A practical framework to enable organizational/operational change and align “enterprise environmental factors”

I would like to thank everyone who attended my last PMI LEAD CoP webinar on “Leveraging Change Management to Enable Project Success” (the recorded webinar is available on the Project Management Institute (PMI) LEAD CoP website and the presentation is available on my LinkedIn profile). I took the opportunity to talk about a broad framework (“high-level framework” in consultanese) I have been using (and refining) for the past decade to enable change and drive the successful implementation of projects that seek to transform the way a business operates.

There are a lot of frameworks out there that offer step by step recipes to address the challenges of business transformation efforts. These frameworks usually promote all or some of the following activities: (1) a communication workstream that usually involves the intricate planning and dissemination of large amounts of project propaganda, (2) lots of training to attempt to indoctrinate the new way of doing things into the minds of the “targets”, (3) lots of time invested in driving change “from the top”, (4) and attempts to use new technologies and processes to quickly and magically “transform” a culture that (in many cases) has evolved over decades and endured all sorts of disruptive events.

I believe it is close to impossible to develop a cookie cutter approach to managing change, a detailed step by step method that can be applied out of the box without a considerable amount of customization, expertise, and thoughtfulness; with the ever ending need for adjustments and modifications, no matter how well designed. When it comes to managing the change process, scope creep is the norm and unlike managing other components of a project, the real challenge with the change management plan is to periodically be able to properly reassess and reprioritize scope elements (it is not uncommon for priorities to change drastically because of unforeseen issues that could not possibly have been anticipated early on). That is why I have tended to use a rolling wave approach with a planning window that is based on the specifics of the project and organizational factors.  A dynamic planning framework works well for the change management components of projects and programs.

Here are some of the key precepts/principles of the framework I presented:

• Change management is an oxymoron. The term “change management” in the context of organizational/operational change is an oxymoron. In many cases, it is not possible to really manage the effects of the change itself, or to truly control reactions to it, at best the project team can manage the process that is used to push the change agenda and adapt it when necessary. People, teams, departments, business units, regional areas, … will tend to deal with change in their own distinct way. Therefore, being able to formulate a change strategy that caters to those different needs is critical and most often that is what separates a novice from an expert. Change management is an attempt to devise a journey through unchartered territory, you can’t fully plan out a course because you don’t have a complete map but with the appropriate set of “sensors”/tools you can proactively identify potential obstacles before you hit them. Once these obstacles have been identified, you must then use a set of basic rules to figure out how to overcome them, and throughout the process, continually adjust your direction and speed, and learn about the terrain so that the overall process improves continuously.
• Change should be implemented  WITH the impacted stakeholders as opposed to having it be   IMPOSED  ON  them. Change management should be about enabling people and fostering the stakeholders’ responsibility to contribute to the process and become accountable for their own success . This is predicated by the fact that at the end of the day, the impacted stakeholders will have to live in the new environment.
• One size never fits all, even when you are dealing with impacted stakeholders in the same organization, in the same department, and sometimes even in the same team. The proper stratification and breakdown of stakeholder groups can make or break a successful change management strategy. A change manager or project manager shouldn’t simply lump a functional area or operational area together. Finding the right level of granularity can be tricky (e.g., in the past, on some of my projects, I've had groups that were as large as 1,000 and while others were as small as 2). As a rule of thumb, the more granular and customized, the better (conversely, the more granular, the higher the overall level of effort needed to manage the process). When looking at the impacted stakeholders, it is usually worthwhile to do it 2 degrees remote: assess not only the impacts to the directly impacted stakeholders but build a framework that allows you to also assess the impacts to the stakeholders’ stakeholders, a lot of surprises can be avoided by doing so.
• Managing change is not about eradicating resistance. Obstructionism and sabotage should not be confused with resistance. In many cases, a bit of resistance is a good thing and does not result in obstructionism or sabotage. A complete lack of skepticism usually means that people don’t care and that can be even more problematic. I posit that resistance and skepticism can be very healthy reactions, provided that they are handled properly. The ability to leverage resistance and turn it into a critical thinking exercise can help improve the transformation effort by questioning some of the underlying assumptions which allows for the refinement of the change strategy. Leaders and decision makers are not always right; sometimes decisions are made based on incomplete information or wrong assumptions. The change management strategy should provide a medium to periodically “ground” the assumptions and vet them through the impacted stakeholders. In many large organizations, middle management can serve as a fairly potent filter that prevents the top decision makers from truly understanding what is occurring in the organization (e.g., what’s truly the cause of issues with suppliers, customers, etc.) The change management strategy should incorporate a dynamic feedback loop that can bypass natural organizational “filters” that may exist in an organization.
• Communication management is not change management. We are social beings, good two-way communication is the basis for almost everything we do: it is essential to a good partnership, critical to a good relationship with our supervisors and coworkers, essential to healthy business interactions with our suppliers, our customers, … but we must keep in mind that good communication alone will not necessarily result in a successful partnership; if an employee is incompetent or simply a bad "fit", good communication will not result in success at work; if a company keeps producing inferior products, having great communication channels linking it with its customers won’t matter unless the problem is fixed. When it comes to managing organizational/operational/business change, the end goal should not be to "manage" communications, it should be to effectively engage the stakeholders, to properly identify and address their concerns (which by no means results in all stakeholders always getting what they want –needed to clarify that). Communications should definitely be organized and aligned but should always be pervasive, ubiquitous, and should always be perceived as an enabling activity that’s a beginning, never an end goal. It is an enabling activity, a tool, much like a hammer or a screwdriver would be tools of the trade to a master carpenter (these days, power tools would probably be a better analogy). Planning for and periodically distributing one-way project propaganda is fairly easy to do and easy to quantify: the project team sent out 5 e-mails a month, a project newsletter every quarter, and put out a video of the executive sponsor telling everyone that the change is important. Never mind that most the recipients are drowning in e-mails and never opened the messages, or bothered reading the newsletter, or viewed the video. If the goal is to push out propaganda, once it has been pushed, the team can affirm that it has reached its goal; and if that is the standard that must be met, then it is very difficult to fail.
• Training delivery is not change management. Delivering training is not managing change; it is an activity that should be viewed as a component of a broader learning/knowledge diffusion/Knowledge management strategy that enables the impacted stakeholders so that they are equipped to move towards the desired future state. When done properly, this can even lead to innovations that could not have been anticipated during the initiation of the project.
• Ensuring systemic alignment is critical. The overall alignment of goals and expectations must be both vertical (e.g., hierarchical) and horizontal (e.g., functional) and should apply to all impacted stakeholder groups (if applicable, that might even include pertinent customers, suppliers, business partners ,…). A successful business transformation effort will require the systemic alignment of not only people but also strategies, processes, technologies, policies, organizational structure, culture & any sub-cultures,…  (PMI’s PMBoK 4rth edition refers to many of these as “enterprise environmental factors”). Alignment must be across the board and even though this might seem like a herculean effort, with the proper strategy in place and an adequate framework a lot of the responsibilities can be delegated and the challenge becomes the efficient management of the change management network once it is put in place. Since I mentioned culture earlier, I should specify that in the context of organizational/operational change management activities, culture should be considered somewhat immutable unless there is a specific initiative aimed at fostering culture change. If the goal is to “nudge” certain elements of an organization’s culture in a certain direction, then yes, that may be possible through change management activities but if the aim is to fundamentally change core aspects of the culture, then that should be a separate, long term, well defined initiative that is staffed with Organization Development (OD) experts whose expertise is culture change. In such a case, the change management activities can be aligned with and enable/reinforce the OD intervention in various ways.
• Change does not always need to be driven from the top. I’d even go as far as saying that in some cases leadership should provide the broad direction, the necessary resources/support, and get out of the way. In many large enterprises, the most critical group to bring on board is middle management (the titles to be included in this group will vary based on the organization but I’d say in most cases, that includes Directors, Managers, and Supervisors). Not having middle management on board is usually a recipe for disaster, even when the senior executives are the biggest cheerleaders and proponent of the change.

This blog is getting longer than I expected. Please take a look at the presentation for additional information on the framework. I'll start going over the components of the framework in the next blog entry.

MY  GOALS:

—  Engage Project Managers (PM) who are interested in enhancing their skill set around managing organizational and operational change

—  Promote Change Management/Change Enablement (systemic approach) as a key component of projects having direct/indirect impacts on people in an organization

—  Start a conversation and engage PMs who are interested in sharing best practices: what works and what doesn’t work

—  Push the envelope and engage you in discussions around various topics related to Change Management (CM) and Project Management (PM)

NEXT STEPS:

I am looking for Project Managers who manage, support, or enable business transformation initiatives and are interested in collaborating to:

1.  Redefine/refine/adjust the framework I described in the webinar (presentation available here)

2. Align the framework with the PMBoK. Even though I believe that organizational/operational change management holds its own as a distinct knowledge area, a good change management framework can thoroughly strengthen some of the existing (PMBoK) knowledge areas such as integration management, communications management, and risk management (Human Resource management was left out on purpose).
The relationship with the first 2 knowledge areas listed is fairly clear but in case you are wondering why I listed risk management, I figured I’d expound on that. If stakeholders are properly engaged and have bought into the initiative, they can help mitigate many of the organizational risks and remove organizational and operational hurtles that are impeding the project. A well designed sensing network can help identify potential risks well before they would typically appear on the project team’s radar. Also, organizational/operational risks can be “fuzzy risks” which are not clearly defined and may not have a clear answer (things that may have to do with internal politics, culture, or items that cross a variety of boundaries and domain areas in such a way that there is no clear owner or set of expertise that can easily help resolve the issue…). If stakeholders are properly engaged and have bought into the initiative, they can help mitigate many of the organizational risks and remove organizational and operational hurtles that are impeding the project.

3.  Share tools and approaches that enhance the skill set and change management competencies of project managers. I would like to start conducting webinars on tools and approaches I have used in the past that worked and also do a couple on “lessons learned”. It would be a pleasure to collaborate with PMs who would be interested in sharing their experiences and contribute so that we can increase the group’s competencies around managing change.