Have you ever wondered about the intersection of change management and project management? How do people come into play in these processes? How can we, as project managers, department leaders and Average Joe employees work within our own spheres of influence to make transitions as smooth as possible?

If you have any interest in these topics, you’re going to love this interview with Bas de Baar. Bas holds a masters degree in Business Informatics and currently is the editor of SoftwareProjects.org and author of Project Shrink. He is an expert in project management and we recently connected on the topic of the intersection of project management and change management. I hope you’ll find the interview as enlightening as I did.

Bas, thank you for agreeing to this interview. We’ve chatted briefly about the intersection of project management and change management and I’d like to use this opportunity to explore that relationship further.

First, I’d like to ask you to tell us a bit about your background as a project manager and how you came to the conclusion that “Projects Are About Humans, Now Deal With That!” It’s a great statement and it seems that you must have arrived at it based on some hard experience!

Everybody agrees on this statement. Everyone that has spent one minute on a project knows the truth of it. And somehow we just seem to forget, over and over again. So, I put this line on top of every page, just to remind me and my colleagues.

For me this conclusion came the first half of the nineties, I was studying Business Informatics at Vrije Universtiteit in Amsterdam.  As a final exam, I performed field research at a large financial institution. The department in which my study took place was a pool of Project Managers, both novice and experienced alike.  The projects they performed suffered from what they called “interventions”, which were changes triggered by the project environment. Being educated as a plan-driven-pro, I set out my checklist and searched for forgotten process components, only to find out after a couple of months that everything was neatly in place. From standard documents to procedures, they had it all. And still the project went from left to right.

Being the eager beaver that I was, I just kept on looking and looking for the missing ingredient but could not find a single clue to locating the feature or process that would help to solve the pressing problem. At one given moment, I had an “aha”-accident (a hit on the head), which turned out to be a life altering moment professionally. At the coffee corner, I overheard fellow project team members have a conversation about a procedure that they were not going to follow… My jaw dropped. Not following the official procedure? Not complying with company policies? If they didn’t follow procedure then all the changes implemented were going to be completed without the project manager’s knowledge… clonk. The penny dropped. It seems so simple now, but it really rocked my world at the time. They forgot to deal with the people.

On Never the Same River Twice, I write a lot about ways to increase mental and emotional flexibility. Your post, 3 Steps Toward Becoming an Agile Project Manager, you tell project managers that, “To cope with the environment you need a brain that can use many mental models to look at reality. You need to be able to throw away your pre-programmed belief and adopt a different mindset in the blink of an eye.” Why, in your view is this so important and what is one thing that we can do right now to increase our mental flexibility?

There are several reasons for the need of a flexible brain. It determines the way how you view the world. I often use the example of looking at a project as a war. Project Managers are using words like “marching orders” and “the troops”. With a mindset like that,  his mind is thinking in friends and foes, allies and enemies. You are either with him or against him. This view of the world will make it very difficult to collaborate with this person if you disagree. In the end, the war metaphor effects reality. If the model is powerful enough and wide spread among more people, the model will even become a reality. The project will end up as a war. By being able to switch to a different mindset, a more productive state of mind can be adopted.

It also allows you  to understand other people’s behavior and ways of thinking. As projects are nothing more than groups of people working together, being able to be empathic with your team and stakeholders is essential.

Finally, the world is getting very complex. It is impossible to determine the precise causes to certain effects. By looking at reality from different points of view, you get a more complete sense of the problem, increasing your chance of attacking the “correct” cause of a problem.

The key for a flexible brain lies in the usual suspects: tolerance, knowledge, health. I recommend a good read on the history of politics in the middle east, starting at least 200 years ago. Very good for creating a flexible brain.

In your Updated Model of Projects and Project Management, you explain that project teams need to be resilient to cope with change. There are many different methodologies promoted to increase team and individual resiliance. In your experience, how can a project manager help his or her team increase their resiliance?

On the individual level, make sure people are motivated, are relaxed, rest and are not stressed out. For the project itself, the project manager has a lot of tools at his disposal: slack in schedule and budget, having resources double available, but also iterative processes that allow you to adapt in every cycle. 

Your post, Projects as Social Interactions, challenges the reader to think of projects as “…a localized energy field comprising a set of thoughts, emotions, and interactions continually expressing themselves in physical form.” In this context, you suggest that the project manager should attempt to steer the project team toward a goal. This seems a bit different from the traditional command and control model of management. How do you feel project management is evolving to move beyond command and control?

Actually, I think we are  moving too slow. Within software development we have agile processes that are very light in command and control, but these techniques are not mainstream yet. Within the larger companies I still see a focus on traditional ways of PM, ways that are completely in line with how these companies themselves are run. Without changing the general management style, the Project Management style will not change. Running some projects without a tight command and control structure to show the benefits will speed up that process. But in the meantime, we have a hard time convincing the dinosaurs to leave the tar pit.

What’s next in your continuing exploration of the intersections of change management and project management? And what do we have to look forward to at ProjectShrink?

In the next couple of months I am looking for ways to help us analyze complex situations; focus on dealing with offshoring within your project; how to create resilience in your project by using resources, materials, equipment and everything else on demand only. And everything else I might find interesting, as keeping a focus is my biggest challenge.

As I promised, Bas shared some great insights. If you are interested in continuing to explore these ideas, please share your questions, insights and experiences in the comments.

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