The best of change management

The Best of Change Management
A selection of professional insights from the Blog archive

ProjectManager.com © 2013 All Rights Reserved

Since 2008 our project management professionals have been sharing knowledge,
experience and learning with online readers via the Project Manager Blog.

Their collective wisdom provides a wealth of how to, top tips and best practice advice,
for project managers, teams and businesses.

To make their writings more accessible we’ve created a series of “Best of” project
management topics available free to download and share.

Here is a collection of excerpts and insights from blog posts that discuss change
management and how process and project software may help project managers adapt
quickly and effectively in the face of change.

Enjoy!

Jason Westland CEO

ProjectManager.com

3 Ways to Manage Project Management Plan Changes ............................................................................. 3

Project Manager Sanity and Change Management Software ..................................................................... 6

PM Program for Quickly Managing Change ................................................................................................ 9

How to Manage Change on Projects ......................................................................................................... 11

30 Day Free Software Trial ........................................................................................................................ 12

ProjectManager.com © 2013 All Rights Reserved 2

3 Ways to Manage Project Management Plan Changes
There’s a six letter word that instills fear into most Project
Managers…CHANGE. We’re not talking about the minor day-to-day
changes that come and go with each project, but rather the
wholesale major changes that have the ability to derail a project
management plan and sometimes even careers, if not properly
managed!

Why do such changes occur and what can you do to make it through such changes
intact? This article will focus on some reasons why changes happen to even the best
project management plan and what you can do to make it through such changes
gracefully.

Change is Everywhere so You’ll Have to Deal With It
Change is all around us. The seasons change, children change, and our relationships
change. We change jobs, clothes and moods. Our friends as well as our likes and dislikes
all change over time. We’re used to dealing with change every day of our lives. Why is it
then, that when it comes to our project management plan, we may be surprised, even
irritated when change creeps into our projects?

One reason is that Project Managers typically do not like change. We like putting things
in nice, orderly boxes and categories (ever heard of a WBS?). We like to plan things from
beginning to end and come in each day knowing what’s next on our list of things to get
done. We like it when everything falls into place on
our project management plan, and each step we
take is a solid step moving forward, not sideways, or
(gasp)…backwards.

Guess what? We need to accept and even embrace
change to remain viable as a Project Manager. Below
are some causes of change and what we can do to
make the best of the situation when change occurs
on our projects.

Some Reasons for Change
The reasons for change are endless. Most changes can fall into the following categories:

A Better Way - Your project kicks off with the most recent understanding of the
technologies and tools available to you and your team at that time. Months may pass
before it’s realized that there’s a different tool or new technology that may, in the long
run, make the deliverable of the project more sustainable or scalable. The downside is
that in the short-term this introduces change to your project and will require a bit of an
overhaul of your project management plan.

Missed Requirements - Try as we might, it’s next to impossible to capture every single
requirement that’s necessary for a successful implementation of a project. A team of
business analysts may be assigned to take on this task. However, the expression “you
don’t know what you don’t know” has a tendency to rear its ugly head at some point in
the lifecycle of a project. It may be that a system the project integrates with may have
been overlooked, or a smaller, yet important stakeholder’s requirements were missed.

Either scenario introduces change into the equation. This is one area that you can focus
on to capture as many requirements as possible by identifying every stakeholder that
could have a say on the outcome of the project. It’s easy to overlook the end-user or the
stakeholder that you may view as not having much to say about the final deliverable.

While it’s not your job as a Project Manager to collect and document these
requirements, you can work with the business analysts assigned to your team to make
sure that everyone has had the opportunity to provide their input. This will prevent you
from being blindsided by a change to your project management plan you would have
otherwise never seen coming.

Market Pressure - You may feel that you have plenty of time to properly complete the
project you have been assigned. But then your Sales team comes back from the most
recent Trade Show and informs everyone that ‘your competitors are on your heels and
you need to get to market in half the time you had originally expected.’ The result? You
guessed it…change to your project management plan.

How to Accept and Embrace Change
You may think that Change is something you may always have a hard time accepting, let
alone embracing. You’ll find that by following the suggestions below you can separate
yourself from other Project Managers and make a name for yourself as someone who
can absorb and execute changes introduced to your project.


Accept It - Go into every project with your eyes
wide open and accept that change is going to
occur. You know that the end of the project
could be quite different to how it was originally
planned. That’s OK. Think of your project in
financial terms…

The beginning of your project is like a Balance
Sheet at the beginning of one period. The end
of your project is like that same Balance Sheet at the end of the period.

If there’s any activity at all during this period, these two Balance Sheets will be different.
You’re able to bridge these changes by means of the Income Statement. Carefully
documented Change Requests and Logs can serve as your Project Income Statement. It
can bridge the gap between how the project was originally planned and how it
ultimately ended up.

Plan for It - You can’t say you know that change will occur to your project management
plan and then do nothing to accommodate these changes. Have a contingency plan in
place (time, resources, and cost) that can absorb part, if not all, of the changes that’ll
occur. Have a Project Change Control Template ready to go, understand what would be
considered billable vs. non-billable up-front and have procedures in place with relevant
stakeholders to review and approve/reject changes that may arise.

Roll with It - Did you know that high rise buildings are designed with enough flexibility
to sway up to a couple of feet in each direction to prevent them from breaking apart
and crumbling in high winds and bad weather? This flexibility allows them to sway in the
breeze while maintaining their structural integrity and safeguarding the occupants
within. You need to replicate the ways of a Project Manager. Maintaining a certain
amount of flexibility will allow you and your team to sway with the changes that may
come your way, while at the same time, keeping the entire project intact.

We all need to face the fact that change to our project management plans are
inevitable. Change comes from diverse sources and is incessant. It’s the highly skilled
Project Manager that accepts and even embraces this change by accepting the fact that
change will occur, plans for it and ultimately has the flexibility to absorb this change and
keep the project intact.


Project Manager Sanity and Change Management Software

Change is one thing you can be nearly 100% guaranteed to occur on
any project. No matter how carefully planned, how many people were
involved, and how many “deep-dive” meetings were held to uncover
all of the requirements…something will have been missed. Or, time will
pass and what seemed to work at the inception of the project is no
longer relevant and requires an adjustment to the scope, schedule, or quality of your
project.

Regardless, change will happen and you will be right in the middle of it. This is
something you will need to accept as a Project Manager or you will drive yourself, and
others, crazy by thinking otherwise. Below are some of the most common causes for
change on a project as well as some suggestions for how to gracefully implement
change and ideally increase revenue in the process with or without change management
software.

Three Common Causes for Change
1. Missed Requirements

The most common reason for a project changing would be missed requirements. In
today’s fast and furious business environment, there never seems to be enough time to
do something right, but there is always enough time to do something over.

Someone comes up with a great idea for a project, or a potential client walks in the door
with a project they need implemented and everyone is ready to start “building”
immediately. A couple brief strokes of the dry erase marker on the white-board, a high-
level flow chart, and a quick conversation with one or two of the project stakeholders
and everyone is off to races.

Days, weeks, or a month or two may pass and it quickly becomes apparent that these ad
hoc planning sessions really didn’t constitute “planning” but rather allowed somebody
the ability to “check this off their list” so the fun part of the project could begin.

Take your time up front. Get Business Analysts involved if need be. Everyone will push
you to quickly get out of the Planning stage. You have to fight this influence. Reason

with them, show them the benefits of planning up-front and how it will ultimately take
less time to complete a properly planned project with as many requirements uncovered
as opposed to one that is shoddily thrown together.

There’s a saying in construction to “measure twice…cut once”. This same principle
applies regardless of what type of project you are managing. Take the time to gather all
requirements up front (translation: as many as you possibly can…don’t just blow
through this part) and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and money later. Once these
missed requirements have been captured in whatever change management software
you are using, you are now ready to move forward.

2. Missed Stakeholders

This is a variation of Missed Requirements, however, a bit more egregious. All
requirements have been captured and the project is moving along just fine. Everything
is on-schedule and on-budget and you are a happy camper.

Then, someone pops their head into your office and wants to know what this project is
all about. They just heard about it from one of their vendors (not even someone from
your company) and believe it is certain to have an impact on the way they conduct
business. What?? You didn’t even know this group existed. They weren’t even
contemplated in the planning sessions that were conducted. Now you find out that they
have a vested interest in the implementation and outcome of this project!

This opens a Pandora’s Box that is hard to close and sure to negatively impact
deliverables, schedules, and everyone’s expectations around the project. Not
insurmountable, but at the same time this really introduced substantial bump in the
road.

Don’t assume everyone knows about the project and has provided their input. This falls
into the category of “you don’t know what you don’t know” and requires extreme due
diligence on your part (and especially the business analyst if you are working with one)
to make sure all stakeholders are present and accounted for.

These changes may take a bit more time to capture in your change management
software as it will expand into a whole new set of requirements, but the effort will be
worth it.

3. Misaligned Expectations

Your sales team would never deliberately do a bait-and-switch…but let’s just say what
the customer was sold may be a bit different than what can be built. This turns into a
tricky conversation that lends itself to its own article, but does present you, as the
Project Manager, with some challenges. The customer now has some decisions to make.

 Are they going to accept the project as-is even though this may be different than
their expectations? &/or
 Will they require customization of the project to meet their needs which will
undoubtedly introduce more time and cost to the project?

It will be important to document this change to the project regardless of what decision
they make. This realigns everyone’s expectations and many times could be compared to
hitting the ‘reset’ button.

Missed requirements, missed stakeholders, and misaligned expectations are all
problematic areas that are a hotbed for introducing change to your project. Don’t be
naive to think change won’t occur. Rather, earnestly monitor these areas where change
could occur, track them with your change management software, and do everything you
can to eliminate these causes of change early and often.

How to Bridge this Change
Nobody ever thinks that a project will end up the way it started out. The result is always
going to be different (either slight or substantial) than what was anticipated. Your job as
a Project Manager is to bridge this difference.

One way to look at managing change is
comparing two financial balance sheets from
two different periods. You can clearly see the
numbers change, but you have no idea or
concept for how this change occurred from
one balance sheet to the next.

Then, you introduce the Profit and Loss
statement into the equation and you see how income and expenses caused the balance
sheet to fluctuate. The P & L statement is what bridges the two Balance Sheets
together.


The same applies with changes that occur on a project. Your project will end up
different than it started out. That’s OK and should be expected. You just need to bridge
the gap by using change management software to document the changes and bridge the
gap.

PM Program for Quickly Managing Change
There are forces that are exerted on our projects every day. We can implement
whatever project management program we see fit, but we have to understand that
pressures will be exerted on nearly each and every task that is undertaken.

Forces range from resources taking longer than originally expected to requirements
being completely wrong, or missed on a project. It’s a project manager’s job to exert
their influence in these areas in order to keep a project moving forward.

One area that comes up time and again is the force of a client or end-user wanting to
change something on a project that is already underway. Not only is it underway, it was
agreed upon that what is underway is exactly what the client or end-user needs.
Everything has been set and ready to go in the project management program… and now
there’s a change in plans!

This reality has caused many to overreact in
the project manager community. Here’s an
example: A client is working with a company
to put together an Hours and Attendance
application. This custom application will allow
their employees to check-in/check-out at the
front desk and then either get on with the job
at hand, go to lunch, or head home.

The client decides that the originally agreed upon green tint of the ‘check in’ button
needs to be a shade or two darker. “Sure, no problem,” the project manager says. “Let
me put together a Change Request form to make sure we capture this request. This will
of course take our Engineering team a few days to determine the scope of the work, our
testing team to see how long it will take them to make sure the change is made.

Then, we’ll of course need to get executive approval on this color change prior to
coming up with the final amount that that this change is going to cost. We’ll then

present this to you, probably after two weeks, and then based upon your approval we’ll
schedule this button color change in to our project manager program and get it done in
the next couple of weeks”. Seriously!?

As ridiculous as that sounds, these types of conversations take place. They unfortunately
take place for a valid reason. This is because resources, project managers, and
companies have been burned by the incessant stream of one-off change requests that
the client feels are necessary to get things right.

There’s no project management program in place that could keep up with some of the
requests that end users will make of the project team. Unfortunately, this has caused
some end-users to just roll their eyes when a project manager brings up the words
“change request”.

Is There a Better Way to Manage
Change?
Is there a better way to manage change
requests? Is there some type of project
management program a PM could implement
that would take the absurd out of the
equation? Yes, and it relies upon thresholds.

This type of project management program isn’t necessarily ideal for all projects. You
may work on a project or in an environment where changes are few and far in between.
In that case it wouldn’t make sense to implement such a project management program
to manage to change. If, however, you work in an environment where change is the only
constant, then you may want to consider this approach. The secret to managing change
through thresholds relies upon the following categories:

Small Changes: Minor changes in this project management program are those changes
that can be made in no time at all. These changes will have zero impact to cost, scope,
delivery, or quality of the project. They are typically cosmetic in nature and even if
something goes wrong with the change it will not negatively impact other areas of the
project.


Let’s say, the client wants to change the color of the button from a light green to a dark
green. The project manager will be able to accept and approve this type of change if it
meets the criteria above. There’s no reason to jump through all the hoops mentioned at
the beginning of the article to obtain approval. By the time all those hoops are jumped
through, the change could have been made and everyone moved on to other
components of the project.

This doesn’t mean that the change is not documented. It’s important to keep a record of
everything that changed, but it’s as simple as putting it in a change request log and then
letting the team know to make the color two shades darker.

Medium Changes: Medium changes are a step above small changes. These may cause a
slight change to the cost, scope, delivery, or quality of the project, but not big enough
that it alters the overall business value of the project. A project management program
for implementing this type of change could be to present it to a Change Control board.

This would be comprised of yourself, the client, and one or two other people in your
company (such as a functional manager or executive). The object would be to get all to
agree upon the change. Again, this should take a matter of hours to complete and not
be dragged out over days or weeks. A simple form can be used with signature lines for
everyone’s approval and then the change can be implemented.

Large Changes: The last category is large changes. These types of changes and approvals
justifiably will take longer to approve and implement. These are the types of wholesale
changes that could cause the ROI of a project to change or the business value to erode.
These are the types of changes that call into question the need to even continue with
the project. A project management program or process needs to be put in place to
ensure that executives in both companies are aware of the impacts.

How to Manage Change on Projects
http://youtu.be/tMR7jVefRIQ

Watch as Devin Deen, Content Director here at projectmanager.com, presents a short
video on How to Manage Change on Projects, by implementing change management
best practices.


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