Project Portfolio Management: A View From The Management Trenches

6.3. MODELING THE IMPACT OF CHANGE

"That brings me right to my next question, Bill. How do you turn this into a model that I can analyze and control?

"The way to start modeling the impact of change on your organization is to bring together your project business sponsors and project managers to review the plans and assess three things. First, assess the changes triggered by projects in terms of the four dimensions we've just discussed: affiliation, task, skill, and belief. Next, you'll need to assess timing—when these impacts affect people. For this, I recommend you place the impact at project 'go-live.' For really big initiatives, you may need to spread the impact over several time periods, but I wouldn't recommend getting any more granular than monthly. Finally, you'll need to articulate who is affected by these changes. This can be broken down into categories—something like a split between executives, managers, and employees works well—as well as by department or functional area, like accounting or sales."

"Okay, this sounds very straightforward, Bill, but do you really do this in one hit like you describe? I sense that this is not a simple linear process—there are too many variables at play to be able to do this in a mechanistic way." John was frowning.

"No, you're absolutely right. What I've described is just the start of the process for achieving a robust consensus view of the change profile across your enterprise. What usually happens—and if this doesn't, I would strongly ...