No project should be started without a clear business case. A clever, well founded decision is based on the carefull analysis and maesurement of facts, assumptions and risks. This is where you should use your brain. However decisions are made by heart. According to the experts our decisions depend 80% on emotions and only 20% on clear reasoning. Is a business case complete if the decisions are supported by only 20% of our decision making capabilities? Maybe yes. But we also have to convince management, customers, users, friends and foes that the project really will bring the benefits we calculated. No wonder Change Management is so popular nowadays.
I fancy the following approach:
Do a stakeholder analysis. On a support scale for 1 to 6 (Unaware, Aware, Understand, Collaborate, Commit, Advocate) give for all groups the should and is values. For example the manager who sponsors the project should advocate it, while employees which are not directly involved in the project should be aware of it. By knowing this numbers you can calculate the resistance factor which is the sum of difference between the desired and actual support level multiplied by the desired value. (E.g. for the manager who is aware of the project but should advocate it the value is 24.) The higher the result the bigger is the resistance to be expected. For the calculation we simple can ask the stakeholders our do an assesment by our best quess.
We can use this information in two ways:
1. We can use it to prioritize the projects. Projects with similar business case can be prioritized by they resistance factor. Lower resistance - higher priority.
2. Change management should be part of every project. We monitor the progress in change management by monitoring the resistance factor regularly.
It would be good to know how resistance and change management influences project performance. Unfortunately I haven't heard any studies regarding this.
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