Leadership engagement at every level is an undeniable requirement for successful change. Unfortunately, many executives think a seminar or other training program meets this need. No surprise that such palliatives have little impact. This is especially true when previous training was simply to be endured and change initiatives have failed.

Ideally, your approach to change would be personal!  You make sure your team members buy into it, own it, implement it, and are rewarded for it in their work relationships. Yet, today we still see many leaders using Top-Down Change as their default approach without considering the impact on productive relationships and their ability to respond to the next change.

Introduction

In our last blog, Tracking Expectation Alignment to Avoid IT Project Failure, Nick discussed the impact misalignment can have on project success.  During many consulting engagements, we identified that organizational misalignment is a major factor in organizations and individuals failing to achieve goals.

This changed our focus to align people’s expectations first, before designing, learning, coaching etc. Consequently, this approach has helped clients add millions to the bottom line, bring projects in on time, and successfully enable value added technology insertion.

In this blog we want to build on that theme.   Many change projects were planned in response to the economy, yet almost half of the respondents to our and many other surveys indicate that a significant number of change projects failed to meet their stated goals.

We have learned that anticipating and managing misalignment goes to the root of building successful change. And so the theme of this blog, Managing Alignment Challenges -- so that you can increase the odds that the change you’re planning will achieve its desired results.

Today, we want to focus on people alignment.  We recognize there are other important components of successful change, including alignment of resources with strategy.  It’s a big subject. But one thing is for sure – Change has to be personal before it can be organizational.

(Abstract from Take Control of Your Project - Using Expectation Alignment to Avoid IT Project Failure by Terry Merriman, PCO Associates LLC)

Whether large or small, IT projects are complex change events. They need cross-functional collaboration between two or more departments or teams. Their success or failure reverberates throughout the organization and often impacts customers. Countless studies and papers on reasons for IT Project Failure cite two critical factors:

1. Poor interpersonal communications
2. Lack of professional project management