7 Managing change
As you saw earlier in the course, change management and project management are complementary disciplines both focused on creating successful change in an organisation. While the project plan focuses on the delivery side of a change such as deadlines, budgets and resources, change management focuses on the people side such as communication, resistance and changing behaviour. Each needs to be in place for a project to be successful, moving from a current state to a future state, as shown in the figure below.
The objective, then, is to integrate both the project and change activities so the overall change initiative meets its goals and delivers its intended results.
Project management focuses on the technical side of moving from the current state to the future state and involves the following processes and tools.
| Process | Tools |
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Change management, on the other hand, focuses on the people side of moving from current state to future state and involves these processes and tools.
| Process | Tools |
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As with frameworks, there are many integrated change management approaches when it comes to making change happen.
Activity 10 Understanding integrated change management
It is often the case that you will act as both the change and project manager for a change initiative or be working with a project manager. Read the following articles and consider how you can take a more integrated approach.
- ‘Integrated change management’ [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] (Wanner, 2013) on the Project Management Institute website.
- ‘Striking the right balance between project and change management in an organisation’(Dennis, 2020) on the Association for Project Management website.
You may wish to make notes in the box below.
In the next section we move on to the important stage of sustaining change of making sure the change sticks.