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Poor project performance is not always a change management issue, writes Ivan OvertonOnce upon a time, not so long ago, change management was the Cinderella of the corporate ball. Change practitioners really had their work cut out for them, simply to get through the organisational front door with change management.
For many managers who had spent a significant part of their working life in control-and-command organisational environments, the value proposition of change management was very difficult to grasp.
Surely, they reasoned, if leadership decided that something had to be done, then employees should simply be told what to do, and that was that?
This mindset proved to be quite persistent, even as increasing numbers of research studies underscored the critical role of change management in the success of large projects.
Then, as the influence of the new organisational paradigm spread and concepts such as ownership, empowerment, involvement and interdependence came to the fore, effective change management became widely acknowledged as a critical success factor for the implementation of any large-scale organisational change.
Change management was included in business school curricula, and organisations began developing their own in-house change management competence.
Change practitioners now have both their glass slippers. Yet, it seems likely that many will in time find these increasingly uncomfortable. Coming from a historical working environment that varied from poor acceptance to outright hostility and rejection, change practitioners now find far greater acceptance in most engagements.
There will always be the disgruntled stakeholder/manager/project team member who wonders (usually out loud) as to the real value of all this “airy fairy stuff”, but they have come to occupy a minority position in most organisations.
The new bane of the change practitioner’s existence is exactly the opposite of the rejection previously experienced, and it poses an even greater challenge.
Change practitioners seem to have become the indispensable darlings of the project world; while this is gratifying, it also seems to have had the undesirable spin-off that just about everything which occurs on a typical project always seems to become a “change management issue”.
If the project schedule changes due to poor planning, and training has to be postponed the day before it is set to start, this (as well as all of the inevitable fallout) becomes a “change management issue”.
If the technical design is flawed, and users express their concerns, it is a “change management issue”.
If an organisation tackles a large change project, but cannot spare the required business resources to participate in the design, or later on to attend training, you guessed it – it is a “change management issue”.
All projects will have ups and downs, and change management can – and should – play a significant role to smooth out the bumps.
But our primary role should be to help stakeholders deal effectively with the shift from As-Is to To-Be, not to act as spin doctors for poorly conceived or poorly managed projects.
Much of what is so frequently and conveniently labelled as “change management issues” on projects has very little to do with change management, unless one is willing to broaden the definition of change management to the point where it becomes a catch-all.
It is a deeply satisfying experience to be part of a major organisational change where you can play a central role in helping those who will be affected by the change to come to terms with it, and to adopt it in a way that creates value for them as individuals and for the organisation.
However, even in ideal situations where most of the change management focus remains on the To-Be, there will almost inevitably still be a component of project crisis management and – even on flawless projects – the change practitioner may need to step into the odd project breach.
This is absolutely fine: Change managers have good process skills, and should apply these to help when projects become bogged down. It is the right thing to do.
However, by the same token, it is not an ideal situation if most of the change manager’s time on a project is spent doing public relations work to patch poor project performance and compensate for bad project hygiene.
To add insult to injury, with “bad” projects, the poor performance of the entire project then more often than not becomes labelled as – you guessed it again! – a “change management issue”.
The important observation in all this is that, by moving from one extreme of not ascribing much value at all to change management, through to the other extreme of wanting to make everything a change management issue, we are not addressing the root causes of the problems encountered during large change initiatives.
To my mind, three of the most pressing problems that need to be addressed are:
Poor project hygiene is too frequently tolerated
There is absolutely no excuse for poor project hygiene – critical project attributes such as planning, resourcing, scope management, quality and timeliness of deliverables must all be top notch.
Most initiatives will be challenging even when projects are flawlessly executed.
Why risk compromising initiatives by tolerating poor project hygiene?
The knock-on effect of a failed initiative is huge – it increases the likelihood that stakeholders will become more resistant to change, it erodes trust and confidence, and it often adds even more work pressure to already stressed employees.
This means that the next initiative is less likely to succeed, and if that also fails, the negative consequences are compounded even further, making it progressively more difficult for the organisation to change.
People are regarded as an infinite resource
Most reasonable people would not arrange a dinner party and then leave it to the last minute before inviting the intended guests, particularly not without having checked their availability first. Yet, in many large organisations this is all too often how projects are approached – there may be good resource planning within the project, but despite the recurring and obvious problem of “initiative overload”, scant attention is paid to the resource loading of employees who may be at the receiving end of multiple large concurrent projects.
Encouragingly, some organisations have begun putting measures in place to ensure a more rational approach in this regard, and are finding that they are getting more change by attempting less change.
Projects are not properly initiated
This should begin long before the formal project kickoff: what is the quality of the process by which initiatives are prioritised; how much real alignment is there among organisational leaders before embarking on a new initiative?
In most instances, the overwhelming consideration remains return on investment in financial terms: Leadership reaches agreement on how much money to invest and what return to expect, but the time and focus that will be required from employees and leaders (both during a project and in the period after the project) to make the initiative work is often vastly underestimated.
This may have serious consequences: Addressing the problem of poor project hygiene may seem simple – appoint experienced project resources with a proven track record, and implement effective performance assessment and management measures.
However, project hygiene is not only determined by the quality of project resources or the project management process. If undue pressure is placed on project budgets or timelines, or unrealistic scope expectations are allowed to develop, then it becomes almost a given that project hygiene will suffer.
Effective project portfolio management should help with initiative prioritisation, while the introduction of portfolio change management will probably contribute to more realistic resource loading (and change impact loading) of employees, but neither of these will necessarily imbue the crucial mindset among organisational leaders that their organisation’s ability to change is a precious strategic resource which should be carefully nurtured.
It is this mindset, above all, that change managers in their glass slippers should be working toward, for from this, the rest will flow.
So perhaps, in the light of this, when the usual chorus chimes in during a project meeting to blithely assign the issue of a lack of participation of overworked business resources in a design workshop to the weary change manager, they may be correct after all – it is a change management issue.
But not quite in the way they meant it.
