Course - Improving Technical Project Success with Change Management Overview

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You've been working on that project for the better part of a year, and it's finally done. You put a lot of thought and effort into your work and even made sacrifices on your personal time to ensure its successful delivery. Your project was delivered on time within budget, and nothing was left out. The funny thing, though, the rest of the team isn't too thrilled about it, and it's not getting much traction. Listen, we've all been on a project that was delivered within its constraints only to learn that no one is really using it, which can be confusing and frustrating. But you see, while your project team was focused on getting the new tool or process ready for the business, no one was getting the business ready for the new tool or process. What I mean by that is while the technical aspects of the project were approved, the people side of the project was ignored.

Projects can only be considered successful if the new thing you've implemented is actually used. Not everyone may understand the benefits of changing the way they do things now. In fact, they may have conviction and think their current way is still the best way. Others may simply be inexperienced in a new tool or may not understand the new process. Some may be very efficient in the old way but fear failing and don't want to risk looking like they don't belong in their role. And you'll even have some who want to try the new thing but are timid and don't know where to start. There is an entire discipline dedicated to solving these problems, and more so, changes to tools and processes actually get used, and the benefits of those changes are realized. It's called change management, and while it's been around for a long time, it's been gaining a lot of steam in the technical community over the past few years, and that trend is projected to continue well into the next decade. Now, change management is different than project management. While project management focuses on the technical aspects of the change, ensuring everything gets done with an approved budget by a certain date and with high quality, change management focuses on the people side of the change, helping people understand why the change is needed, reducing resistance, and obtaining their buy-in on wanting the change, ensuring they know how to perform in their new role, and sustaining the change so it gets institutionalized and becomes the new normal.

In the next video, I'm going to explain how change management increases adoption, but first, I want you to think of a project in your career that was delivered as requested but wasn't used right away. Think about how good the project team initially felt about getting it out the door, only to come to confusion and frustration when they learned it was being resisted. Now, let's see how change management could have helped.