First things first: the right people can make any organization structure work, but these situations are usually the exception. The general rule is that an organization aligns to a common set of objectives, and those objectives can be in conflict with another organization’s objectives. An easy way to think about this is a sales team wants to sell many units at any price. A marketing or finance organization is more interested in selling units at a profitable price.

In thinking about an I.T.-oriented change initiative, there is a similar tension between organizational objectives. The Information Technology group is typically driven by objectives such as cost, project timelines, information security while they meet the needs of their internal clients. Those internal clients, frequently the owners of a particular business process, place a lower value on I.T.’s objectives. Process owners are most concerned about employee effectiveness and efficiency. A process owner will frequently trade away short-term costs for long-term gains in productivity.

In thinking about a typical organizational change manager’s work, it is clear that they are most closely aligned with the process owner. It goes to follow that having the change manager report to the I.T. organization mis-aligns interests. It becomes too easy for the cost and time-driven IT manager to stifle input from the change management team. The voice of the organization is never heard.

It makes far more sense for the change manager to have a direct reporting relationship to the business sponsor that is accountable for the success of the project. Granted they typically don’t want multiple project direct reports, but it has been my experience that they will be much more interested in talking about business and organizational issues than the status of integration testing and data cleansing routines. The sponsor needs to play an active role in leading the project and needs to be constantly up-to-date on the business and organization issues being caused or cured by the project. There can be no better place for the change manager to be.

Consider putting these checks and balances in your next project governance structure.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2011 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Change Management, Information Technology, Leadership.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.