Here is my takeaway #5 from a book that makes organizational project work worthwhile, “Change Management that Sticks: A Practical People-centered Approach, for High Buy-In and Meaningful Results”:

5) “Of course, not all the projects I have worked on have been successful. I would venture that in those cases there was a big gap between what was delivered and what the real problem was.”

Note: This comes from the Introduction (page xxii).

Change Management focuses on behaviors of people impacted by change. Project Management focuses on managing the project itself through change. Organizational Management of change initiative projects focuses on the organization of change. All of them should make people a central focus.

We worry so much about people accepting change and not resisting or even sabotaging it. We worry about Project Managers and teams orchestrating the plan and delivering change implementations on time. What if a problem that is at the center of most of our organizational struggles is the reason behind most change projects missing the mark?

The “unofficial” project management book I last reviewed (See #8 of 33 takeaways) and this change management book cite an organizational responsibility as the prime reason for both change and project failures.

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STORY TIME

Job interviewers often ask project managers, “Can you explain a time when a project failed?”

I probably failed this question. It’s not easy to answer with my broad understanding. I didn’t want to point blame at others, but I also wanted the organization that was interviewing me to be aware that the reason for the failure was beyond my control. Still, in project management we succeed as a team, and we fail as a team.

Maybe I could have prefaced my explanation with a little background. I have worked in a lot of unconventional environments (at least unorthodox for project management) and situations where I have had to step up as Project Manager when it was not explicitly my title. In these instances, you have to trust that the organization and other experts at least know and are doing their parts correctly. In my work now, I am changing the whole dynamic so organizations can succeed together.

I was not included in on organizational meetings to initiate a new global training program though I did ask to be. I headed up the initial creation, application, and facilitation of much of that program. For a few months beforehand, I prepared Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) trainings and then I was given a completely different paid-for-program on General American Healthcare Training to incorporate.

The company realized that these new workers being in a different country would need that training first. I studied and organized 2 weeks’ worth of training material on my plane flight to the Philippines. The Subject Experts supporting the efforts from different offices stateside actually did a good job to change direction as well. Point is the real benefits we wanted out of this project could not be realized early on because initially “there was a big gap between (what we could deliver) and what the problem was.”

Note: We didn’t have a Change Manager, but we did hire an excellent HR Manager for the new office we would be servicing. Let’s face it, we were winging it on most things, thinking that overworking good employees to fill the void could make up the difference for bad organization of change project management. At least we learned a lot. Well, I did!