A case for a dedicated change management team

Change Management Teams improve the success of projects

Key IT projects fail more often then they succeed.  The top factors of project failure relate to leadership, project vision, organizational communication, distrust of change, and feelings of non-involvement.  In short, people issues.  Organizational Change Management (OCM) is a critical success factor for large enterprise-wide initiatives.  OCM is a framework to manage the effect and perception of changes brought about by the initiative to organizational roles and responsibilities.  In other words, OCM address the human side of change.
 
Organizational Change Management has to be managed as effectively as the project itself.  We prescribe a dedicated change team for critical projects that have high impact. The change team should ideally include the following roles:

• Change Leader – Act as the overall program manager of the change effort
• Change Manager(s) – Manage change for individual functional areas
• Change Analyst(s) – Prepare, schedule and distribute change communications
• Subject Matter Experts – Possess specific tool and framework expertise and help train employees

 
OCM for a project must be fully integrated into the overall project governance so that project managers can take appropriate action regardless of whether issues are related to the deployment of technology or to ensuring employees are aware of and supporting the change effort.
 
A dedicated change team:

• Increases the probability of project success
• Manages the people side of change
• Provides a single point of accountability & responsibility
• Complements project efforts

 
How do you perform the functions of OCM in your projects? 

---

Sai Balakrishna

About the Author
​
Sai Balakrishna is the Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer for ProcureVision, LLC. An expert in strategy development, business process optimization, program and portfolio management, Sai has over 25 years of management and leadership experience from Fortune 100 companies including American Airlines and Verizon.