Failure to Launch: Why OCM is not a last-minute consideration

If you were going to have elective surgery and you asked your surgeon what his plan for the surgery was. Would you expect a step-by-step guide through the process including safety, risks, benefits, aftercare, and rehab? Would you expect pre-op instructions and time to plan how you will get home or receive care afterward? What if your doctor started walking toward you with a release form and just said, "I've already prepared everything. We are just going to cut you open tomorrow. We'll take out an organ, we'll sew you up, you'll get some post-op care and we'll discharge you. You ready?"

My first reaction would be, "No, I am NOT ready!"

Yet so many projects behave as if this is an acceptable way to approach Organizational Change management. Project Managers don't bother to do a written Impact Assessment, Stakeholder Analysis, Communications plan, or Training plan. In fact, it's not until they need to start sending out communications that they think about who needs to know, when, and what information they need.

One of my biggest pain points as an OCM practitioner is working with projects who haven't integrated OCM into their project from the beginning. Here are 5 (of many) reasons why this doesn't work, even with small projects:

1. Lead Times

   When you don't lay the groundwork and create OCM plans, all of a sudden you need to deploy communications and training that haven't even been created yet. You don't leave yourself enough time to draft thoughtful communications, get them to appropriate approvers, and have them published with reasonable lead times. It's very difficult for an organization to disseminate communications, schedule training, and publish job aids on short notice. If you consistently send drafts of communication and training materials at the last minute, people in your organization are going to get very annoyed with you very quickly. On the other hand, if you plan ahead and give yourself plenty of lead time you can draft communications, have them reviewed and approved, and send them out with plenty of time to spare.

2. Change Resistance

   Human beings require a little time to prepare for a change, even a small one. So in addition to needing lead time for logistics purposes, the people experiencing your change need enough notice to get emotionally and psychologically ready. They need to understand the benefits, the drawbacks, and why the change is being made. Impact analysis and stakeholder analysis can give you this insight so that you can minimize resistance. If you don't understand what your stakeholders' concerns are, what they need to know, and when they need to know it, you are in for a lot of resistance to this change. In addition, when you give people enough time to understand the change, you drastically reduce the resistance to that change.

3. Change Champions

   Change champions are one of the most helpful tools in an OCM toolkit. These are leaders in your stakeholder groups who can help generate momentum for the change and minimize resistance. However, these key stakeholders need to be engaged at the beginning of the project and probably involved in UAT/testing, if not the design of the solution. You cannot create Change Champions at the last minute. However, when you successfully engage and create a Change Champion network for your project, they will do most of the heavy lifting for you. Its a great way to work smarter, not harder.

4. Training

   Training often requires producing training materials and scheduling training meetings. Even if you have all of the materials created, they often need to be reviewed and approved; and this takes time. If you have teams that are in different time zones or on different schedules, it's going to be very difficult to schedule training at the last minute. Everybody has full calendars already.

5. Solution Problems

   If you have gone all the way through project planning, design, building, and testing without any formal OCM consideration, you may think you have the perfect solution. Sadly, I can't tell you how many times I have worked with a project that has already built a solution that doesn't work for a group of stakeholders they did not consider. OCM is all about understanding the ways that people work and visualizing a future with those people's perspectives in mind. Change is just the path between the current state and the future state. When we fail to adequately consider the impact of a change or we fail to thoroughly explore which stakeholders will be affected, we have no guarantee that the solution we have built and tested is actually a good solution for everyone. It may only meet some needs of a limited number of stakeholders. In this case, the change is doomed from the start.

These are only a few reasons why Project Managers should be thinking about OCM and building its practice into their project management practice. OCM Ensures that the organization successfully transitions to a future state achieving expected benefits while minimizing perceived negative impacts on risks. It's no wonder that organizations are more frequently hiring OCM practitioners and implementing OCM practices. They are seeing the benefits of Organizational Change Management in more thoughtful project consideration, designs, and launches which translates to more successful projects that launch on time.