On our projects, and in our programs and project portfolios, we often struggle with how to make changes. From my own personal experience, the most challenging part of change management has always been the area of making incremental changes versus making wholesale major changes. Let’s take a look.
My personal tendency is to favor incremental changes in my project scope. This allows us to keep most things the same, and to isolate some changes that we might feel comfortable with, and then simply monitor the results. Intuitively, this is the least risky approach, as it keeps most things the same. However, there is a flip side to this, as keeping things most things the same may actually carry greater risks than we realize.
The idea of making major wholesale changes to our systems, our products, or our approaches to projects or programs certainly has its risks, but these risks need to be weighed against the risks of keeping things mostly the same. Here are some key factors to consider in your risk analysis.
- Are there major changes to the under paintings of the project?
- Are there some major changes to the basic financial assumptions that had been made?
- Is there a structural change in the basic foundation supporting the project or program?
- Is there a major change in the process, or processes, in the projects or programs requiring consideration?
These questions may lead us to want to make wholesale changes. But what I find most important is that we must have a sound understanding of the situation, and be able to answer the above questions with great clarity, in order to proceed with major changes. This continuous inspection and adaptation is a form of agile project management.
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So, this brings me back full circle to the idea of making incremental changes. While it can be fool hearty to make incremental changes with the belief that risk has been minimized, it could also be that making incremental changes in a very deliberate matter can serve to give us the answers that we need to the questions above that point as to whether we should be making wholesale changes or not. But I think its most important to use incremental changes as a tool, not only to advance our initiatives, but as an information gathering tool, to assemble intelligence on the major factors that we know we must monitor in order to continually assess if we are going in the right direction.
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John Reiling, PMP
Project Management Training Online
Tech Training Online
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