As many contemporary CEOs have looked to define and understand change, they have often looked at the corporation as a living organism. As Andrew Grove, founder of Intel Corporation put it: "A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation."

Making change
There's a reason that change is often put in a human context: Because the people side of change management is often where transformation fails. Similarly with project management, if only the project and process are the focus and the people who are managing and implementing are an afterthought, the project will likely fail.

Ask any new leader who tried to drive change through an organization with no understanding of the company's culture, values, people and behavior. Many of us have lived through some of those experiences on both sides of the equation. At the top, it's painful and frustrating, and out in the field, it's confusing and debilitating.

If you've worked in a company where you feel like there's just one change after another, you might ask: "Can't we just stabilize and stop trying to change everything?" That was the ideal before the information age. Now, with global markets that are interrelated, outsourcing, labor mobility and immediate communication, there's no choice.

Dealing with change
So, if change is here to stay, then how do we mere mortals deal with it? Let's look at a few ways to approach change and how project management can give change management the traction it needs to succeed. German-born psychologist Kurt Lewin developed an early model of change in which he described it as a three-stage process.

Stage 1: Unfreezing
Lewin called the first stage unfreezing. This involves overcoming inertia and dismantling the existing mindset. In a company, this would be when a management team explains a vision and tells everyone why the company needs to go down this road. If there is no explanation that is real or believable, people stay frozen in the old mindset.

Stage 2: Change
In the second stage, the change occurs. This is typically a period of confusion and transition when people are aware that the old ways are being challenged, but may not have a clear picture to replace them with yet. Without continued communication during this stage, the change can become stalled and get "caught" in the company.

Stage 3: Refreezing
The third and final stage is called refreezing. This is when the new mindset has been consistently articulated and supported, and it is crystallizing. People are getting comfortable with the new way of doing things. Refreezing is successful when the communication actually begins to match the behavior that is happening in the organization.

When you look at Lewin's model from both a change management and project management perspective, the message and vision is driven from the change management strategy, but how that message takes hold in the organization and gets translated to actual work is in the hands of project management. How that gets done inevitably will be a series of projects that stem from the goals of the change management initiative.

Remove the roadblocks to change
Now that we have the lay of the land and understand how change management and project management work together to accomplish change, next week we'll look at ten ways to remove the common roadblocks that get in the way of change being realized.