(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

Following an email link this morning we downloaded the Orbus Software top 8 CIO priorities¹.  The eight items:

1. Drive change to socially enable the enterprise.  Internally and externally enable and exploit the opportunities afforded by social media.
2. Simplify IT and transform IT funding.  Make IT transparent to the rest of the organization and enable a funding process that is singularly focused on supporting corporate strategy

The Change Activation Toolkit is a learning and implementation resource that solves the engagement & awareness challenges with innovative resources that boost organizational change capability & promote positive change behaviors. 

This document outlines the key ways in which the Change Activation Toolkit offers organizations a compelling value proposition and substantial return on investment.

This document presents a framework for approaching communications around a typical change initiative, and includes some ideas and recommendations to improve the effort and results.

At a basic level, the primary objectives for communications around a business project are to…

• Create awareness/inform
• Create understanding
• Influence (gain acceptance; enlist support; engage actions/behaviors)

The Change Acrtivation Toolkit authored by Better Business Learning is now TBO's primary resource for change management training and change project delivery.  We were attracted to the toolkit's innovative structure and easily understood materials.

Business literature is full of ideas on how to design your organization.  The leading ideas that show up repeatedly are designs to make your organization more customer centric¹, designs to improve decision making², and adopting designs that create a measureable improvement³.   All three of these outcomes can be achieved by focusing on an organization’s business processes for the design and understanding the new structure will require a clear focus on the people and teams that do the work for successful implementation.

The following approach has proven successful in previous organization designs: