Griffith-Cooper, B. & King, K. (2007, January). The partnership between project management
and organizational change: Integrating
change management with change leadership.
Performance Improvement, 46(1), 14-20. doi: 10.1002/pfi.034
Griffith-Cooper and King have worked to tie project management
techniques with change leadership and change control methods in order to create
a robust framework for managing change.
They contend that such an integration of disciplines is the real secret
to a strong change management capability.
They arrive at this conclusion by weaving-together the work of Bridges; Kotter;
LaMarsh; Ackerman, Anderson, and Anderson; and, Holt, Self, Thal, and Lo. The key output of their research is a synthesis
of ideas depicted in some tables which I found to be insightful. Some highlights of these tables are noted
below.
The authors are both project managers in industry with about
fifteen years of industry experience, supported by a PhD statistics
colleague. It’s not quite evident what
that colleague did; this work is decidedly non-quantitative. They published this work in a ProQuest publication,
Performance Improvement. That’s a plus,
in that ProQuest certainly has a degree of editorial capability that is respected
by professionals.
Of particular interest to me were the tables that provided
the following.
1. Deliverables from
the six phases of a project, from pre-launch through post-project evaluation
2. Integration change
control elements, listing inputs, tools and techniques, and outputs
3. Critical success
factors for process change, transition change, and transformational change,
along the dimensions of vision, roles, communication, and training. (I found this one, due to the depth of its examples
and length of its definitions, to be particularly helpful
Case studies outlining application of these frameworks would
be a great value-added feature if they exemplified application. But, the authors did write the article in
such a manner that it should have broad appeal to those in both private and
public sector organizations, and NGOs.
