Integrating change and project management

When introducing change, it needs to be managed effectively on both the technical and people side. The discipline of project management focuses on the technical side ensuring that change is developed, designed, and delivered. It provides the structure and tools to make this happen. Change management focuses on the people side to ensure that change is embraced, adopted, and utilised by the employees who have to do their jobs differently as a result of the project. They are both important and often work in parallel. Yet, they are commonly viewed in isolation, with different purposes.

But when project management and change management are integrated. they can focus their efforts towards a singular objective – improving the performance of the organisation through delivering the intended results, ensuring a company’s processes are efficient as possible and employees remain motivated and productive.

However, to integrate these disciplines there are some prerequisites:

1: Focus must be on results and outcomes, not deliverables:

If a project team only focuses on hitting a go-live date and not held accountable for the results and outcomes, integration cannot happen. Likewise, change management should not focus only on executing change management activities. A shared focus on results and outcomes is the cornerstone of successful integration. Understanding the current state, being able to define and articulate the future state and embedding actions to achieve the future state is where change management helps the change be adopted and supports users through the transition, enabling the project to achieve the desired results.

2: Recognising the role and value of change management:

Before integration, there needs to be an acknowledgement of the role and value of change management. Change management must be viewed as a crucial component for change delivery. With increasing internal and external pressures on all of us, especially over the past 12 months, supporting individuals through their change transitions has never been more important. Our ability to achieve expected benefits and outcomes will be tied directly to how effective we are engaging employees in upcoming changes. The return on change investment (ROI) depends on employee adoption and usage.

3: Structure:

Project management brings structure in its approach and a set of defined deliverables to the technical side of change. The same should also be in place for the people side of change. Without structure, it is difficult to integrate change management activities into project delivery. Change management structure works with different project approaches including waterfall to agile. Effective planning can align the two disciplines so that the right activities happen at the right time, in the right way, for the right people. Additionally, as with project management,  a structured approach to managing the people side of change increases credibility with sponsors and project teams.