Welcome to Episode 111 of Harmonious Workplaces, a podcast dedicated to corporate culture, organizational change management, and workplace behavior. Hosted by organizational development consultant Rich Cruz and certified change management professional Ben Kleinman, this episode tackles a critical corporate challenge: understanding how change management (CM) and project management (PM) differ, and why their collaboration is absolutely required to deliver value.
If you want to ensure your organizational processes are optimized to deliver maximum value, bridging the gap between CM and PM is essential. Here is a comprehensive breakdown of their insightful conversation.
Defining the Difference: Technical Delivery vs. The People Side
While both disciplines exist to deliver value to an organization, they focus on very different aspects of an initiative.
Project Management is fundamentally about delivering a planned change within a defined scope, time, cost, and quality. Whether utilizing a traditional Waterfall methodology (with defined stages like initiation, planning, executing, monitoring, and closing) or an Agile framework (delivering value quickly through two-week sprints), PM drives the technical delivery of a solution. A project is typically defined by a specific start and end date.
Change Management, on the other hand, is the “people side of change”. It focuses on implementing and sustaining the delivered project over time. For example, if a project team is responsible for installing a new IT system, change management is responsible for ensuring that individuals collectively adopt the future state behaviors required to use that system effectively. Furthermore, change management activities often continue for months or even years after a project is officially closed to ensure the benefits are fully realized.
The Problem with the “Bolt-On” Approach
Often, organizations embed change management within the Project Management Office (PMO). While this structure has benefits, it can lead to common challenges. Change management is frequently resourced at a much lower level than project management, or worse, treated as an afterthought.
Too often, change management is brought in late—as a “bolt-on”—when a project is already facing adoption issues. When an initiative focuses purely on technical details and deliverables, employees can suffer from change fatigue, becoming overloaded by complex tasks before they cognitively or emotionally understand the benefits of the new behaviors.
Additionally, project management tends to be hyper-focused on the “To-Be” future state, often acting agnostically toward the current culture and how things have historically been done. Change management steps in to acknowledge the status quo, guiding people from their current stability, through a transitional neutral zone, and finally into a sustained new beginning.
Change Management as “Project Risk Insurance”
A powerful concept shared in this episode comes from a recent Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) conference: change management acts as “project risk insurance”.
Every project inherently carries risks. Project managers focus on mitigating technical risks, such as a lack of budget, scope creep, or timeline delays. Change managers, conversely, mitigate people risks. They ensure that the project’s value isn’t lost due to a lack of individual skills, an inability to adopt new systems, or a simple lack of desire to change. By proving that CM minimizes the risk of costly rework and low quality, change managers can secure the necessary backing and credibility from their project manager counterparts.
How to Optimize Your Teams for Maximum Value
How can organizations ensure these two disciplines work harmoniously? Rich and Ben offer a primary strategy: map your timelines together from the very beginning.
When project managers are in the early initiation phase mapping out technical deliverables, change managers should simultaneously be in the formulation phase mapping out the overall change strategy. By creating a longitudinal view on a single calendar, you can:
- Align Cadences: Synchronize project milestones with change management activities, workshops, and adoption tracking.
- Unify Communications: Instead of disjointed messages from the “project team” and the “change team,” create a single, unified message about the entire initiative.
- Prepare for Go-Live: Ensure that when the technical solution is ready for testing and launch, the workforce has already been engaged, upskilled, and incentivized to embrace it.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, an organization doesn’t care who is doing what; they just want to see the expected benefits and value realized. By aligning roles, methodologies, and communication plans early on, project managers and change managers can complement each other perfectly to deliver both technical excellence and sustained human adoption.
To hear the full discussion or check out more resources—including Trust Fall Pratfalls, the latest cartoon book featuring Hermie the HR Hermit Crab—visit Harmonious Workplaces online. And remember, until next time, make change your friend!
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