Greetings, Project and Change Management Community members! Alliance 2024 is a few weeks past us already as time continues to fly by quickly! I enjoyed getting to connect with some of you at the conference and look forward to more interactions throughout the year!
In January, we saw some excellent blog posts from Margo about Change Management in our organizations – the forces and dynamics of change and why the change management process matters for improving the success of our projects. If you have not had a chance to read those yet, I highly recommend doing so!
For this two-part blog series , I will highlight some tactical changes we have identified in the IT Project Management Office to help bridge the gap between project and change management roles, inching our way towards more successful project delivery.
We do not have dedicated change management positions in our IT organization at Kansas State University to handle the full scope of what a change manager would do. Recognizing the importance of change management, we have looked for ways to dip our toes into change management practices we could incorporate into our project management lifecycle. This post is a snippet of the Alliance presentation my colleague, Stacy Divine, and I gave: “Tools for the Accidental Change Manager.”
What is an accidental change manager? Well, we’re defining that as someone who is involved in a project, likely the project manager, who does not have formal training or certification in change management but is responsible for successful project delivery. It also means that being a change manager is a secondary duty and doing the full job of these two roles is typically not possible. However, we are trying to enhance some standard project management practices to include change management concepts.
For this post we will focus on tactic number one – Enhancing the Project Charter. One of the most vital steps in a project is documenting the scope of work through a Charter. This is a standard process at K-State and many other organizations, so we have selected a few key questions to add or tweak in our charter template that help call out the importance of change management as we initiate our projects.
1. Project Elevator Pitch: This is something we heard about from our friends at the University of Kansas Medical Center and have “borrowed” for our own use. The point of adding this is two-fold. One, it helps the project team align what we are doing with a project in a simple, short phrase. Secondarily it allows the project team to use that same language with external stakeholders or audience to help avoid mixed messages about the why, what, benefits, and timeline of a project.
2. “How will we measure success?”: Typically, we think of a successful project as one that achieves milestones on schedule and within budget, and that certainly should remain as a goal for the project team. The change here is a focus on the language we have added: “Describe the end state of the project including key benefits and desired mindset of change recipients.” This helps us focus on the people who are impacted by a project and how their realities will change.
3. Audience Communication: “Describe the tool(s) to be used for communicating change with affected stakeholders. How will affected users, support staff, and other stakeholder groups be aware of and understand why a change is occurring?”: Again, we are using the captive audience of our project sponsors and team members agreeing to the project charter to focus on the importance of communicating with those who will be affected by the project. As a project manager, this helps set the stage for building a more effective communications plan by focusing on change communications from the outset of a project.
If you are interested in reviewing our charter template, you can find it in the HEUG PCM Community Library: KSU Project Charter Template. Feel free to use anything in that document that is helpful and drop any comments you may have to help us continue to improve our approach as well! Next time we will talk about the stakeholder/audience analysis.