Helping Leaders Cope with Not Controlling Change Management

Helping Leaders Cope with Not Controlling Change Management

Andy Jordan

– November 18, 2020

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at andy.jordan@roffensian.com. Andy’s new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

Traditional top-down governance doesn’t work anymore when it comes to project delivery. Things move too quickly, and having to wait for formal approvals and signoffs simply slows everything down and impacts a project’s ability to enable business outcomes.

Nowhere is that truer than when it comes to change management. In traditional project delivery methods, change control was one of the longest, most highly structured processes. It started with formal change requests, proceeded through an analysis process that delayed the project (even if the change was ultimately rejected), and then went through a formal review and decision-making process that could take weeks.

Even if the change was universally seen as positive for the project, it would be highly disruptive. Time would be lost waiting for the go-ahead to make the change. The team would either be held up waiting for a decision, or would be working on something that might have to be revisited later when the full impact of the change was understood. No one liked the way changes were handled, except perhaps for the leaders who were able to retain authority over the decision-making process.

With the number and frequency of changes that projects see today, progress would quickly grind to a halt if formal approval was needed every time something had to change. Individually, those changes tend to be relatively …

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Published at Wed, 18 Nov 2020 05:00:00 +0000