Episode 468: Project Management is Change Management
This synthesis addresses the technical developments and human elements essential for project success. Change management expert, Tim Creasy, graced a podcast episode to share his profound insights.
Main Highlights
Project management and change management are mutually indispensable to project execution.
Creasy stresses the importance of the 'people side of change' and structured support during transitions.
Audience engagement and interactive discussions with live participants are encouraged.
Key Tools and Concepts
Challenges and Solutions
Securing leadership buy-in for change management significantly influences success.
Addressing workplace flexibility challenges in a hybrid work model is critical.
Practitioners should prioritize narratives that resonate with leadership and prove value.
Conclusion
Understanding the intersection of change and project management is essential for project managers. Proficiency in both disciplines enhances managerial effectiveness. Change management is not solely about reaching project goals; it also involves a human-centered approach to organizational transformation.
Audio audio-only-podcast.m4a/2024-01-22
In this episode of the Project Management Podcast, we look at how change management and project management go hand in hand. After all, every project delivers a change. Hello and welcome back to the Project Management Podcast at pm-podcast.com. This is the live stream for episode number 468 and I'm Cornelius Fishner. Thank you so much for joining us today. Always nice to be with you, especially live here. And for those of you who are accessing this episode recorded and not live, please do remember that this is a video episode. So if you are only getting the audio, then please do look for the play video episode in your podcast app or visit pm-podcast.com slash 468 where you can play and stream the video live from the website or other recorded from the website. All right. Today's topic is change management. The disciplines of change management and project management, they are both necessary when we are executing a project or an initiative and each discipline brings the critical structure needed for effectively implementing change and achieving the results that you or rather we project managers want. Yet change management and project management, they must work together to achieve the successful change. Doing so creates a unified value proposition and that sets the foundation for tactical integration and delivers value across all aspects of the project, including both the people side and the technical side. And joining us today is Tim Creasy. Together we want to look at the basics of change management and discuss the differences and similarities to project management. Here he is in picture format and one moment, here he is in real life. Hello, Tim. Welcome to the program. Hello, Cornelius. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here today. Yeah, of course. Now then, let me introduce you to everybody here. Let me read your bio. Tim is an author, researcher, change expert and human. He focuses on the people side of change with the process, wit and vigor. Tim's work forms the foundation of the world's largest body of knowledge on change management. His role as chief innovation officer at ProSci gives him unparalleled insight into change management challenges, trends and futures. And he has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. We're adding about 20,000 to that number at the moment here and enables audiences with valuable data and actionable information. Tim, my first question for you, what makes change management exciting for you? Why do you focus on change management? Yeah, great question around what makes it exciting. And I actually arrived at this as more of a reflection, but I think this is why it's exciting to me. You know, Jim Collins talks about his mentor, Peter Drucker, offering up this challenge, the question that we should all be trying to solve, which is how do we become more humane and more productive at the same time? Because it's easy for an organization or a project or society to achieve one at the expense of the other. But to become more humane and more productive is the challenge. That was his big question. And change management, I think, uniquely threads the needle of helping us become more productive and more humane. The data tells us we're more productive. We are more successful in our initiatives on time and on budget, less risky, less costly. And change management is a more humane way to engage our people in times of change, to bring human beings to the change table. So I think that's what excites me about change management. It threads the needle. All right. And let's take this over to our listeners, our viewers. What would you say they can expect to get out of our conversation here today? Very good. Well, the first is I hope they see change as unlockable, because I think most of the time we have the answers within. It's around getting a frame to help us see the challenge as something we can unlock. So I want them to see successful change as unlockable. I want them to have a nice foundation and footing for bringing together project management and change management, because I know your audience really comes out of that project management profession. And we are most successful when these complementary disciplines come together to deliver on that common objective, which is more successful change. So that's my second. My third is some terms of phrase, because I really think words make worlds. And crisp, clear terms of phrase can help us bring shared understanding in a much faster way. I'm going to offer up hopefully a number of terms of phrase that will resonate with people, and I'm hoping they'll chat them in for us. If they hear a term of phrase, they put T-O-P, capital T-O-P at the beginning, and give us one of those phrases, because it will help me make sense of which of these phrases really land and help you advance your cause. And I think it will be a good way for us to kind of capture a log of some of the conversation we had today. So words make worlds, and those terms of phrase that help us really bring together these disciplines are going to be essential for driving more successful change outcomes. Okay. And talking about the chat, let me bring this back in here. If you have a question right now here live for Tim, then please do use the chat. Yes. We will bring the chat up directly here, like these ones here. We have a few people who have already joined us and who are sending us their hellos from the three corners of the world probably. So if you have any questions that you want to post, Tim, then please do go ahead. Now, this is the first time really that we here on the Project Management Podcast do talk about change management with a change management expert. So what we've decided to do is we decided to lay the foundation and really talk a little bit about the basics. Where are project management and change management the same? Where do they differ? Where do they have to go hand in hand? What's the overall goal? And what we want to start with right now is definitions. Tim, would you please introduce us to the definitions here? What is change management? What is project management at its core, at the basis? Very good. So I'm going to give you the definition, but I met a gentleman named David Elfenbaum at a number of change conferences. And one time he tweeted, an ounce of context is worth a pound of isolated facts. And so rather than introduce the pound of isolated facts, the definition first, I want to provide some of that ounce of context. And so I like to think about change as a coin, which is nice because it gives us a little double entendre, right? But change is really around helping an organization move out of a current through a transition to get to a future state, an aspired to future state where performance is better in some way. Change always starts for a reason. Sometimes those reasons are internal. Sometimes they're external. Sometimes they're grounded in today. Sometimes they're grounded in future. And if we are successful, the project delivers objectives and the organization gets gains. So that's kind of change. And if we think about it as a coin, there's two sides of that change coin. There's a technical side of the coin where we design, develop, and deliver a solution that meets the needs of the issue or opportunity we have in front of us. And that's really the domain of project management, right? Managing the project activities, the trade-off of scope, time, cost, quality. That's the domain of project management. How do we execute on designing, developing, and delivering the technical solution to meet our needs, our issues, and opportunities? The other side of the coin is the people side of change. And that's where our employees, the people who have to do their jobs differently, engage with, adopt, and use the solution that's being brought forward. And so that's the other side, the people side of the coin. And that's the domain of change management. How we prepare, equip, and support our people through the individual change journeys they experience as a part of the organizational project that we put forward. What I think is interesting, Cornelius, and I was listening to your interview with Mark Phillips about the afterward. And he put forward this notion that, you know, project management doesn't tell us what change to make. It helps us make changes more effectively, right? He said there's domains out there that tell us what change to take on. He introduced society and government. I would put forward that a lot of the improvement disciplines organizations pick up, they tell us what change to make. Project management and change management uniquely help us make those changes more effectively and successfully, almost agnostic to what the change is. And so that's how I would kind of define and position change management and project management. All right. Thank you very much. Yes. And I completely agree with you. Once project management, once change managements are ongoing, well, you don't have to figure out what to change. That happens previously. Somebody is coming to you and telling you, we have to fix this. There's a problem. Or there's a new idea. We want to drive this new idea forward. And that change that the project brings, change management will help implement. Got a couple of people here from Johannesburg saying in. Cor is here. And Nomawetu is here as well. Hello to South Africa here. We got the first question coming in from Kenneth. What's the biggest change management challenge you have ever faced? And how in detail did you overcome it? You want to take that on right now? Or you want to wait until a little later we come back to Kenneth? I'll tackle it with a first pass of an answer. Because I do think there's individual change challenges. That's the one I'm going to reflect on a little bit. But I think the biggest, one of the most pervasive challenges we run into around change management is our leaders and project managers seeing change management and project management's value as something separate. That there's a project ROI and there's a change management ROI. And what we've worked really hard to maintain is that the ROI of change management is delivering the people-dependent project ROI. So, I think the biggest challenge is really creating that foundation where we realize we're on the same team, which is landing this project to the most value we can to the organization. Building the bridge of partnership and collaboration by aligning on that outcome on the horizon, the flag on the horizon, I think is one of the biggest challenges practitioners run into routinely. You know the other big challenge they're running into right now? I call it getting past the head nod. Because getting past the head nod, oh yeah, change management's important, carry on. Because 20 years ago, right, the change management folks were kind of the crazies in the corner talking about how we needed to really pay attention to our people in a whole new way when we introduced change. And over the last 20 years, it's really caught ahead of steam, right? Become almost a buzzword. Well, that actually creates a significant challenge because we have senior leaders, project teams asking for but not even understanding what it is they're asking for. Thinking that change management's a silver bullet or it's just the way we do things here, as opposed to really understanding it's that structured, intentional way to empower and engage our people in times of change. And we can learn how to do it and do it better. So those are some of the bigger challenges I think people are running into right now. Okay, we have a couple more questions coming up. But before I bring those into the picture, I'd like to take us to our next major topic. And that, wait, went one too far. That is intent. There we go. So from your perspective, what is the intent of project management? What is the intent of change management? Where do they meet? Where do they differ? Very nice. And I'm going to add change leadership to it as well. So I'm going to give you change leadership, project management, change management. I think change leadership is deciding where to go and how to get there. So that's the articulation of vision, the establishment of that definition of success. That's the role of change leadership, is deciding what we need to do as an organization to respond to our conditions and really excel and improve our performance. So change leadership, deciding where to go and how to get there. Change management is ensuring our people get there too. And project management is how we build what we need to get there. Whether it's the processes, tools, hardware, software, maybe it's a building. Project management helps us build what we need to get there. Change leadership decides where we want to go and how to get there. And change management helps us ensure that our people get there too. And Graham Bolin, who is one of our ProSciMaster instructors at ProSci Canada out of Vancouver, uses this turner phrase that I love, that project management prepares the solution for the organization. Change management prepares the organization for the solution. And when we have both those in place, we deliver results and outcomes. So that's where I think the intent varies. Although in the end, it's about helping this organization improve its performance through this change. Right. Okay. Since you brought change leadership in, let me bring in a question that brings in another discipline, launch management. I must admit, I've never heard of launch management. So what is the difference between launch management versus change management here from Maslina? Yeah. And Maslina, if you want to clarify, I'm assuming launch management would tie to an organization using a more iterative approach, like an agile development approach. With a product launch after a series of development releases or development cycles. What I think change management does is focuses on that universal common denominator of change, which is the human being. And so the very first, one of the most important questions we ask in change management is who has to do their job differently and how? Who has to do their job differently and how? And whether I'm rolling out an electronic health record, or building a brand new integrated hospital, or rolling out a launch in a more iterative, fast manner, who has to do their job differently and how? Gives me the measuring stick to understand that those personal change journeys that I need to help people through. So yeah, I think we start to align launch as the readiness for operations for product launch. Yeah. So at the moment we launch, what do we need people to be able to do differently? And how are we going to get them there? That's how I think change management folds in with launch management. Okay. And since you mentioned agile, how, this is a question here from Pete coming in. How does change management being discussed fit into an agile environment where uncertainty and change is expected? Yeah, we actually tackled this with a deep dive in our research back in 2017, looking at the intersection of change management and agile. And I kind of went there because there was a lot of chatter at the time that said change management will look different in agile. Full stop. And it's like, Well, where's the meat, right? I understand it's gonna look different, but really where's the meat? And so in that research, we actually took 10 practice areas of change management. Sponsorship is one, as an example. We said, what are the unique challenges for sponsorship in iterative development? And what are the adaptations? What would you do differently to bring sponsorship to life in an iterative environment? And so we started to build out this body of knowledge and Shannon, there's actually a great YouTube clip around aligning change management with the pace and cadence of Agile, if you wanna find a resource and chat it out to the crew. And Shannon, by the way, is our angel in the background here. Let me quickly bring her in so she can wave at you. Hello, wave at everybody, Shannon. Hello, yes. And she'll be now trying to find that resource for us and then share the link in the chat with everybody. Yeah, so in the video, we talk about time and place. It's the phrase my boys hear more than any other, time and place, right? Wrestling, backyard, perfectly fine. Grandma's dining room, they could just get a glare, kind of a stare from the dad that says, time and place, time and place. So when we bring change management to life in Agile, it's about realizing when and where are their material impacts to how people do their jobs and how do we support them in bringing to life that personal change? So we end up with cycles of iteration of employee ability at go live that aligns with the Agile release approach. There we go. And Shannon's already found it. The link is both on YouTube and Facebook underneath this video for everybody to see. Now, let us continue with our, we've been jumping around a little bit in various topics, which I find great, but let us continue here with the normally scheduled programming, so to speak, and we're going on to focus. You've mentioned the people side of change management quite a bit, but you haven't really talked about technical changes. Is that just, that's how the conversation went or is the people side focus of change management truly bigger than the technical side of change management? Yeah, I think, you know, when we talk about focus, the project management really, the focus is on sequencing the tasks and activities that let us, you know, balance times, scope, cost. The focus of change management is those, the activities we can take to help people through the change journeys they're going to experience. So whether it's, and Cornelius, we started using the notion of a project challenge and an adoption challenge as a way to frame up focus, because if I'm rolling out electronic health records at a huge hospital, there's lots of project challenges, right, around reader boards and screens and making sure the buttons work. The adoption challenge is how do we help people change their own processes, mindsets, critical behaviors to bring that solution to life? And so Cornelius, there is always a people side to every change, whether we are paying attention to it or not, right? We have an instructor, Phil Eastman, who used to say, you know, you will always pay for the people side of change. You'll either do it upfront and on purpose where you answer the questions people have in the order you know they're going to have them because human beings just travel through a change journey in a somewhat predictable way if we offer them up what they need to unlock and step forward. Or you can pay for it at the end. And that's when you do the old email on Monday for training on Tuesday for go live on Wednesday. And then everything comes crashing down, right? Because that's not the way to help our people be ready to take on and step into the change. So that's where I think those focuses vary. It's the people side preparation, the solution for the org and the org for the solution. And then they converge at go live. And we talk about this notion of aligning ability at go live. Ability is one of those building blocks of successful individual change. And so if we can help people get to the ability to do their job a new way on go live the day we need it, that's the prerequisite to successful change. And so we'll actually align in work breakdown structures using milestones, individual change journeys with that project journey. And that's where that focus kind of comes back together. All right, we are moving on to the next big topic that we have, and this is scaling factors. So my first question to you is, this is based for everybody to understand, this is based on an article that Tim wrote that outlines the basics of the differences between project management and change management. And this is just one of the chapters in that article. So first question, what do you mean by scaling factors? And then how do the scaling factors differ or converge between project management and change management? Yeah, great question, Cornelius. And so scaling factors help us understand how much project management we need for this initiative and how much change management we need for this initiative. And so they're the things that help us gauge the effort and energy, the resources, the time, the people we need involved. I actually think this is a kind of a fun jumping off point, though, for a bigger conversation that's happening in this discipline, right? About why don't we just merge change management and project management and squish them together, right? Create a project delivery approach that does all, the technical and people sides of the coin. And the analogy I use there is that of a spork. Do you know what a spork is? Yeah. Like a spoon and a fork that you use when you go camping. It's a pretty useless tool, if you ask me. It's incredibly useful if you're on a seven-day backpacking trip and you're managing weight and you only want that, right? Or if you're a four-year-old and as soon as you find a spork, it's the coolest way to eat anything. But you're right, sporks are really not that useful, right? Anytime you sit down to dinner, you would much rather have a spoon and a fork and a knife and know how to use them together instead of me just handing you a spork every time. And so I think this parlays into this notion of scaling factors, right? We can envision an initiative that has very small amounts of technical complexity with huge amounts of people side complexity for bringing the solution to life. And so I need much more change management in that situation. I probably don't need a ton of project management, but I can also envision projects and initiatives like a technology hygiene project where we have a huge amount of technical complexity, lots of need for project management support, but a very small impact to how people do their jobs. Therefore, a very small need for change management. So how technically complex is it to move us from the current to the future? How complex is it on a people side spectrum to move us from the current to the future? And those two complexities let us know how much change management and project management we might need. I have a question that, go ahead. I wanna survey the group real quick. Do you use a spoon or a fork when you eat macaroni and cheese? This is an ongoing debate in my household. And so I just given the chance to have an audience that this of course assumes that you eat macaroni and cheese but I'll be curious if people can entertain me and chat in if they use a spoon or a fork, but both are better than a spork, this kind of merged. And do you find this in the project management community, this conversation around pushing the two together or? I have really not seen that conversation to tell you the truth. Spoon, fork, fork, fork, four times so far. One, two, both, three, four, five, six. The fork is winning by six to two at the moment. I can't show them all, but they're like, yeah, here you go. This is a ton of people coming in. I'm on the losing side of that battle then based on the math that we have here in terms of the household debate. Right, all right. Let me make sure I get that. Oh, somebody is using a spoon with an extra long fork. We have this question here from Dinvideo. I'm not sure if this is actually about change management or more about people management or excitement management. When in a big organization with other people like sales and architects being at the forefront of the customer, how do I, as a program manager, get the user on the customer side excited about a change of a small two months project? So it's less about how do I implement the change, more about, well, the change is coming. You better get excited about this. This is really good. How do I get that excitement across to them and make them go, oh, yay, something new. It's interesting, right? Yeah, because I think this notion of excitement, we realize not, I mean, we're not here, it's not kumbaya circles, right? It's not cheerleading. What we wanna do is make sure people are ready to step out of their current state and into the transition state. And so we have a individual change model that kind of describes those building blocks that an individual goes through in times of change. The first of those building blocks is awareness of the need for change. And we tee up kind of three big questions that we need to make sure to ask if we want our customers to step forward. Why, why now, what if we don't? So we're not necessarily trying to get them excited, I know, but I know that was the tone of the question. What we want to do is make sure that they internalize the answers to the questions. Why, why now, what if we don't? And given the amount of change going on today and the notion that this might be a fast, smaller change, why this instead of that? We need to help our people have an awareness of why priority is going here instead of there. But if we can help our people say, have the answers to why, why now, what if we don't? Why this instead of that? We can get them to the point of saying, I understand why. And that's that personal milestone of stepping out of the current state into the future state. The next building block of that journey is I've decided to. We call that desire in the Adcar model. And there we need to make sure that people understand what's in it for them, the organizational motivators and the individual motivators for them to take that step out of the current state into the transition state. So that's, I think, where we start is awareness desire by answering why, why now, what if we don't? And what's in it for you? What's in it for us? And why should you get on board? Okay, we've got a couple more people who responded to your spork, fork, spoon question. We've got another vote for the fork. And we got this one from John. No, wait, where are we? Yeah, I support the change project management fusion as an idea, but I have never been able to stab my foot with any spork. So yes, they are complimentary disciplines. They probably should stay separate, but we have to focus on both. And they get executed in an integrated fashion, right? They get brought together through execution, but by understanding them as different disciplines and the relative amount of each we need, yeah, we can be more effective. We're seeing a lot of integration. Human-centered design is one of these things that brings together the technical side and people sides of change earlier on during design discovery, some of those pieces. And then certainly we see integration in action when we're executing the disciplines. All right, moving on to our next big topic here, we have the process. And most of our listeners here are project managers, so they are aware of the sort of generally accepted processes over on the project management side, initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing, that's what we have on that side. What does it look like on the change management side? What is the general high-level process that we follow over there? Yeah, great question. And I think that, first of all, I love that we're talking about it, that it has process behind it, right? Change management is not sitting around on a couch. Doesn't just happen, right? Yeah, there's no magic beans yet. I haven't found the elixir that helps people just adopt change. So yeah, there is a process. And ProSci was actually founded by an engineer focused on big process optimizations that kept realizing that human beings were getting in the way of his beautifully designed process and the results he thought he was supposed to get, right? And it was around helping them through that change journey. That was really how you cross the chasm between requirements and results, or between specifications and actual sustained value to the organization. So the process that ProSci has developed based on two decades of research begins with prepare-approach. So we have three phases, prepare-approach, manage change, and sustain outcomes. So during prepare-approach, we define success. We answer, what is it we're doing here? What are we trying to achieve? What are the project objectives? What are the organizational benefits? What's the reason for change? We define impact, who has to do their job differently and how. And then we define our approach by looking at factors like risk and resources and resistance, roadmapping our timelines to make sure we align the technical and people-side timelines. So that's prepare-approach, how we get ourselves started. Manage change is the phase two, and it's actually iterative by design. It's built with iteration in phase two. So we do some plan and act where we build blueprints and the plans to help people through their personal change journeys. Then we track performance. How are we doing? Are people moving forward through the change journey like we thought? And then we adapt our actions. Where we identify people are getting stuck in the people-side journey, we step in and help them through whatever the barrier is they're accounting. And then phase three is sustain outcomes, realizing that eventually this project becomes part of how we do things at the organization. And so what can we do intentionally to identify ownership and make sure that we transfer both the assets and the energy to sustain the behaviors and really keep the change in place? Because we know it's our natural and physiological and psychological tendency to regress, to go back to what we used to do. And I think this is one of the interesting highlights where change management and project management, there's an opportunity to continue to improve our understanding here is around, I call it, I'm a big fan of alliteration. So I got two alliterations that I think help us understand this. The calendar conundrum and onerous ownership. So the calendar conundrum is this notion, right? The project has an end date. By definition, projects have end dates. And maybe the team has a hyper care phase after that and some support planned after that, but eventually this team is gonna roll off. And if they had a great project manager, she's gonna get snatched onto the next project. The human side of change lasts longer than that though. And so extending past go live toward a milestone date around outcome realization, and how are we gonna make sure that we stick around to help our people stay in that future state that we've worked so hard to get them to. So the calendar conundrum. conundrum can create some of that. And then onerous ownership is who is picking up and owning this. Yeah, benefits realization is what project management has started to talk about in a major way in the last two to five years maybe. It's getting bigger and bigger. So talking about benefits before you even start the project and how you're gonna sustain it and how will you measure whether or not your project was successful at the end, but also three years after it's ended, can you still prove to me that that was a good project? Yeah, the benefit realization, I think there's an, I was down in Australia in 2015 and there were already some significant conversations there. Even an organization that had built a benefit realization office that sort of sat between the PMO and the business to help facilitate some of this transition. But yeah, benefit realization, the discipline, right? It takes incredible intestinal fortitude at the front end and the back end. To truly declare what we're setting out to achieve on this project takes, there's a boldness there, right? But it's that level of transparency we need in terms of articulation of success. And then to have the energy and capacity to actually measure and say, did we deliver what we expected to? Because activities are easy to measure, outcomes get trickier, right? And guess who owns whether an activity gets done or not? I do, right? Like if it's mine, it sent the email, held the town hall meeting. We have much more control, discretionary control over activity execution. Outcome realization, benefit realization through the outcomes of the change is a much more collective, it's a team sport, right? Successful change is a team sport, so. We got a question from Joe coming in here. He asks, is there any record or document to explore? Let me expand on that. And if people are interested in the basics foundation and advanced product management, any kind of a book that you could recommend that say, oh yeah, here's the Bible of change management. Well, you wanna go to prosci.com as an organization or a research organization at our core, which I think is really neat because we've spent 25 years researching and then trying to make painfully accessible the ability to positively influence change. I run the development side of the house here and the phrase we use is elegant simplicity. Can we do all the hard work to bring forward elegantly simple solutions that help people unlock change? So prosci.com has a tremendous amount of free resources. If you go to resources in the main nav, you'll find a bunch of thought leadership articles. There's a great one around integrating change management and project management. There's a really nice one called the unified value proposition that establishes that foundation. You also find a tremendous amount of webinars. There's probably 200 hours of recorded webinars. So there's one that we delivered just about two months ago around integrating change management and project management. And there's one from the beginning of this year called the five tenants of change management. And that's really where I'd go to start is the five tenants of change management. So yeah, those would be a couple of places I'd start. ProSci's YouTube channel has all kinds of great one, two, three, five minute clips. There's actually a whole channel if you wanna track down this link around, we call them Tim talks. So there are five minute little interviews of people asking me questions and talking about all kinds of various aspects of change management. One of those is called back to the basics. It's about a five minute clip, which I think is five minute really solid foundation of what the people side of change is all about. All right, excellent. Moving on to our next big topic. And this one is all about the hard tools. Everybody loves hard tools. And so what sort of hard tools can you recommend, talk about and use again and again when change management comes into play? Yeah, very nice. And so your audience is, I'm sure, very familiar with the kind of project management tools we have in our tool chest that help us manage those trade-offs. Management of work, business cases, Gantt charts, burnout, burndown things, yeah. Yeah, and most of them, right. They help us manage either usually the time, the resources or the scope or the quality as we kind of move this thing forward. I think the very first critical tool that change practitioner needs is an individual change model. Change management is in its end about helping individuals through the change journeys they experience and doing it at scale. Because even if a change requires 150,000 people to use a new tool, the change is successful when each of those 150,000 people experience their own successful change journey. So we must understand the individual dynamics of change so that we can actually scale it at the project or initiative level. So I think that's the very first tool. ProSci is called the ADCAR model, A-D-K-A-R. We know it's probably more famous than ProSci. The most widely used individual model to help us understand those individual journeys. We have a change profile as one of the tools we use that really articulates the project, the purpose, the particulars and the people. So it's kind of a foundational definition of success for the change. Certainly a change impact definition where we, and I think this is really one of the keys where change management brings empathy to the change table, to the project table is that when we talk about defining who has to do their job differently and how, we actually have an impact tool that sets behind that where we can look at, does this change? So Cornelius, let's say you decided to flip over away from this platform to a different platform and you've got your team that has to come along with you to help you use the new platform. We would say, does this change impact their process, their system, their tools, their job role, their critical behavior, their mindsets, attitudes, beliefs, their performance review, their reporting structure, their compensation or their location? The 10 aspects of a person's job that your project may or may not impact. And if you want to drive adoption and usage of solutions, you need to understand what your solution actually means to help people show up each day. So that's the change impact definition. We have risk assessments that look at the size of the change, the readiness of the organization to see how well we're aligned there. We use a role roster, just a little bit different than a stakeholder analysis because it really identifies who in the organization are stepping into fulfilling the change management activities that we've built out and identified. We know from the research, it's abundantly clear in times of change, frontline employees have two people that they care to hear messages from. There's two preferred senders of change messages. I'll see if you can guess who they are, Cornelius. I'm a frontline employee, a change is going to impact me. Who are the two people that I care to hear from? My boss and the CEO. The person I report to, exactly. And I want to hear from them. How does it impact me, my team, the work we do? I'm scared of this, didn't we try this last week? And the person at the top of the organization, I want to hear organizational level messages. Why, why now, what if we don't? Competitive, customer, all those issues. Wait, I got two out of two? You got two out of two, 100%. Cornelius, where's the prize? Is there a prize like a ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding? Yeah, so as a change practitioner, you're much more like the director of the play. You're not one of the actors. You're not the face and voice of change. You are enabling the face and voice of change. In the same way, the project manager is more of an enabling role in change, architecting those activities and the decisions that need to be made. So the role roster identifies who they are and then we have blueprints and plans to help us identify and structure what all those activities are. A sponsor plan, a people manager plan, certainly a communication plan and a training plan, but we often know there's kind of this, oh, change management, that's just communication and training. In the same way, I would ask a project manager, is project management just the work breakdown structure and just the schedule? No, of course not, right? Is it just the statement of work? Is it just the, no, it's not just the tools. Obviously a lot more than the tools, right? Yeah, the tools. A tool is a tool, it's still a tool, right? I love it. Tools are fun, but yeah. So then we've got some performance tracking, like scorecarding around looking at the success of the organization, the change itself, and then sustainment planning. So we'll often build a sustainment plan as one of those tools where we clearly identify ownership when and how we're going to pass it over. Let me move on to the next topic here. We have about 10 more minutes before we want to wrap up here. I think we've already spoken a little bit about success measurement. We talked about benefits realization and all of that. Maybe you want to go more into some of the actual measures here. What are some of the measures? Because in project management, it's on budget, the quality is right, we are on schedule, all of that. That's kind of how project management generally measures on a very high level. Are there some high level measuring factors that come up again and again in change management? Yes, certainly. We have that notion of on-time, on-budget, met technical requirements. That's one way to define success for a particular aspect of the change. Broader though, we certainly need to understand, did the organization get the market improvement expected when it invested the time and energy into this change? So we actually have three levels of measurement. One is organizational performance. Did the organization get the reduction in cost, increase in market share, reduction in risk exposure, the successful integration of the acquired organization? Did the initiative deliver to the organization what we expected? And so project, this is kind of that shared objective. That's what project management's there for too. That's the stuff we hopefully saw in the statement of work. The middle dimension is around individual performance. Are individuals successfully moving through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement? And in the end, we're gonna measure adoption and usage. Are we getting the level of adoption and usage we need, which always must begin with the question, what does adoption and usage mean for this change? But if we can get it defined, then we can measure adoption and usage. And then our third dimension of measurement is change management activities. How well are we actually doing the work of change management? How well are we aligning with best practices? Are we moving along progress to plan for the activities that we built out to support the people side of this change coin? So let's get into the metrics. There is no universal adoption metric because it depends on what to adopt and use the change means to you, right? If we're rolling out a new expense reporting system and you, let's say Cornelius files expenses once every three months, this change barely touches you. You've got a salesperson who's filing expenses weekly. This is a pretty significant impact. You've got the person who runs in finance and accounting who manages all the expense records. It's their entire job that got flipped over. So we must understand what the change means to each group who has to bring it to life. Then we can define what does to adopt and use the change mean for you. Then we can start to measure, how would we help? Know if you got there and what are the proxies that would suggest you haven't got there and we can still step in and help you further. So just like any project needs to be tailored to the needs of the project, same in change management. Change management needs to be tailored to the change. The impact that the change has on the person or the group that it affects. Yeah, what are the adoption challenges we have in front of us and how are we gonna help our people overcome them? And I've heard you chat on some of your previous podcasts about some, there's some change types that our organizations tackle that become pretty tricky along these lines, right? The dreaded, try the project again and just give it a new name, right? We've tried it three times, just hasn't worked yet. Give it a new name and try it again. It's not gonna work. It's not the way to prepare, equip and support our people through change. So yeah, it's really around how do we get out in front of helping our people succeed and the changes we're asking them to make as part of our projects. Right, I would like to take the next question that we have here as a segue into our next generic topic here. Zainab Zalai Masks, is there a way to make a self-paced way of training in ProSci or a cheaper way for those who pay for themselves? And I'd like to take that as a segue over into the next and really final topic almost that we have, the practitioners and change management certification. Here, I would like you, Tim, to maybe talk a little bit about who are the practitioners of project management, change management, primarily change management. Then also tell us a little bit about what type of certifications are available. What does ProSci do to help us to get certified and get a better understanding on how change management should be implemented here? Yeah, ProSci's cornerstone offering is a three-day certification program for change practitioners. So it runs three days. Interestingly, it had always been in person before March, 2020. We did not offer a virtual offering of the certification program. And then we, like everybody else, had to figure out how to make that pivot. So now it is offered in a virtual environment. It does run three consecutive days. I call it an immersive virtual experience because while you're still sitting at the desk, you are completely immersed in learning, applying, learning, applying. And the focus of that three-day program is to really equip the practitioner to have a more positive impact on the changes that they're supporting. What's interesting is that I've been interested about who's coming to these programs, right? And so I had a class the first week of December. Actually, I had seven classes that week with a total of 98 participants. These are for our open enrollment programs. So anybody can sign up. You get a classroom full of various people from various organizations. We also teach enterprise-focused programs where we deliver a whole class to all employees from the same organization. But in these open enrollment programs, I had 98 people in one week attend. And so I started crunching my job title to see who was coming to these programs. About 20% of them had change management job titles. So they were what I'd call a change management professional. It is their job. It's their job role, their job title. It's what they do in every single day. That was only 20%. The vast majority were much more of these change practitioners, people that are looking to add change management as a skillset and competency to become a more multilingual change leader, and I don't mean English and French, right? The change leaders of the future are going to need to understand change management and project management and knowledge management and agile and product development and probably all sorts of other technologies that help our organization. change more effectively. So, I start looking at who's coming to this class, and project managers are the most represented job title. Then I've got folks from operations, HR, OD, IT, learning, strategy, quality, communications, business analysts, and I think what's exciting for me is that the change management community gets made up by people from various walks of life, different industries, different sizes of organizations, different professional backgrounds, but they are drawn by this notion that the better we treat our people in times of change, the more successful we are going to be. It is the right way to treat our people, to position them to succeed, when we ask them to change how they show up. So, I started to really explore this notion of the change management professional as one of the big groups we service, but then also the change practitioner, the project manager who realizes becoming bilingual in project management and change management is the way they're going to bring the most value to the initiatives that they support. I'd imagine there's something similar happening in the project management space, the idea that you have professionals, you know, it's what they do, all the advanced certifications, but then you also have folks that make projects more successful as practitioners, but maybe not necessarily with that professional hat on. Yeah, I have to admit, the more I reflect on what we talked about and the things you say, I have to say that, yeah, probably in my project management career, I let the change management side maybe slip a little bit too often, not focusing on it, not really giving it that much attention, right? So, there are so many topics that vie for your attention, yet, you know, there are only 24 hours in a day that you as a project manager can apply to a project, right? So, yes, there's definitely something that we should focus on more. And I think it's the harder side of change, right, Cornelius? You know, we hear about the hard side of change, and then, oh, that's the soft side of change, the people side. I'll maintain, right, you do a merger of two organizations. There is a ton of complexity in merging two financial systems. The hard side of that change is getting people to work collaboratively, more effectively in this unified organization that we're trying to build towards. So, it doesn't surprise me that we shy away from it, because it's harder. And I think it's becoming more important today as organizations are embracing values around ownership and accountability and empowerment. It actually makes change management more critical and important. Because I give the example of my grandfather's GE, right? He started his career there, finished his career there. And when he was told to jump, his answer was, how high? That was the value system, right? Predictability, control. It's a whole different value system that organizations are trying to craft and create today. And as soon as you create an engaged, accountable, empowered workforce, change just got trickier. Because how high is no longer the answer. Why do we need to change? I thought you told me I had control of this. What if I think we should do it this way? And so, it makes change more challenging and more valuable and beneficial when we create this environment. And this discipline, I think, is stepping into helping us make sure we do that effectively. All right. At this time, I would have moved on to another topic. We have two more topics, actually, that we want to talk about. But I've seen six really good questions coming in. We won't have time to talk about all six of them. Ebenezer, Salih, Kyle, Kenneth, Ruth, thank you so much for throwing those questions into our chat. I've selected two of those. And the first one I'd like us to talk about here in the next five to seven minutes, and then we'll wrap it up, is this one from Salih. Management buy-in for projects is something we practiced and used. However, management buy-in for change management is something perhaps you can tell us on how to help. So, how do we get management buy-in for change management? It's a great and timely question for those who are watching live. Because this week, I'm actually delivering three offerings of a webinar called Stop Talking About What You Do and Start Talking About What You Deliver. And that's the premise of the webinar, is too often when we're trying to get buy-in for change management, we're talking about what we do. Risk assessment, stakeholder analysis, communication, training. And all that's important, that what we do is important. But the what we deliver is capturing people-dependent return on investment by treating our people the right way. What we deliver is mobilizing people to deliver results and outcomes. What we deliver is one of our clients use the phrase benefit realization insurance. That's what the people side of change is. It's about putting insurance against the benefits we expect or hopefully signed up to deliver. And so that webinar, Stop Talking About What You Do, Start Talking About What You Deliver focuses on shifting that conversation. I'm going to offer up, I'm still finishing my slides, of course. But I think my three big talking points are context, problem, and language. So context, you know, why does context matter? Stephen Covey tells us priority is a function of context. So instead of, if we want to get priority for change management, we need to talk about it within the context of the expected value of the project. So we'll ask these two questions. What percent of the project ROI depends on people changing how they do their jobs? And what are the real costs and risks of poor adoption we anticipate for this project? Because now we're talking about the value of change management within the context of the value the project's trying to deliver. So that's context. Problems, I use the Ted Levitt quote, nobody buys a quarter inch drill bit, they buy a quarter inch hole. The drill bit's just what they bought to make the hole. You got to understand the hole, what they're trying to create. And so no senior leader or project manager, their problem is not that they don't have enough change management. Their problem is we're putting time and effort and energy into making this change happen. And the human side of change is a critical link in the chain of us being able to be successful. So we have to attach change management and its value to what, you know, what's keeping them up at night and also what's getting them up in the morning. And in terms of language, we use the Nelson Mandela quote, if you speak to a man in a language he understands, it goes to his head. If you speak to him in his own language, it goes to his heart. And so we really work to shift the conversation about the value of change management and put it into the expected value that the practitioner or the leader is trying to create within the organization. All right, thank you. And the final question that I would like to bring up is the one from Kyle here, because it is very current. It is about COVID. What are some tips that you have for managing change in the COVID era, where many teams are working from home and may not have the regular face to face engagement? I think, you know, COVID has shown us we can do things differently. We can do things remotely. I think it's not going to go away. So even 10 years from now, your tips about how do we manage change remotely are probably going to be valuable. So, Tim, how do we change or manage change remotely? So this is kind of my favorite topic right now. And I've got about six hours of conversation we can go into. All right. Summarize it in 90 seconds. I'll tee it up real quick. Yeah, workplaces are changing, certainly. The hybrid is not going away. The hybrid workplace is what we're stepping into. I think what we as organizations need to understand, begin asking ourselves, is when and where does the where actually matter? When and where does the where matter that we actually are coming together? And when and where can we can we work from anywhere? And seizing those opportunities to create value through shared space, and embracing what's possible, what is out there, if we embrace the flexibility that we learned. Because human tenacity and ingenuity over the last 15 months has been stunning. We pivoted entire organizations to working remotely in a day and a half. If we would have tried to take 30 days to do it, it would have taken us 60, and we would have broke it 10 different ways. But we all made this thing happen. And so to me, the key going forward is making sure that we don't unlearn some of the amazing things we just learned were possible in terms of both our skills and our capabilities and competencies, as we step into this new hybrid workplace. Excellent. Thank you so much for that. That 90 second summary there of a really humongous topic. Tim, thank you so much for being here today. Folks who attended this live gave us all these great questions. Thank you so much. Thank you for answering all the questions that we could bring in. Tim Creasy from ProSci, thank you for joining us today. Appreciate it very much. Thank you so much. Absolute pleasure. Really appreciated the opportunity. And thank you for all the questions and engagement. And even all those people that use forks to eat macaroni and cheese appreciated you chiming in and being part of the conversation. So yeah, hopefully until next time. Yeah. All right. Thank you, folks. If you would like to know more, please visit pm-podcast.com for show notes, transcripts, and PDU information. Yes, if you are PMI certified, you can earn PDUs just from watching this free podcast episode. Our email address is info at pm-podcast.com. And finally, we have this meme here because we're talking about change. But, but, but, the koala bear says, we've always done it that way. I think this is something that every project manager and every change manager has heard dozens and dozens of times. And with that, until next time.