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Tag: Change Management

PMTimes_Nov2_2022

Do I Hear an Amen?

Written by Dorice Horenstein on . Posted in Articles.

Subconscious biases and habits of mind dominate or influence 85% to 95% of our emotions, judgments, reactions, decisions, behaviors, actions, and results.

What’s your reaction to what you just read?

When I heard that during WBECS’s coaching education platform led by Peter Demarest, a thought leader in the integration of axiology and neuroscience, I was surprised. I knew that the subconscious had a lot of influence on us. I was not ready to hear that our sub-conscience has this much influence!

Knowing this now, I was challenged with the following: how can I use my mind to keep my head from undermining the wisdom of my heart so that I can be my best self and live my best life and help others do the same?

In other words, how can we change, expand, and influence our thinking so we play in the A Game of our abilities?

The answer is unequivocally this: by tuning into our hearts, which encompasses all the values that we deem important.

Our values are the driving factors of our success.

We all have values we believe in. Yet how often do we not live up to the values that we hold in high esteem? How often do we react based on our perceptions, beliefs, and judgments and our values fly out the door?

 

One client recently shared with me that courage and bravery were one of her top values. Yet, she was paralyzed in making decisions and moving forward. Another client shared that their relationship with family was top value, yet they were describing a 16-hour professional workday and the need to cancel a family vacation. And it is not only these two clients. We all at times “trip over our own values.”

Perhaps an important question is how we access more of our brain capacity and awareness of self. In Demarest’s book, The Central Question of Life, Love and Leadership, he focuses on the one question that I often use in my own life, especially when working with individuals and teams:

 

What choice can I make and what action can I take at this moment to create the greatest net value?

 

We all make daily choices. How do we know, however, that the choice we make today will lead us to our desired outcome?

In my practice, I have coined the acronym AMEN to CORE, a 4-step principle that when practiced consistently over time creates a value base success for individuals and organizations.

 

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A stand for Awareness of life and awareness of your purpose, whether individual or organizational. What are you here to achieve? What is the reason that leads you to think that? What are you becoming aware of if you allow this quiet contemplation to brew in your mind? What do you hear as the whispering of your soul?

 

Men stand for Mental Fitness. The idea of being mentally trained follows not only being aware of what sabotages you but the ways you can lean into your sage perspective, which advocates that every outcome can be turned into a gift and opportunity if we let it! The choices that we make have an immeasurable impact on our future. Mental Fitness provides us with a quicker recovery from the choices that led us to an undesirable path and opens our minds with curiosity to discover other available choices.

 

CO stands for Communication. Measure how you speak and how you listen. How coherent are you in your approach? How do you communicate your contribution to maximize your impact?

 

RE stands for Resilience. How committed are you to the path that you create or agree to pursue? What are the ways you are not only accountable but also responsible for achieving your goals and purpose? How consistent and persistent are you?

 

Let’s go back and ask Peter’s central question. What choice can I make and what action can I take at this moment to create the greatest net value? The stronger your mental muscle the more effective your results will be.

 

And here is the big one-million-dollar question- how do you get there?

 

When working on your awareness, consider the following:

  • What do I believe in? What are the values I regard as my north star? (I suggest taking a value-based assessment).
  • What attributes do I need to develop so that I can live my values proudly?
  • What tendencies do I have that may undermine my effectiveness? What triggers them?
  • Knowing that you are triggered by _____. What can you do to bring a more value-based perspective to ______? What would stop you?
  • What value are you committing to living out today?

 

When conversing with others, use the following three short techniques to begin a conversation without judgment:

  • Turn “should” to “could.” How would you feel if someone told you “John, you should do ______ and you should do ______?” Replacing “should” with “could” has the potential to minimize the judgmental tone of your request.

 

  • Replace “why” with “what.” “Why did you do that?” “Why are you___?” may make others feel defensive. Instead, consider asking “what about this situation made you feel ____? What were you hoping to achieve when you did ____?

 

When we change and broaden our thinking, our perspectives, beliefs, and habits change. When we make choices based on our values, we end up living our purpose. When we consider what happened and ask ourselves, “What now?” we bring our A Game wherever we go!

PMTimes_Nov1_2022

Know Your Project’s Setting for Realistic Planning

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles.

In any project, your mindset and setting influence your experience. To plan realistically you must know the mindset of the players and the setting, the project’s environment. This article focuses on the setting, and what you can do you identify and consider environmental factors in planning.

Previous articles have addressed environmental factors from different perspectives[1]. Here we use PESTLE Analysis to identify environmental factors to better enable risk management and performance.

 

Identify the Factors

To be realistic, a plan must consider the project’s environment. For example without knowing the technology to be used and the nature of the relationships among major stakeholders, planners may be overly optimistic or pessimistic because they make unfounded assumptions; overlooking a legal requirement can have far reaching effects.

Performance can be improved in two ways, 1) by changing environmental conditions (if possible and practical) and 2) by accepting what cannot be changed and baking the impact into the plan. Both ways require that the conditions are identified. That is where environmental analysis comes in.

PESTLE Analysis is one of many models that help you to understand your project environment. Other models, for example SWOT Analysis, can be used instead of or with PESTLE analysis.

PESTLE Analysis assesses the Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental factors that affect project performance. The model is usually applied on the organizational level for strategic planning. Here the focus is closer to the project itself.

 

Tacit vs. Explicit

Often, there is a tacit understanding about environmental factors. With tacit understanding, there is the risk that stakeholders do not share a common perspective of the situation. Some may be unaware of some factors; others may have different views and values. Changes may have been made or are planned that make experience less useful as an anchor for predicting the future.

Explicitly identifying and analyzing the factors helps to make sure they are meaningfully addressed. This means spending time and effort on the analysis, deciding which factors are actionable, and planning accordingly.

 

Resistance

As sensible as explicitly assessing environmental factors seems, there is resistance to it. Possible causes are, the team and its leadership may not recognize the benefits, they may believe that everyone knows how things are,  and  they may take the attitude that “we can’t do anything about the environment, so why bother talking about it.” Leadership must be willing to confront the realities of their environment, including its flaws.

 

If powerful stakeholders are eager to have realistic plans, then resistance is overcome by recognizing that one of the primary reasons for chronic late and over budget projects is not taking the project environment into account. For example, a plan will be unrealistic if it is based on the assumption that a decision will be made in a month when it always takes three because there are multiple levels of decision makers, many of whom are very busy with other priorities.

 

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The Factors

The environmental factors in a PASTLE analysis are described below. The purpose of the model is to raise questions that enable project managers, and planners to identify any hidden obstacles and to consider as many factors as possible. How will these issues effect the project? Do they effect multiple projects? What can be done about them to make plans more realistic and to streamline the process?

  • P – Political:

Politics is the process of making group decisions. On a macro level, there are governmental influences in the form of regulations, taxation, international and other issues. Internal politics also have an impact on the project. Is project governance effective? Is there a political issue about the way the PMO, project managers, and functional managers perceive roles and authority? Do differences in political beliefs and allegiances cause conflict among stakeholders? Is the project goal a political issue among organizational leadership? What “old grudges” and beliefs get in the way of effective collaboration?

Political issues along with the social factors are among the most difficult to address. There is a tendency to make believe they don’t exist. There may be “hot” buttons and fear of poking a hornet’s nest.

  • E – Economic

Economic factors are both internal and external. The internal ones include the perceived cost and value of the project outcome, volatility in resource costs, budget adequacy, the project budget as a proportion of the organization’s budget. How flexible is the budget? Is there a clear expectation of financial gain? External economic factors include interest rates, volatility in the cost of resources. credit availability, and market behavior.

  • S – Social

Social factors relate to stakeholder cultural norms, values, and demographics. For example, if the team includes members from different generations or cultural groups, is there potential conflict? What is the expectation and tolerance for the “Storming” stage of team development? What is the organization’s culture? Are there multiple organizations involved? Are their cultures compatible? Explicitly the way to facilitate communication, manage conflict, and make decisions can avoid unnecessary stress and conflict.

  • Technology

On the project level technology has two dimensions: the technology used to manage the project and the technology that is part of the project deliverable. Is the technology stable? Is the technology new to users and providers? What learning curves are involved? Is there adequate support? For project management is there a platform of PM software and related productivity tools? Is the platform adding value, is it well managed and supported? How is the data managed and used? What options do you have and how will each impact performance, cost, and risk? How aligned with other projects is the technology?

  • Legal

What are the contracts, rules and regulations that effect the project? How are contracts managed? Are project staff and management subject to legal liabilities? Are there audit requirements? Are there ethical issues? Common legal issues are, copyright, patents, and intellectual property, fraud, non-disclosure, consumer protection, environmental protection, data security, health and safety, discrimination and abuse.

  • Environmental

From a project manager’s perspective project performance is effected by the project environment, the environment into which the product will go, and the broader environment with its weather, climate, geographical, factors. Project and product environmental factors overlap with the other PESTLE categories.

 

Moving Forward

Using an analytical model to assess environmental factors enhances risk management and leads to better plans and improved performance. Is your approach to identifying the factors that influence your project as good as it could be? How can it be even better?

[1] Consider the Project Environment, https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/consider-the-project-environment/  by George Pitagorsky and Understanding Enterprise Environmental Factors, https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/understanding-enterprise-environmental-factors/ by Mark Romanelli

 

PMTimes_Oct25_2022

Software Tools or not Software Tools? That is the question. The way to achieve Enterprise Agility

Written by Giovanny Guillen on . Posted in Articles.

The way to achieve Enterprise Agility

How many times we have heard about agile, Jira, Kanban, etc., and everything related to agile philosophy? Today we can find a lot of software tools to manage projects or processes using agile methods. However, can enterprises implement agile through implementing a software tool?

What is Agile?

Agile is a philosophy, a way to act, to collaborate in an organization to achieve a goal, to complete activities and tasks, in a process to ensure and encourage participation, leadership, and collaboration among every team.

Enterprise Agile Transformation

Business Agility is an ability for enterprises to react to changes using an evolved system in the way they work. From this system, we can extract its essence and adapt it to any professional field.

The Process

Figure 1. Enterprise Agile Transformation Framework

Before implementing software to manage agile projects or processes, we need to make a change in our processes, our organizational and leadership and people mindset, and our belief, to create an agile environment in processes and people. We must begin to change our minds and our organization. This is the way to implement agile in any organization. How?

  1. Change the mindset. Today, project team members, and employees, are one of the main parts of the business. Without them, an enterprise can’t work and achieve strategic goals. As leaders, we should recognize their value and encourage their collaboration and participation in every process. In this context, leaders, from executives to supervision levels, should impulse a leadership model based on:
    1. Motivation
    2. Empowerment
    3. Share responsibilities with the team

 

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Focus attention on the main wealth generators of your organization.  It is important to transform their mindset and their way of facing changes with agility. If moving the boat (an entire company) is complex, then in parallel a BOAT is built that moves faster.  A flexible and small structure. A self-sufficient team, empowered and specialized in facing market changes.

  1. Change your processes. It is important to review your processes to create lean ones that include support to manage changes. Reduce bureaucracy through employee empowerment, giving them enough authority to make decisions and eliminating unnecessary steps.
  2. Change your organization. We must break with the idea of working by departments – by silos. Unite the diversity of professionals in an area, a flatter structure, or a HUB. Common mental, digital, and physical spaces favor agility.
  3. Customer Centric and focused on clients’ needs. Nowadays, clients change their needs and preferences. It is imperative to know their expectations, and how you can address those to manage their preferences and make changes. Listen to customer needs. Orient the attention of your entire crew towards a customer-centric objective. The goal of agile teams is to meet customer demands. And to hear it, it is important to focus attention on a 360º view: sales data, navigation data, and direct customer data.
  4. Frameworks. To face changing environments, it is important to organize teams with new ways of working. For this, Agile business methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, Design Thinking, OKRs, and Management 3.0 can be implemented. For example, you can work with SCRUM frameworks used within teams that handle high-uncertainty and complex projects. This will allow you to set new work rules, such as working in short periods called sprints, carrying out daily follow-up or daily meetings, working with the initial features that offer value to customers and the organization such as MPVs; and organizing teams in another way:  product owner, scrum master and development teams.
  5. MVP Culture. The minimum viable product must be above complete products. An MVP culture should be established to deliver constant value to the customer. Instead of developing an entire product for years and waiting until it is complete, the MVP allows us to launch the minimum value of this product to the market, check how it is received by the customer, and continue to evolve with new developments in the right direction.

Software tools

After you have begun changes in your mindset leadership and employees, your organization, and your processes, you can implement software tools that can help you to measure and improve your processes, fix issues, and achieve Enterprise Agility. By means of software tools, your enterprise can start a transformational agile way, face changes, adapt processes through automation, and respond fast and efficiently to customer changes by analyzing their behavior.

Enterprise Agile Transformation Benefits

  1. Focus on people. Collaborative and multidisciplinary work makes talent prevail over processes and organizational charts.
  2. Empowerment and motivation. Collaborative work, fluid communication, and the equal participation of all team members generate autonomy, transparency, and accountability in all its members, which empowers and motivates employees
  3. Risk Minimization. The continuous review model allows adaptation to change in a faster and more efficient way, finding solutions during the process that minimize the risks of failure
  4. Response Speed. Agile transformation provides a flexible structure that allows the delivery of projects/services versions within short deadlines.
  5. Improved results. The closeness with the client allows having a more excellent knowledge of it providing a differential added value and generating savings in costs.
PMTimes_Sep28_2022

Change Management: Walking in the Footsteps of the Project Lifecycle

Written by Ali Raza on . Posted in Articles.

Over the years, many theories of change have been proposed. For example, Kotter’s theory of change articulates 8 steps in a change management process, starting with the first step of needing to ‘create urgency’ through to the final step of ‘anchoring change in corporate culture’. 1

Lewin’s change management model proposes 3 phases for organizational change, starting from phase 1 which involves ‘unfreezing’ (preparing the organization to accept change that is necessary) to stage 3, which involves ‘refreezing’, which occurs when the organization is back in homeostasis.2

However, in my view, what has been poorly defined in the literature thus far is the difference between general cultural change within an organization and change management that is indigenous to the project lifecycle.

Take a typical project lifecycle as shown in Table 1.3 When we try to superimpose an aforementioned change model (let’s take Kotter’s), on the project lifecycle, it is easier to see why the change model isn’t entirely commensurate with the project stages.

 

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Table 1. Kotter’s 8 stages of change superimposed on a typical project lifecycle

This reflects the fact that existing change models relate to general cultural change rather than project-specific change. However, in projects, both types of change are at play. We need a new model of change that adequately reflects both the cultural and project-specific change that occurs within projects. I have proposed a new model below in Table 2.

In this model, stages of cultural change and project-specific change are highlighted alongside each of the project lifecycle phases. The cultural change elements draw on Kotter’s model of change.

 

Table 2. New paradigm for change within projects.

 

By using such a model, project managers can know with greater clarity what activities they need to partake in at each stage of the project lifecycle when putting on their change management hat.

 

References
  1. (2022). Kotter’s 8-step change model. Available at: https://www.accipio.com/eleadership/mod/wiki/view.php?id=1874. (Accessed: 17th September, 2022)
  2. (2022). Lewin’s Change Management Model: understanding the three stages of change. Available at: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_94.htm. (Accessed: 17th September, 2022).
  3. Adobe Communications Team. (2022). Project life cycle: a guide to what it is and the 5 life cycle stages. Available at: https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/life-cycle (Accessed: 17th September, 2022).
PMTimes_Aug2_2022

When is a Decision Final?

Written by George Pitagorsky on . Posted in Articles.

This article addresses the question, when can a decision no longer be changed?

Everything we do results from a conscious or unconscious decision. When it comes to anything important, it is better to make firm conscious decisions.

In projects, changing decisions about objectives, requirements, designs, staffing, and vendor selection is disruptive and costly. Not changing them may also be disruptive and costly.

 

When is a Decision Final?

A decision is final when it can no longer be changed. It can no longer be changed when the decision has been completely implemented or when authority, rules, and regulations say the decision cannot be changed.

We can’t revoke a decision to build a house once the house is built. It is physically impossible (in the absence of time travel) to go back and not build it. While it is physically possible to change a decision that has been deemed final by authority, there are political ramifications.

 

Models, Beliefs, and Relationships

Models and beliefs about sticking to decisions influence the decision-making process. Relationships among stakeholders are affected. Some expect that once a decision has been made the decision-making ends. They believe that going back to reassess a decision is a sign of poor decision making – being sloppy, wishy-washy or indecisive.

Consider the relationship between executives, clients, requirements analysts, and implementers.

  • Clients and executives love decisiveness and hate ‘analysis paralysis’ – they want to ‘get on with the work’
  • Clients often change their minds
  • Requirements analysts are charged with avoiding the need for changes and communicating changes to the implementers
  • Implementers are often ‘annoyed’ by the changes, thinking that the clients are indecisive and oblivious of the impact of their changes and the analysts are not doing a good enough job when eliciting requirements
  • Analysts feel that they are not given sufficient time and do not have sufficient access to decision makers.

We value both firm decisions and the flexibility to change them.

 

Expect Change

Change is inevitable. Consider a conscious decision-making process:

“1) Define values, goals, objectives and specifications underlying the issue or question

2) Define the decision making and target environments

3) Agree upon decision criteria

4) Identify solution options

5) Analyze and compare solution options vis-à-vis the decision criteria

6) Decide

7) Implement the decision

8) Monitor and adjust

9) Reflect on the process for lessons learned.”[1]

We see that step seven, Implement the decision, is not the finish line. We acknowledge the need for adjusting decisions whenever conditions change.

 

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Decision Making and Change Management

This question of when a decision is final links decision making and project change management.

The heart of change management is deciding whether to change previously made decisions.

A change management process decides whether to allow change to earlier, frozen, decisions. Changes are costly. Changing a requirements or design decision before it is implemented costs far less than changing it afterwards. Changing a decision that has been baked into a contract can require legal proceedings. Changing a screen design in a website less costly than changing the design of a physical product, like a bridge or building once construction is started.

 

A Middle Way

Enable and minimize change.

We want to be flexible, open to changing our minds, and we want to avoid wasting time and effort caused by having to unnecessarily revisit decisions.

Let’s look at a case. A design team decided on the use of a certain type of handheld device. Based on that decision a procurement process was started. A couple of weeks into the procurement process for the devices, the design team changed its mind. They decided that a handheld device would not work. They changed the design to use work stations instead. This wasted the time and effort of the procurement team and the vendors they reached out to for bids.

Was the change warranted? Yes, it was recognized that use of handheld devices made operational costs excessive.

Could the design change have been avoided? Maybe. If the team avoided unnecessary changes by spending more time and effective effort to better understand the decision factors – objectives, work environment, criteria – using checklists, and making sure people speak up with ideas, comments and criticisms.

 

Causes

In this case, the design team became aware that they had not consider the operational issue of the loss, damage, and ‘shrinkage’ of the devices when a member spoke up to bring the operational issue to light.

Why hadn’t he/she/they spoken up earlier? Maybe the idea just dawned, or out of fear to speak up during the design sessions. Either way, it was a good thing the issue was raised and that the design team and leadership accepted the change, even though it disrupted schedules and wasted effort. The up front loss was miniscule compared to the expenses saved.

Imagine if design team leadership didn’t support the change, saying that it was too late or too politically dangerous to question the earlier decision. Not only would there have been an inferior outcome, but some members of the design team would also be demotivated, thinking that their leadership was unprofessional and cowardly.

If this kind of thing happened frequently it would be a sign that the design team’s process needed some improvement.

 

Action

Adapt an approach that dynamically balances enabling and avoiding changes.

Any project decision can be changed until the decision has been completely implemented. Minds change when information regarding decision factors change. While you may never be perfect, make sure your decision-making process addresses all the factors that influence the decision. Take the time to get it as right as possible the first time.

Consider how often stakeholders change their mind after having decided, and how many decisions end up being poor ones.

Do you need to devote more time and focused effort to the decision process? Do you need more formal facilitation, brainstorming, checklists, and input from experts regarding objectives, decision criteria, environmental considerations, and options?

[1] https://www.projecttimes.com/articles/the-power-of-decision-criteria/