4 Change Management Best Practices to Keep Project Changes Under Control

These change management best practices can minimize the costs and maximize the benefits of change for your team.

In the 1990s, Sheryl Crow sang about the positive aspects of change in her song "A Change Would Do You Good."

If she wanted to be responsible, Crow could've released a much less catchy follow-up to that hit called "Too Much Change Can Be Destructive."

Imagine coming into the office one Monday morning to find that you're getting a raise, the kitchen has been renovated and the old, inefficient coffee maker and microwave have been replaced with new appliances.

That change would do you good!

Now imagine coming in to find that your manager and three of your coworkers left, the $1 million project you're working on has doubled in size, you're moving to a new office 10 miles away, and you need to migrate to a new project management system. Then imagine that happening every other month for a year.

That much change might destroy your company (and your sanity, too).

The cost of excessive and unnecessary change

The thing about change is that we can all deal with it, as we have our entire lives, but you should have to deal with change only when it's necessary and contributes to your long-term happiness and business success. Excessive, unnecessary change will fatigue your team, leading to frustration, lower quality of work, and high turnover.

According to Gartner (full report available to clients):

Repeated negative experiences can have a debilitating effect on your employees.

Gartner notes that (research available to Gartner clients):

If you're constantly subjecting your team to negative change experiences, you're digging yourself quite a hole. On the other hand, if you can turn change into a positive experience, you're building credit for inevitable negatives (like when your network fails the week before a key project milestone).

Good change management is also good for business. Gartner estimates that only 34% of all change efforts are clear successes, but change management research firm Prosci found that companies with excellent change management are six times more likely to reach their objectives than those with poor change management.

Your goal is to minimize the costs and maximize the benefits of change. Let's look at a few ways you can make that happen.

4 change management best practices for project managers

The key to this cost minimization and benefit maximization is to take an open source approach to change management, according to Gartner (full report available to Gartner clients).

What do we mean by an open source approach?

Open source software developers make their code publicly available so that anyone can interact with and potentially improve the software. Think of how Wikipedia became the world's biggest online encyclopedia by allowing anyone in the world to contribute and modify entries.

In the same way, an open source approach to change management means opening the process to the employees that the change will affect. In other words: Putting those people in an active role for the planning, communication, and execution of the change management process from beginning to end.

4 ways to make an open-source approach to change management work

1. Answer the "why?" before committing to any change

We've already looked at the costs of negative change experiences. One of the worst things you can do as a manager and business leader is to put your team through a change that affects them negatively without providing any benefits or advancing your organizational goals.

Before committing to any change, ask yourself, your fellow managers, and your employees what the benefits of the proposed change will be. If the identified benefits don't outweigh the costs (including how many people it will affect and how long it will take, in addition to the financial cost), reconsider whether this change is truly necessary.

Identifying and documenting the "why" of the change will also help later in the process when, inevitably, someone asks "why are we doing this again?"

Elise Olding, a research vice president at Gartner, notes that "Individuals learn and respond better to coherent explanations for change, and do so most readily if presented as part of a storyline."

Recommendation: Spread your compelling, shared storyline throughout the organization using a peer advocate network to share and translate messages and relay feedback to your leadership team.

2. Adapt your approach to the situation

Open source software is highly adaptable because it can be altered to suit any situation. You should approach your change-management strategy the same way.

Your change management policy needs to be flexible and open-ended, never rigid.

The scale of the change you are working with makes a big difference. If you're adding a minor feature that takes a two-person team one afternoon to implement, you probably don't need a planning committee to oversee it. On the other hand, if you're doubling the scope of a project involving multiple teams, you'll need to be more deliberate and thorough.

While even the smallest change should follow a plan-execute-monitor progression, the complexity of each of those phases depends on the scale of the change. It's much more important to have an organizational ability to adapt to change than it is to have a defined checklist of steps for change management. And organizational change management ability comes from empowering your employees to take an active role.

Recommendation: Work on changing your organizational culture from a fixed mindset toward change to a growth mindset toward change. A growth mindset "unleashes creativity, reduces fear of failure, fuels adaptability, cultivates collaboration, and promotes continuous learning" according to Gartner VP analyst Neil Osmond.

3. Empower employees to take an active role

Look at your team as agents of change rather than objects of change. In other words, they are driving the change that is necessary and beneficial to them and the business, rather than the change happening to them whether they like it or not because it's good for the business.

Equip your employees with all of the information and tools they need to become active, engaged participants in the change process. Ask them for their feedback during the planning phase.

Once you're committed to the change, distribute information outlining all of the benefits of the change so that they'll be motivated to contribute and even help guide the change management process. Encourage them to communicate through the change process on a dedicated channel in your collaboration tool.

Recommendation: Let's say your team is moving to a new office. Tell them why in clear terms as soon as possible. Assign team leaders who will guide them through the move, and distribute packing crates to their desks before the move so they can pack their own things. When they arrive at the new office, have welcome packages waiting to make the move a positive experience.

4. Use dialogue rather than monologue

One surefire way to fatigue your employees and cause them to tune out is to recite long-winded directives without stopping to listen to their response. Ignoring your employees' side of the conversation can lead to "mistrust, confusion, and anxiety" according to Gartner.

Recommendation: Early on in the process, let your employees know that their questions and feedback are welcome and valued, and assign change sponsors who can help answer their questions and direct feedback to the appropriate channels. Have a town hall meeting with employees before any major changes take place.

Here are a few prompts to get the discussion going:

• What key changes are being implemented as part of this process?

• What were the biggest drivers behind the decision to make this change?

• What is the timeline for this change?

• What problems is this change meant to solve, and how will success be measured?

A change for good

By using open source change instead of top-down change, Gartner estimates that organizations can see the following benefits:

• Probability of change success increased by as much as 24%

• Implementation time decreased by as much as 33%

• Time spent on change decreased by almost 13 hours per week, per employee

How do you approach change management? Are you constantly trying to mix things up to keep your employees on their toes? (If so, you should probably stop that.) Or are you still using fax machines and typewriters because "that's the way you've always done it"? In either case, there's a better way.