How to Sustain Organizational Change

Change has to be built into the way businesses work.

However, many organizations have problems with the way they tackle change. These problems are usually related to people, processes, systems, technology, or structure.

Why? Quite simply, change is complex. And the pace and scale of change today can overwhelm many organizations.

Stick with me and I will explain what is needed.

Sustaining Organizational Change

Projects are key to creating beneficial change. Moreover, they are the vehicles for managing and implementing organizational change.

Those organizations that recognize project management is a core capability—or competence—are more likely to find success sustaining organizational change.

And successful business change projects have the following vital characteristics.

Business-led change

They employ a single project team.

That is, a team that is business-led. One that comprises all the required resources from the business, human resources, information technology and so on.

Ideally, team members should be collocated and allocated to a project full-time, since this encourages communication and helps to build strong relationships.

Benefits realization

Business change is about delivering benefits.

The project team is responsible for delivering clearly specified benefits to the business, not for creating systems, structures nor introducing technologies.

There should be no other success criteria!

Business change projects should always be driven by benefits that support strategy.

A Sense of urgency

Executive management describes the business need—the reason the business needs a change project—from the start. Their mandate should also specify the time-scale within which the project must deliver the benefits.