Here is my takeaway #10 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”:
10) “This book is about business change projects. Death and taxes are called the only certainties in life. I would add change to the list. It focuses on a subset of change and that’s business change. This means any piece of new or enhanced change to a business environment that affects people. It could be a project or initiative, in which a current state is amended to a new, and not yet known, future state. It is for the people in the business who have to deliver that change. These people are usually people leaders or managers or sometimes professional business change managers. But they’re also the ‘Hey, you’ volun-told staff member.”
Note: This comes from the Introduction (page xxvi-xxvii).
This is my last takeaway from the Introduction section and then we will get into what change management specifically entails.
I included this takeaway because I think most of us deal with informal change management, in the “volun-told” category more often than not. The last book I reviewed, “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager,” made me realize that most project managers are informally thrust into those roles. How much more for Change Management, whose standardization (just 10 years or so) is still in its infancy?
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STORY TIME
As I have winded my way through my career, I have noticed one thing after another missing from our processes that would have benefitted our companies in our pursuits. The first time I started working on projects across an organization it didn’t have actual Project Managers. The work was simply handed off to Operational Managers like me. And when I say handed off, I mean, it was like, “Here you go. This changes your area of work. You see it through.” That was the extent of the passing of the torch to me learning about and becoming a Project Manager. The realization of how important Change Managers are and how rare they are was even more stark.
Projects I led went well in that we accomplished what we set out to do and it led to other similar projects with another company, but it was a lot more painful than it had to be in both environments. Once I certified in Project Management, I realized most organizations not only do not initiate projects well, but they don’t know what Organizational Project Management is. So, I studied that and implemented what I learned on any executive-led initiatives I was a part of as far as anyone would listen. There are not too many experts in that subject area. I became one.
If an organization is large enough it usually asks a Project Manager to establish a Project Management Office (PMO) and then they turn it over to them. But what about small and mid-size businesses? In my experience, the more you understand the support missing from the business, the more your role expands. You fill the void. You become an unofficial project manager on projects no one else wants to lead, an unofficial organizational leader people look to for sign-off, and then an unofficial change manager to help people impacted by change to accept the changes to their work. You are constantly “watching your back” to make sure you “don’t step on any toes”, but for the most part the other overburdened leaders and managers are very happy if you can take any project load off of them so they can focus on “under water” operations.
In these companies, I was told we just have to “wear many hats” here. That made sense when I was in a company of 1-5, 5-10, or even 1-25 just trying to stay alive. But you reach a tipping point. Most companies I have worked for have been more than 50 employees strong (In the least, hire 1 dedicated professional Project Manager for every 50 employees.). I led operations for a department of 70+ people at one point. All these businesses were either experiencing growing pains or just dealing with the success of more work per individual employed than in the past. Changes were inevitable, but rather than everyone in the business changing how we worked together the chore of an increased workload often fell to just a few, like I pointed out. And we floundered a bit, to put it lightly.
Either I am a glutton for punishment, or I am a relentless problem-solver, but I have stuck with it probably longer than I should have in a few places of work, and I doggedly worked through several solutions that can and does cure what ails business progressions today.
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You don’t have to take the scenic route. Streamline your work and business success. My knowledge, project, and change management programs assist organizations wherever your business professionals are at in their progression, in an understood and coordinated fashion, to be a little better individually and collectively in advancing your business together by degree.
One thing is for sure, you can’t do it alone. Even when you know how to make the process of change go more smoothly you can only go as far as the combined efforts of the team around you takes you. That’s why I am sharing my takeaways from this book, and others, to put it out there and expand the reach of this understanding. I hope our combined influences can change the business world for the better.
I found the contents of this book to be an enlightening piece of the puzzle, and coupled with my broad experience I think you will find powerful insights that can make business change outcomes work out better for you too (better than you even knew they could be to this point in your journey). Whether or not your business officially adds these different positions or not, you need to train one another up to cover the responsibilities of these roles, if you want members of your team to have a chance at “wearing many hats”, working as a team, and meeting expectations.