Change managers aren't miracle workers
Without project management best practice, your CM budget is worthless.
If you don’t run a project effectively (I’ll get to what I mean by that in a minute), don’t expect your change manager to fix it.
And, yet, I’ve seen this happen. The conversation usually goes something like this: ‘The people aren’t accepting the solution we chose — we better get a change manager.’
At this point in my career, that’s when I run. Because no change manager can improve stakeholder relationships once they’ve been broken by poor project management (and business) practices.
Change management isn’t a miracle cure-all. It’s earth-bound, requiring a generous and customer-centric mindset from the change manager and project team. Its success is also dependent on leaders in the business being change leaders themselves — by seeking to understand people, processes, systems and data — and by setting examples for new ways of working.
And, of course, it’s dependent on what I would call project management best-practice. What is that, you ask? This is what I think it is:
being clear on who the customer is (who benefits?)
understanding the core business problem
seeking broad input for a solution to this problem (aka the end-state)
being clear on the scope — what’s in-scope and out-of-scope and ensuring scope is neither too expansive or work that should be done by the business itself (BAU)
identifying a leader from the business who will represent the business’ interests in the project and explicitly support it (business owner)
seeking broad input into requirements, review, building and testing of the agreed solution
providing customer support, communication and training from the beginning to the end of the project
having a realistic and actionable plan for embedding new processes and ways of working AFTER the project’s completion as part of the project handover to BAU.
I would argue that if ANY of the above isn’t undertaken, there is zero chance that any change manager will be do any good (and, believe me, many will try). You can’t ‘pick a solution yourself and go hard on CM. As I like to joke: If you do that, you won’t need a change manager, you’ll need someone to mop up the blood.
If the above approach IS taken, however, assuming you hire the right change manager — someone who cares about his/her stakeholders and makes it about the business, not about themselves — then your chances your CM can contribute to a successful project outcome are very high.
So high, in fact, that I want you to think of me when you’re hiring.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.