulate change
This is basically working out what you are going to do – in project management terms it is the initiation stage of a project. Think about how you could align your business objectives with actions that would result in changed behaviour. This step is all about identifying the need to change and working out the scope of exactly what you will be doing.
Plan change
This is the planning phase and looks at how the change will actually take place. Think about the people, processes, technology, organisational structure and the office culture and what will need to change. Then plan how you can get there. This step also requires producing a plan, much like a project plan. You’ll also identify stakeholders and work out how best to work with them.
Implement change
This is the step where you’ll do the bulk of the work. Make the changes, deliver the deliverables or complete the tasks. But you’ll also involve stakeholders and ensure that the organisation is ready for the change by carrying out your planned change management activities alongside delivering the project outputs.
Manage the transition
This is the shift from the old ways to the new ways and ensures that the new changes become the business as usual way of working. Integrate the new ways of working or changes into the normal operating practices. This step also includes the measurement activity. You’ll want to measure the results both in terms of adoption or achievement but also in terms of benefits and performance results. As a result, you’ll have had to work out how to do this before you get to this step!
Sustain change
People have a habit of going back to the old ways of working if you don’t make it easy for them to stick with the new ways, so sustaining the change over a long period of time (especially if it is to do with culture) can be difficult. This part of the change life cycle sets out how this will be achieved. Ongoing communication and continuous involvement of stakeholders is one way to achieve this, and all these activities will also have to be planned. One of the other things that the guide suggests is to conduct ‘sensemaking activities’. These are ongoing conversations and social practices that enable people to make sense of what is happening during (and, I would add, after) the change processes. You’ll have to think about what these could be in your organisation (lunch and learn sessions, town hall meetings, etc) and how you can implement them.
This change life cycle makes a lot of sense to me, but it will require some integration into your normal project planning activities. Be sure to add the activities to your Seavus Project Viewer schedule so that you don’t miss anything out!