by Paul Vogels, on Jul 15, 2021 10:51:36 AM
3 ways of Bringing About Successful Project Change Management Within Your Planning Team
The quality of the entire field of project controls across Europe is growing rapidly.
Organisations are becoming more adept than ever in planning and managing complex projects, especially when it comes to reporting.
If you’re starting to feel that your team is one step behind, and struggling to keep up with the competition, don’t worry.
Here, we delve deeper into the fundamentals of project change management, helping you to adapt your existing processes to remain competitive in your market.
Implementing Project Controls
It’s easy to see how implementing project controls training can help planning teams to deliver quality work.
Project controls can be integrated and used for data sharing, data warehousing, dashboarding, and more.
But this naturally requires a great deal of change management, and a lot of very clear, standardised team processes.
It may sound quite straightforward, but the truth is that 70% of organisational change management programmes fail to meet their objectives, according to McKinsey.
It’s clear that project change management must be approached in the right way.
Especially right now.
“The amount of change that the average employee can absorb without becoming fatigued is half what it was,” notes Gartner Vice President Jessica Knight, discussing the growing prevalence of change fatigue following the pandemic.
Project Change Management Strategies
The key to successful project change management is to focus on your project planners, rather than the change itself.
By supporting your project planning team through change and putting their needs first, you may find change management easier.
Here are 3 ways to bring about successful project change management in your team:
1. Build Knowledge & Awareness
Successful project change management can only happen if you have buy-in and participation from your team.
We know that this isn’t always an easy thing to achieve.
‘But we don’t have time to do that’ is probably a phrase you hear a lot as Head of Project Planning.
Your team has grown accustomed to doing things in a certain way, so it’s understandable that they will be reluctant to change.
The key is to build knowledge and awareness of why the change needs to happen; why standardised project planning and control processes are important, how they’ll serve the future, and how tooling and training in project controls can help them plan better.
2. Encourage Hands-On Participation
A mistake many Heads of Project Planning make is that they get too caught up in the technical side of project change management.
They forget to consider the human side; the fact that their team is the ones that will need to work under these changed conditions.
And so it’s vitally important that your team have their say; that they participate in the change, and have input in the way change is implemented.
Research even shows that adopting an ‘open source’ change management strategy can increase the chance of implementing a successful change by as much as 22%.
3. Communicate Clearly & Regularly
A good communications plan, taking into account all stakeholders and the timing of steps in the change process, is essential for successful project change management.
However, basic project change management activities such as communication are ‘often overlooked or assumed to be in place’, according to recent research.
It’s important to communicate what’s happening with your team.
However, instead of long (and potentially boring) reports, try to share clear, concise information that’s relevant to the individual department, in a way that can easily be understood by the recipient.
The Importance of Change
As Head of Project Planning, your role is changing.
As project planning becomes an increasingly important part of the organisation, and as planning is being absorbed into many more departments in the company, your team is having a bigger and more direct impact on operational success.
Relying on older, outdated, or suboptimal planning processes is no longer acceptable.
Heads of Project Planning must be making constant improvements to ensure they are bringing true value across the company.
Bringing value means being able to work in ways that are expected through the business, and to achieve this level of consistency it’s vital that your team all work in the same ways, using standardised processes that produce the same quality results.
Implementing project controls is a big part of that.
However, making such a big change in a team of established planners can be tricky.
That’s why it’s so important to understand how to bring about successful project change management within your planning team, allowing them to properly embrace the change needed today.
