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Change Management Skills

Need change management skills for an information management change request and want some practical suggestions to ensure rapid project delivery?

Project management skills needed for information management projectsChange Management Skills include the usual skill set but also include technical skills not normally required for traditional project management

Why is that?

Information management projects are data centric and require highly skilled IT specialists.

Change requests are different than traditional project change requests with much more emphasis on data requirements, and business intelligence usage requirements.

Changes to architecture and design is different as much if the emphasis is on data storage and data movement.

Information management quality assurance testing is highly technical and requires significant involvement from the technical team instead of being handled completely by an independent test team.

Release testing is more extensive and error prone than traditional projects and needs to be carefully managed to ensure that time is not lost. Release management involves providing technical direction to:
  • Data Architects;
  • Data movement (ETL) designers;
  • Data movement developers; and
  • Database administrators.
So what?

A good project manager should be able to plan for these events and manage accordingly.

While true that a good project manager or change manager should be able to manage change, Information management projects also require specialized change management skills.

So what change management skills do we need?

Change management requires a technical manager or technical lead (technical project manager) who can take ownership for the overall change design, development and successful implementation.

This is a  critical role that will make or break the project and will provide the best chance for on time, within budget delivery.
Why is this so critical?

Information management change requests  have highly skilled multi disciplinary teams and it is imperative that someone provides technical direction/coordination and makes change management and leadership decisions based on experience.

A change manager must have the experience to prevent technical challenges from delaying the project and creating much rework.

What do we need?

If you want a successful information management change request implementation, consider a manager with the following change management skills and experience:
  • The usual project management skills including planning, organizing, and communication;
  • An excellent knowledge of information management policies, standards and best practices and project methodology;
  • Demonstrated experience providing technical leadership to multi-disciplinary teams comprised of requirements analysts, data architects, data movement and business intelligence designer/developers, integration testers, including database administrators, quality assurance testers, and release management teams; and
  • Experience with project management tools such as Microsoft Project or Omni Plan, and other tools such as requirements management, document management, testing and configuration management.
This can only really be gained through 12-15 years of technical design and project management experience in a variety of information management and data warehousing environments including leading database and data warehouse design, data movement and business intelligence solutions.

But this will cost a bundle!

Think of the cost of a 25-person project team waiting two days to restart testing while an unexpected back up is restored! Then think of how many days like this a good technical change manager can prevent…OK, you get the point.

Can change management be done part time?

That’s a good question—I have seen technical leads provide leadership and direction to 4-5 projects at one time so it is possible.

With today’s technology and project collaboration tools, much more can be done remote than was possible even a few years ago.

Summary...

Information management projects are data centric and require highly skilled IT specialists including specialized change management skills.



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