TOP Ideas

Our consulting company, Capability Management International, is 15 years old this year. So we start the year with 15 of our most critical insights.

All projects are ‘change projects’

Benefits come from changes to how you do business, how you operate, how you penetrate the market. Benefits come from change. Therefore, it makes sense that every project should be seen as a ‘change project’.

But what does this mean? One CFO told me proudly that all of his projects were now ‘change projects’. When I asked him what he had changed, he answered, “Nothing, we just now call them ‘change projects’!”

Viewing a project as a ‘change project’ changes the questions you ask up front. With, say, a systems project you ask, “What do we need to do to get this system in?” The change project asks, “What needs to happen, what has to change to get us from where we are today to where we want to be (and sustain us there).”

Change projects also have a different ‘lifecycle’. Whereas technical projects go through design, develop, test and implement; change projects look to clarify (the unknowns), prepare (the changes), migrate (make the change) and sustain the change (once implemented). This is a different way of thinking and planning projects.

Technical delivery now becomes a ‘change stream’ along with education, training, communications and documentation. This makes ‘technical alignment’ a key change management activity — ensuring that what the technical staff are developing exactly matches and supports the planned changes and outcomes. This is a very different perspective to seeing change management as the means for implementing the technical solution.

Also, when you plan your project as a change project, you find many changes you can do now to deliver immediate benefits. Indeed, we have consistently found we can realize up to 20% of the potential benefits during the project from changes made early. When you progressively deliver change you

• reduce the net cost of the project through the savings made
• inspire real confidence in the project as one that delivers benefits
• reduce the change impact and workload by spreading it out over time
• can assess ‘change readiness’ by assessing how well changes to date have been absorbed.

Now, every project would like that list of benefits; and its easily possible if you view, plan and manage your projects as ‘change projects’.

What’s stopping us? Post your comments below.

To enable anyone to successfully plan a change project we developed the Change Planning Framework, which is described in “How to plan change” available from valuedeliverymanagement.com

© Jed Simms, Australia, 2009