3 Keys to Project Success and Driving Sustainable Change

Have you ever been the leader of a significant business change and not been able to make it stick? Most organizations believe that the key element in any project is sound project management.  But what about the people it is affecting? So many times two other elements are missed when it comes to delivering successful projects.

What are the 3 factors for project success?

Research reflects that three essential factors yield project success. First, of course, is effective project management. This is the normal focus area: deliver the project on time, on budget, to a specified level of quality, and meeting stakeholders’ expectations. Some of the key steps include:

• Planning
• Organizing
• Implementing
• Controlling
• Close Out

Although project management is important, and critical to success, two other factors are also essential: leadership and change management. Having active and visible leadership sets the stage for active and visible participation, direct communication and coalition building to ensure success. These executive actions are necessary. Remember the old saying “What is interesting to my boss fascinates me.” Active and visible leadership makes it important for people to deliver success.

Change management isn’t just a “soft and fuzzy people thing”. Numerous change management methodologies have been developed and deployed; ones that come to mind include the Kotter model, the Lewin change theory model, LaMarsh and Prosci. All have worthwhile attributes that should be evaluated and effectively executed in a structured fashion in order to deliver project success.

How does change happen?

After you have the three elements to deliver successful change it is important to understand how and where change happens. In most cases we are driving change organizationally so many times that is how it’s approached. Leaders schedule communication meetings where they “tell them” about the change. Telling them about the change isn’t change management! Change management starts at the individual level. We must engage folks that are being affected by the change to be part of making the change. Face-to-face, one-on-one conversations need to transpire in order to build trust that leaders care about the stakeholder impact of the change. After having the one-on-one interaction, further engaging the stakeholders to be part of the change is critical. We need to tap into their knowledge and have the process owners be part of making change.

Organizational change results from individual engagement. It needs to have some structure to it.

The leader of the change needs to make sure that the change team prepares, manages and reinforces change across the organization to deliver success.

In managing the change, factors like a communication plan, understanding risk points and developing mitigation strategies come into play.

Does change management have an ROI?

In business, no change happens without there being some business benefit that would be gained by the organization. So is there a return on investment to effectively driving change? Many would say no but research has proven that an effective process that deals efficiently with the people side of change yields measurable results. The ROI of an investment in the application of the change process is measured based upon speed of adoption, ultimate utilization and proficiency. 

Speed of adoption is how quickly people are up and running on the new systems, processes and job roles. Ultimate utilization means, of the total population, how many people are demonstrating buy-in and are using the new solution? Proficiency asks whether individuals are performing at the level expected when the change was designed. The payback in applying change management can be measured. It is critical to the long-term success and sustainability of a project.

Summary

Remember the three key factors to driving change! Having engaged leadership/sponsorship, project management and change management are all critical to success. Additionally, change happens at an individual level first, then grows to create organizational change. Having these in mind will deliver successful and sustainable change.

For examples of how this works in practice, please feel free to contact me at BWesner@LCE.com or (843) 991-7404.  To learn more about this topic, visit Life Cycle Engineering's webpage on change management.

I welcome discussions on this subject, so please feel free to comment below.

References: c) Prosci 2010. change-management.com. Used with permission.