Interview: Defining A Project's True Finish Line
6 Mins
Updated: November 11, 2022
Published: January 8, 2020
Following a keynote speech at the 2019 PMI China Congress entitled, "How to Use Change Management to Achieve Project Success," Prosci's Mark Dorsett talked with Project Management Review Magazine (PMR) to offer insights on the keys to project success. PMR reports on the latest advances in project management research across China and internationally, paying special attention to companies that are expanding their global reach. As EVP of Global Business, Mark leads Prosci's efforts to build global strategic partnerships and has helped clients in more than 40 countries achieve greater success with change.
A Project is Successful
When the Intended Goal is Achieved
Mark Dorsett, EVP Global Business
Mark, you’ve worked across the globe. In terms of measuring project success,
have you met differences in different countries?
The answer is both yes and no. For example, there are geographies that frequently focus more on technical projects such as software development and implementation. Whether I am in China, India, Eastern Europe or anywhere else, I see that managing these projects is done quite similarly, and the focus tends to mostly be on meeting requirements and completing work on time and within scope.
But there are definitely some markets that incorporate how people will adopt and use the new ways of working more into their project plans and management approach. In these markets, project success tends to be measured on whether the business objectives were met, as opposed to how tightly the scope, budget and schedule were managed.In your opinion, what is the finish line of a project? Would you please make distinctions
between requirements and results, outputs and outcomes, specifications and sustainment,
installation and realization, solution and benefits?
Talking about benefits realization, would you please
go further to explain value realization?
Based on your research, what are the top contributors to project success?
- Effective sponsorship, which is much more than approving budgets and assigning people. It includes being active throughout the project, building coalitions of sponsors throughout the impacted organization, and communicating directly with impacted groups, which we call “the ABCs of sponsorship.”
- Focusing on how people will adopt and use the solution by having dedicated and trained change management professionals assigned.
- Using a structured approach for applying change management.
- Focusing on the impacted groups and seeking their engagement and participation early.
- Frequent and open communication on why the project is being undertaken as well as what it means to those who are impacted.
- An integrated technical side and people side of managing the project.
- Early and effective engagement with people managers.
Successful Change Requires Both
the Technical and People Side
In this VUCA era, how do you understand the importance of change management?
Do you think it’s necessary to establish a CMO (Change Management Office) in organizations?
That being the case, more and more organizations are establishing a CMO to develop this capability across the organization for the same reasons that PMOs have been put in place over the past 20 years or so. Do I think it is necessary? I have to say yes. However, the more important question for organizational leaders is, with the increasing frequency of change, do you think you can prepare and support your people without a core capability to focus on adoption and usage? Can it be done without some form of organizing structure? Our experience and research shows that it is much more effective with a CMO.
Because CMOs are so important, what do you suggest are the steps of building a CMO?
Why did Prosci develop a 3-phase process to help manage change?
What are the three phases in the process?
Second, it makes it very easy to integrate the people-side adoption work with the technical side of developing and delivering the solution. We know that the value derived from our projects is often very dependent on whether people effectively adopt and use the solution. By developing a methodology to focus on this, we are in a much better position to ensure this occurs.
In order to manage change, what qualities does the project leader/manager
in digital transformation need to have?
- Does he or she have the business context to know why the project is being undertaken and what the organizational goals are? If not, find someone who can describe it.
- The project leader/manager needs to be able to communicate effectively with many roles in the organization including upper management, the project team, as well as those being impacted. This requires the ability to speak at a business level, a technical level, and with an empathetic ear when talking to the people being impacted.
- It helps to have some level of proficiency in the technical domain, but it is not mandatory unless the team is very small.
- I recommend that they should be very well connected in the organization as there are many stakeholders who need to be interacted with.
Change Management and Project Management
Project management provides the structure, processes and tools to manage the technical side of any initiative while change management addresses the people-side issues associated with adoption and usage. Project success is more likely when the two disciplines work together from the project's outset, integrating the disciplines to form a unified value proposition.