One of the biggest unexpected hurdles when small companies start to scale up is change management, which is really the big brother to project management. It can sneak up on you. With growth comes operational complexity. More and more projects start happening simultaneously, and they compete for limited attention and resources. At a certain point you may start to notice you’re losing track of change at multiple levels:
- Small: Individual project change – managing the planning, implementation and communication around single projects
- Big: Organization-wide change – managing priorities, budgeting, resource allocation, and timing across your company’s full range of projects
This raises the question: who has the top-down view of all your various initiatives, priorities, and resource allocations? Well, if you’re like a lot of small companies – maybe nobody! This can be a problem.
When your company is small, your IT people are project and change managers whether they know it or not. For that matter so are your HR people, admin staff, and department managers. It’s usually pretty ad hoc:
- Departments probably handle their own projects (IT may be called in for the techie parts)
- IT handles back-end infrastructure stuff
- Prioritization follows the “squeaky wheel” method – whoever is loudest or most important or has the biggest “C” in their title gets the attention (today)
- No standardized project methods
- No centralized change oversight
This scenario doesn’t scale well. It leads to ambiguity and frustration across your whole organization around who’s working on what and what the top priorities are. (Plus your IT folks are probably pulling their hair out trying to keep up.)
When your business enters a growth phase and project activity increases, ideally someone should own:
- The holistic view – ensuring that projects are approved through a organization-wide lens
- Prioritization – prioritizing projects and allocating resources across the full portfolio
- Process – ensuring that project and change execution follow good practices & standard processes
In a small company, all of this could fall to IT, though IT probably lacks the authority, knowledge, and bandwidth to wear all these hats. So at this moment it’s instructive to take a look at how larger companies handle this. Larger companies are more likely to have well-defined functions for:
- Project management as a distinct discipline, centralized within a corporate Project Management Office. This includes:
- Program Management – management of groups of related projects
- Change management which follows formal methodologies. This includes:
- Portfolio Management – where all corporate change requests pass through a centralized body that oversees the full portfolio of company projects
But this all sounds kind of formal, not to mention expensive, for a small company. So the question for you – small yet growing company – becomes, how do we bridge the gap between our current ambiguous landscape and this “large company” scenario that we don’t have the time or budget to build?? And, a follow-up question: how do we figure out, just from a practical standpoint, how much simultaneous change is realistic for us to take on right now?
Well this is the part where I mention I can help 🙂 If the above sounds familiar, drop me a line. There are ways you can address most of this using existing resources. I can provide guidance on getting a handle on your current initiatives, and how to build structure for change within your organization without hiring a squadron of Project and Change Managers before you’re ready.