Chapter 11 • IT Project Management 425embrace the need for this change. To help motivate
them, a work environment in which it is “safe to
change” needs to be created. That is, individuals
who need to change have to be convinced that giving
up the old ways of doing things will not personally
disadvantage them.- Moving stage: Change requires knowledge transfer
and training. Until the knowledge and skills required
for the new roles are acquired, change cannot take
place. Information about changes in work tasks
needs to be assimilated, and adequate time needs to
be allocated for the people to learn these new skills
and behaviors. - Refreezing stage: The new behavior becomes the
accepted way of doing things. New incentive systems
could be needed to reinforce the new behaviors, and
the change might not be routinized until new
informal norms have also been adopted within rele-
vant workgroups across an enterprise. Today’s com-
mon wisdom is that modern organizations and their
people need to be able to accept change easily. This
suggests that one of the new behaviors to instill in an
organization after a major change initiative is for an
organization’s employees to become “change-ready”
(Clark et al., 1997): Change-ready personnel view
change as a desirable, ongoing state for competing in
today’s business world. If this occurs, the Unfreezing
stage should become less difficult to move through
for future projects involving a lot of workplace
change.
Based on a study of successful and failed efforts to
transform an organization, Kotter (1995) has proposed an
eight-step framework for leaders of major organizational
change efforts:
1.Establish a sense of urgency
2.Form a powerful guiding coalition
3.Create a vision
4.Communicate the visionThese four steps help bring an organization through the
Moving stage (described earlier) by establishing a sense
of urgency for the change and both creating and commu-
nicating a vision to help direct the change effort.
5.Empower others to act on the vision
6.Plan for and create short-term wins
7.Consolidate improvements and produce still more
change
8.Institutionalize new approachesIf a new system is first piloted, or implemented in stages,
the choice of the pilot or first business unit to implement
the system are very important choices for creating early
“wins.” According to Kotter, the 8th step will only occur if
the change becomes rooted in the organization’s norms
and values, and this clearly requires top management
support.
Kotter and other change-management researchers
have recently emphasized that major organizational change
efforts cannot be entirely planned in advance. Instead,
change efforts should be expected to be somewhat “messy”
and “full of surprises” (Kotter, 1995). A successful change-
management effort therefore requires both planned (pre-
planned) activities as well as “improvisational” responses to
unforeseen circumstances (Orlikowski and Hofman, 1997).
Similar to risk management, then, a major systems project
trap is to ignore negative feedback. Paying careful attention
to those in the organization who are closest to the people
who will be affected by the systems project will help avoid
implementation failure.
Three major categories of change-management
activities have been associated with successful IT
projects: communicating, training, and providing incen-
tives. Communication activities are part of good project
management, and communicating the need for change
(the vision) is one of the first activities that needs to be
addressed. The second category, training, is part of the
installation step in a systems life-cycle implementation
phase. According to the practitioner press, however, the
amount of user training required for an initial implemen-
tation success is typically underestimated. The third
category, incentive system changes (e.g., performance
rewards), helps motivate the attitudes and behaviors
needed for the Lewin/Schein moving stage and helps
institutionalize the behaviors for a Refreezing stage.
Special project incentives may be used for high-risk
projects and be under the control of the project
manager(s). However, long-term incentive schemes to
influence behavioral changes are clearly beyond the
scope of a single project.
In many situations, the budget for an IT project
does not include change-management activities. Not allo-
cating sufficient resources for managing business change
when the implementation of an IT project includes major
changes in business processes can be a major barrier to
implementation success (Brown and Vessey, 2003). In
organizations with a PMO (or project office), specific
activities to ensure “change-readiness” are more likely to
be a part of the project plan. These include formal assess-
ments of the project’s impacts on different types of job
positions. Based on the level of these impacts, resources
are then allocated for training workers. This type of
approach was taken by Motorola (in their Semiconductor
Products sector) in preparation for a major ERP release
that affected 5,700 employees worldwide. Under the