Today, people are either excited by the fast pace of change or they are scared to death by it. In fact, some become so scared of change and making the wrong choice, they become paralyzed by the choices in front of them. However, we know that change is going to occur anyway, so wouldn’t it be better to be part of the change rather than merely swept along by it?

Today we are experiencing constant change. Not only are we in a continuous state of flux but the change is rapid. What use to take months or years to accomplish is being accomplished in a much shorter time frame. Blackberry phones fell to 4th place last year in sales of smartphone and Apple took the number 1 spot, when only a couple of years before that, Blackberry was number 1. GM, bankrupt a couple of years ago had the largest market share of cars sold in 2011 according to Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html. Impressive how quickly change can occur. These are only a couple of examples of the dramatic changes that are occurring in business around the world. We must be willing to change in today’s environment or risk being cast aside.

People and organizations often are afraid to make a choice for fear of making the wrong decision. However, not making a choice is still making a choice. Failing to make a choice was a decision to let others decide and now you have surrendered control to what happens to your organization or to you. I believe that it is better to make the choice. If you make the wrong decision, just take corrective action. Your path forward may not be as straight as you would like but you are moving in the direction you chose. Not making a choice could result in you moving in the opposite direction, sideways or not at all, which today is as bad as moving backwards. It is imperative today more than ever to manage the change occurring to us and our organizations.

Coping with all of the change can be difficult and when faced with the amount of change that is happening, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. One method for dealing with change is to chunk the change up into portions that are manageable. Create small changes that are not overwhelming and that can be managed. Work your way through that change and then take on the next change. Project management offers a great vehicle for managing change. They end when the change is completed and therefore differ from operations management. The tools and structure that project management brings is exactly what is required to manage change.

There are many methodologies and frameworks to project management but agile project management is especially useful in managing the rapid change that we are now experiencing. It builds flexibility into the projects and therefore your organization. Through agile methods, a project is worked on in chunks or time boxes called sprints of 2-8 weeks each. A list of requirements is created for the project and from this future sprints will be setup to deliver the requirements. This adds flexibility, as the requirements that remain can be reprioritized, removed, if they no longer make sense, clarified or added up to the point they become part of a sprint. Project must have a definite end point but this allows the most important requirements to be accomplished quickly. Requirements that are not as important are delivered towards the end of the project, may be moved out of the project, done in future projects or not at all as the environment we are in renders them obsolete. I also like to keep my projects small. I prefer 3 month projects but always try to keep projects less than 12 months. If a project is larger than 12 months I break it into smaller projects, which allows changes to occur to future projects so they adapt to the changing needs and environments, or are removed from the road map all together.

I don’t think there is any question that we are in an environment of change. We can either manage the change or it will manage us. Once we make a choice there are strong tools and frameworks in project management to assist us in managing the change. So, make a choice, the risk of not making one may be greater than the risk of making the wrong one.