The purpose of applying change management on a project is to ensure that it achieves its objectives by driving adoption and usage by the people impacted by change

According to Prosci’s research, the 6th greatest contributor to a successful change management initiative is the integration and engagement in project management.  I have noticed that the most common view of this integration, is at the project plan level.  This would include having a single plan with both project management and change management activities; resources assigned to those activities with start dates and end dates allocated to each.  A further level of detail would include listing dependencies between activities and predecessors for each task.    

What about integrating governance? 

Project governance is the collection of processes and rules that help you manage a project. It communicates the different activities of the organisation and tells you who is responsible for doing what.  This is a cornerstone of project management, and in my view should be a cornerstone of change management and the management of change management plans too.  In the Prosci Methodology, In phase 2 – Manage change, we need to Plan and Act and Track Performance.  During these phases it is essential that we also use these project management governance principles to ensure our Change management activities are on track! 

Why is it important? 

The purpose of applying change management on a project is to ensure that it achieves its objectives by driving adoption and usage by the people impacted by change.  Why I feel this is important is summarised below: 

• It drives accountability by giving the organisation a framework for decision-making that helps the executives, project team and other employees stay accountable and aligned. 
• It assists in ensuring our change activities are delivered on time and in budget 
• It helps ensure that the right decisions are made by the correct people with the relevant information at hand 
• It ensures we communicate with the correct people on progress of the change and the people issues associated with the change 
• It help us manage scope and mitigate scope creep 

Some tips 

Keeping this simple is often the answer in how to introduce and align change management governance. Here are few tips that I have seen work: 

• Hold regular meetings to track progress of your change management activities and document the minutes of all team meetings including: 
  Decisions taken 
  Attendance and apologies 
  Date and venue of the meeting 
  Actions and responsibility  
  
• Always review previous minutes for accuracy at the start of each new meeting 
• Distribute the minutes to all key stakeholders 
• Get each change management workstream e.g. communications, training, to prepare status reports highlighting progress, issues and risks 
• Integrate the risk log with the PM risk log 
• Integrate the issues log with the PM issues log 
• Integrate the decision log with the PM decision log 

Conclusion 

I feel that integrating CM and PM governance is essential for making sure we track and motor the progress of our change management plans.  It also help us to integrate with project and in so doing helps us build change management understanding and competence.  It is a great step to assisting our change to be successful.  

Feeling overwhelmed?  

You don’t need to. There is help at hand. At CMC Partnership Global we have created a Skill Builder for Change and it is all about Project Management. In a one-day interactive workshop, you’ll have access tools and templates that can be used to manage a project step by step. In this workshop you’ll bring with you a project that you are working on and start building your plan throughout the day. To get 8 tips for supercharging your change project, take a look here. 

After the workshop you will have access to a portal with videos that help you reinforce the concepts detailed during the course and examples of documents like project on a page, work break down structure. After you have completed the course, you will also get a unique digital badge that can showcase your skills on Linkedin (and any social media platform) and help you find job roles relevant to your skills. For more information take a look at the course here or get in touch.