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Can leading projects exist without leading change? Change Management can be thought of as the process of getting people’s “psychological state in which organizational members feel committed to implementing an organizational change and confidence in their collective abilities to do so” (Weiner, 2009, p. 1). Whereas, Project Management may be envisioned as the pragmatic guidelines and processes to achieve a “temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result” (Watt, 2014, p.12). A few years ago, I was privileged to be part of a change project where my institution needed to change the Learning Management System (LMS) from Platform X (an imaginative name) to Brightspace. The migration was a grand success, considering it involved multi-level planning, multi-departmental collaboration, and had an impact on everyone within the institution.
The issue to be Solved
The migration to a new LMS was imperative to address many challenges, such as ease of usability for faculty and learners, data storage/security, data analytics, functions, and features. The migration project and planning scope was documented and communicated often as internal stakeholders (learners, instructors, support staff, project managers, and senior executives) and external stakeholders (contractors, suppliers, and vendors) were involved. In my opinion, this was the key to the success of this project. It identified all stakeholders who were invested in the project’s outcome and recognized the organizational change the project may cause. This step is critical, especially for projects introducing new technology, as they have “a high-complexity rating and a correspondingly high risk” (Watt, 2014, p.179).
The Barriers and Challenges
I am confident that the planning team had a Change Management Plan (CMP) to create and strategize organizational change. Additionally, a Risk Management Plan (RMP) in place to help mitigate potential risks and establish how to address them as they arise. I was not part of the planning process but was part of the training team. From my perspective as a trainer, there were two main challenges:
Challenge 1: Time
The training team developed a training schedule based on the analysis of the project scope and work breakdown structure (WBS). Drawing from our experience, we planned and designed as best as possible to consider systemic complexity and power dynamics. However, we should have budgeted more time to address unanticipated challenges and work.
Challenge 2: Resources
Watt (2014) defined resources as “people, equipment, place, money, or anything else that you need in order to do all of the activities that you planned for” (p.116). The training team was in a constant state of needing to borrow resources.
Circling back to my original question at the beginning, can leading projects exist without leading change? In my understanding, change management supports and enables project management processes. Thus, the answer is no; project management needs change management to be successful. Moreover, the University of Central Florida (n.d.) has labelled this process as “institutional capacity and readiness” (para. 1) and provides indicators to assess readiness to engage in an institutional learning initiative.
Reference:
Conway, R., & Masters, J. (2017). From Design Thinking to Systems Change. 33.
Institutional Capacity and Readiness | Blended Learning Toolkit. (n.d.). Retrieved March 6, 2021, from https://blended.online.ucf.edu/2011/06/07/institutional-capacity-and-readiness/
Watt, A. (2014). Project Management. BCcampus. https://opentextbc.ca/projectmanagement/
Weiner, B. J. (2009). A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation Science, 4(1), 67. https://doi.org/10.1186/1748-5908-4-67