Comments on: Don’t Project Manage Change – Provide A Service!

By: Your Team Really Can Do A Great Job | Project Management Tools That Work

Your Team Really Can Do A Great Job | Project Management Tools That Work — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:14:55 +0000

[...] 3. Management assumed that the adoption of a major organizational initiative would be accomplished by forming committees to write directives and processes that everyone would then follow. This had been going on in fits and starts for a particular initiative for about three years. We then substituted for this approach a small precision guided team that visited each impacted development team. The small team rapidly educated each development team by showing them what they already did that matched the initiative and what they needed to do differently to achieve full adoption. The development teams could then implement the initiative as they saw fit for their team. It took nine months to adopt the initiatives by the vast majority of the organization. Another nine months were required to fix the most difficult part of the organization and then to achieve official compliance. (For more on this see Don’t Project Manage Change – Provide a Service.) [...]

By: Three Reasons Not To Finish A Project Early | Project Management Tools That Work

Mon, 03 May 2010 16:36:22 +0000

[...] We cranked through getting all the needed information from the people and systems we needed information from. People were getting use to our requests and we helped them by often pulling and formatting data for them, so all they had to do was review it and sign off on it. Talk about good service and good relations! We were a headquarters function and so we were in position to demand action from departments, but instead we focused on making it easier for them to help us, rather than using our authority to drive fast compliance (for more examples, see: project management tools as a service). [...]

By: Bruce Benson

Bruce Benson — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:41:54 +0000

PeggySue,

I’ve seen both “types” of PMs, those that were essentially AAs and those that were leaders. I observed that the individual had as much an impact on what role they filled as did the organizational expectations. In many cases, I’ve seen PMs happy to be doing technical/administrative tasks and shy away from the tougher political and leadership roles. Other PMs were only interested in the power and leadership and spent their time getting others to produce the technical artifacts needed.

Clearly, a nice balance between the two would seem more useful.

Thanks for the comment.

Bruce

By: PeggySue Marquez-Kelly

PeggySue Marquez-Kelly — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:42:24 +0000

“Don’t Project Manage Change – Provide a Service” is great – and very timely!

I especially appreciated the comment that PM’s should “empower, educate, motivate and measure the current state of the implementation”! When a project manager has the skill set required to accomplish this, project management itself becomes a leadership role – not an administrative one.

Thank you for sharing!

By: Bruce Benson

Bruce Benson — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:20:34 +0000

I read your current post. It has a lot of good classic change management ideas.

The idea in “Provide a Service!” was if a classic method is not working, consider another approach of providing a service.

This is especially useful for individuals wanting to bring about a change, but who are not in a position of getting the support they need. It allows them to “press on” and make progress without needing agreements to move forward. It is also useful in an adversarial situation – where folks have a built in prejudgment about your initiative.

A fairly complete case study can be found at:
http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/frames.asp?uri=1995/10/Process.asp

Starting out, one could use a technique such as what you outline. But if for some reason it didn’t work, then this is an alternative approach that has worked well for me.

Thanks

Bruce