Transition is the ultimate measure of project success, simply put, this is where we either make money or lose money, we either deliver on our goals or we do not.
According to Stanford’s Advanced Project Management Program, there are two types of transition: continuous and discontinuous. Breakthroughs are where discontinuous changes occur; while continuous transition is the adoption of the project work into the existing operations and ongoing processes. With this clarity, let’s focus on the continuous transition.
Successful transitions create seamless and timely handoffs from the project team to the ongoing operations. With each transition, the organization must account for the impacts to people, process, and technology. (i.e., organizational change).
Assessing your change management practices may reveal the truth. “Organizational change management requires projects and programs, so its impossible to accomplish one without the other,” from the book, Executing your Strategy, Copyright 2007 Mark Morgan, Raymond E. Levitt, and William Malek.
The rationale is simple, Organizational Change is a Project. This is the starting point to assessing your change management practices. Confirm the change management project has the required sponsorship, approval and funding. For many project and project portfolio leaders, this is considered out of scope and deferred as an operational responsibility.
Further assessment into the change management practices, will require an honest account of the sponsors, their engagement, and performance in terms controlling scope creep and orchestrating the integration of components into the product or service offering.
Lastly, the assessment must account for feedback. To reap the project’s benefits, an organization must have a clear understanding of the difference between an output and an outcome. For example, an output may include, a system while an outcome is the result of the output being realized such as achieving greater productivity. With this understanding, the feedback can be easily collected, distilled and summarized.
If you are ready to assess your change management projects, schedule your free consultation.
