Making Organizational Change Stick

Business needs change. And it needs it in ways, at a rate and on a scale that is unprecedented. Current success rates for organizational change projects are dismal and are likely to remain so until organizations reinvent their approach to project delivery, and learn how to integrate Change Management and Project Management successfully. In this ground-breaking and innovative book, Gabrielle O Donovan shows you how to design strategy, structures and processes to realize this integration and deliver sustainable and commercially powerful business change.

She opens the book by providing the context, describing both the problem and the solution; how the disconnect between Project Management and Change Management feeds the 40–70 per cent failure rate and the laying of many a dud egg; and how cross-discipline integration efforts thus far have only addressed the tip of the iceberg, ignoring the subterranean cultural element that can divide or unite project teams. From there, she profiles Project Management and Change Management in turn and, crucially, the value and service propositions of these respective disciplines and the different theories, models and tools they employ.

In the second half of the book she makes a ‘Project and Change Partnership’ (PCP) culture explicit and measurable, articulating those cultural assumptions that will support an effective alliance and that relate to those universal problems all organizations face regarding the macro environment, external adaptability and survival, and internal integration. From there, she describes how Project Managers and Change Managers can cooperate daily by dividing work packages and activities throughout the end-to-end project lifecycle. Project leaders who instill a PCP culture will benefit from the unique value that these interdependent disciplines bring to project delivery. It is they who will lay golden eggs and realize business benefits.

Making Organizational Change Stick is written for project leaders, Change Managers, Project/Programme Managers, design thinkers, business architects and anyone concerned with business change.