These sets of tools, templates and plans will help you manage change and navigate to your expected project outcome. They are designed to help you avoid potential delays in your projects, prevent higher costs to implement change and achieve results sooner. These tools should help you to jumpstart your change management initiatives or simply to begin integrating change management into your project planning.To enhance your project success, it is recommended that you conduct the assessments and integrate the change management plan early in your project initiation.

What you can expect to accomplish with these tools:

• Identify project’s strategic business opportunity through the business case, project charter
  and project manager interviews
• Identify specific actions needed for project success
• Identify stakeholders and roles critical for project success, i.e., steering teams.
• Measure stakeholder commitment at different given times throughout the life cycle of the project
• Plan communications and messaging
• Measure communications effectiveness
• Link expected performance to owners
• Determine training needs and resources
• Begin to facilitate organizational alignment
• Begin to measure and support knowledge management
• Evaluate change acceptance

These tools are designed to help project managers think through some critical drivers for successful project planning and implementation. They should prove helpful to you in identifying the most effective ways of managing behaviors, securing support and sustaining project changes. At any stage of a project, these tools can be applied to any business unit, employee or employee group.

Change is an integral part of working in today’s competitive marketplace. Competitive positioning is the driving factor in our need to be constantly changing and making improvements to our business processes. Improvements of these processes often mean introducing new technology and new ways of performing our work.

The purpose in implementing a change management program for your project is to ensure key business performers or owners are ready to use a new system, technology or way of doing business. In order for organizations to change, people need to change. And, introducing change to people often leads to resistance. This is where change management can be an effective tool for project success. Change management focuses on the people side of business change--getting users to accept new ways of doing business, new technology or a new tool.

Change management is about the discipline of managing change as a process.

Adding to the success of your project planning
Even though most of our projects represent change, change management is often an area overlooked in project planning and execution. The success and desired outcome of many of these projects are based on employee acceptance.

The methodology
The methodology focuses on managing change through a combination of strategy, application of behavioral tools and strong focus on consequences that have been integrated into the project planning.
After going through an initial assessment, the project manager will determine the level of change management initiatives based on the scope of the project. The six areas that make up change management include:

• Stakeholder management
• Communications
• Training
• Accountability management
• Knowledge transfer
• Organizational alignment
  

• How to Effectively Plan a Project Kick-off Meeting
• Stakeholder Management Principles
• Business Benefits of Change Management
• Motivating and Rewarding a Project Team
• Effective Communications Planning When Introducing Change