Losing sight of the original change management initiative

Portland, Oregon, is not a huge place, as places go. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in my little world here that I forget the “real” world is much bigger. Sometimes I like to see what is happening in the field of change management outside the U.S.

Here’s an article from David Walton, a change management practitioner in the UK. He describes what happens when a change initiative devolves into a series of projects, giving rise to a project management focus that drags attention and resources away from the initial change program. This situation leads to a “cult of project management,” as Walton puts it. Measurement becomes all about the projects and not about the change.

People going through a change program have opinions about it, that is a given. But when the focus is on projects, communication between project teams sometimes breaks down. One way to mitigate this tendency might be to keep tabs on how transparent participants think the change process is through an ongoing tracking survey.