Whether you're working on a mail server install or a systems integration project in any industry, change often rears its ugly head. It's important to know the difference between change management and project management.

Let's first take a look at two typical business definitions:

• Change management is a structured approach to managing change in individuals, teams, organizations and societies that enables the transition from a current state to a desired future state.

• Project management is the discipline of organizing and managing resources in such a way that a project is completed within defined scope, quality, time and cost constraints.

If I were to take both of these definitions and breathe a little life into them and make them more accessible and meaningful, I'd say:

• Change management is the way to move individuals, teams, organizations and societies from vision to reality.

• Project management is the art and science of getting things done.

When you boil these definitions down to their bare bones, then it's clear that you can't have one without the other. Change management can't be successful without project management, because project management enables change management, and change management, by its very nature, actually creates projects.

From my experience, the key difference between the two is this: change management is the "what" and the "why" of transformation and project management is the "how."

Life is a series of projects
While change management provides a vision and the purpose of that vision, project management is everything that has to happen to realize the vision. As the adage aptly says: "Every journey begins with a single step." Change management is the journey, and project management is made up of all the steps within a journey. I'm fond of saying that "Life is a series of projects."

Both disciplines have bodies of knowledge. Project management has the Project Management Body of Knowledge, which is the standard body of knowledge as defined by the Project Management Institute. Change management practitioners often follow General Systems Theory (GST), which is the notion of a system and the dynamic interrelatedness of its components. GST was first conceived by a Hungarian biologist, Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, in the 1940s. Project management also has its roots in the 1940s, growing out of the military.