Review of a Project Management Tool - Change Management

After reading some blogs about Project Management and some reviews of Project Management books, I realized that a common topic was Leadership & Change Management.

Researching in those topics I found a Harvard Business Review article about change management that talks about the common mistakes that companies make in projects.

Here is a summary of those Common Mistakes:

The first common mistake is to not establish a sense of urgency. A lot of times management do not understand how change initiatives or new projects can drive employees out of their comfort zones. They just want to start the new project without considering the effects on the employees. If people are not motivated, the change initiative will go nowhere. Management has to establish a sense of urgency to start and to get good results out of a project. One way can be to present unpleasant facts, like competition gaining advantage over the market. Management has “to make the status quo seem more dangerous than launching into the unknown” (Kotter, 1995).

The second common mistake is not forming a good and powerful team to lead the change effort. First of all, if management is not fully compromised to the project, the change initiative will fail. Management has to be an active supporter and employees need to know it.

A third big mistake is not creating a vision about the new project or change initiative. The leaders of the change initiative have to create a good vision of the project that can be communicated throughout the whole company. That again can be a big problem, if there is a vision, and the employees that will be affected by the change do not know it, and do not know the importance of it, the project will be hard to implement. And most importantly “communication comes in both words and deeds, and the latter are often the most powerful form” (Kotter, 1995

Another mistake is not removing obstacles to achieve the new vision. Management has to think about the obstacles that are going to appear in the process of trying to achieve the new vision. They have to think carefully about all the aspects that can arise, and they have to put themselves in the employee’s shoes to find out the probable problems.

Another big error is not planning for and creating short-term wins. Short term wins foster the motivation of employees. Management has to find out ways to make employees feel that the project is advancing and that results are being achieved.

The last big mistake is not to anchorage changes into corporate culture. “In the final analysis, change sticks when it becomes “the way we do things around here”” (Kotter, 1995).

Reference

Kotter, John. Leading Change. Why Transformation Efforts Fail. (1995) Harvard
Business Review OnPoint, 1-10.