Awareness of the purpose and value of change management (CM) has definitely risen among my clients since I began practicing CM in 1998. However, I am still astonished at the number of clients and/or PMs I encounter who vastly underestimate the effort and skills required to do CM correctly, even on large projects that impact thousands of users.
In many cases, CM work is downplayed and assigned to a team member (who does not have adequate skills or experience) to accomplish "off the side of their desk". Just before go-live, project leads face reality and the true size of the change burden. And that is when my phone rings. Of course, the expectation is that I am going to come in and accomplish change miracles one month before go-live. I am here to tell you that it ain't going to happen, folks.
Think of the communications (comms) effort alone on a project touching 3000 people in an organization that may have 25 or more communication channels. You will need a full-time CM specialist for 4-6 weeks to do adequate data collection and write a decent communications plan. Then, you will then need a communications resource to implement that plan (write and deliver messages) every day until well past go-live. And none of this even touches the CM work on training, stakeholder management, or readiness assessment.
CM requires the same if not greater skills and resourcing as process redesign or system/technical roles. On a recent transformation project (not just system install) impacting 8000 staff in a large organization, there was a project team of about 20. 4.5 of those individuals were responsible for all CM planning; comms delivery; training plans, materials, and delivery; process redesign and documentation; and org design, while the other 15.5 were all working on the system.
I once ran into the president of a small consulting firm who thought one person would suffice to cover both the PM and CM roles for a large transformation project impacting 17,000 staff. Go figure. I don't know where this lunacy comes from.
Designing an effective CM program is very difficult to do well. CM is one of those services that really does require a master's degree and several years of experience. This level of expertise does not come cheap, but then again, the planning tasks don't take long to accomplish. It is a short-term investment with long-term payoffs.
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