Excellent change management text book by Mark Hughes

"... please tell me you all - why does good change take so long?" - Greg Brown

Projects are synonymous with change. Hence the project management community has learnt that managing a significant project entails managing concomitant change on behalf of the project team and the stakeholders. Problematically, however, the rational and teleological approaches that dominate project management (Pollack, 2007) are more suited to directing technical processes and logistics than to the subtleties of wrangling complex emotions and politics. Worse, the change dimension of significant projects is inherently ‘wicked’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973). This means that identifying and characterising the potential change issues, selecting approaches to ameliorate them and identifying metrics to evaluate progress are irreducible parts of each particular project. Consequently project managers must accept the lack of steadfast algorithms for planning, implementing or evaluating change. Hence, when managing change hard nosed, logical positivist project managers need to learn how to interweave softer, less deterministic mindsets into their professional practice. Realising this, as a working project manager, I decided to update my skills and sought a course that would address the non-algorithmic people side of projects and change.

So I recently completed a two year part time M.A. in Change Management at the University of Brighton taught by Mark Hughes and Steve Reeve. The course was great as it used action learning/research to share experiances between experianced managers. A perfect learning design for the target group. Mark has now published the excellent text book 'Change Management: a Critical Perspective'. Mark's text is a blessing to educators because it presents rigorous arguments against reifying positivist approaches to change, together with sober alternatives, and contextualizes these arguments within a first rate evidence-base. This approach sets a radical agenda squarely within the workplace while opening the floodgates for critical and reflective debate in the classroom. I am currently reviewing the book and hope to publish the review in the journal Project Management in Business.

Mark also recently published ‘When Faculties Merge: Communicating Change’ in the recent special issue of Organizational Transformation and Social Change that Tom Browne and I edited. In the paper he brought his extensive subject knowledge of change management to bear in the context of his personal experience of a radical change to his faculty. Mark suggested that ‘the storytelling approach may be regarded as an antidote to the often prescriptive/normative nature of the change literature’. This provided a worked example to back up the assertions in this book. Anyone interested in change management in higher education would be advised to read the paper and the book.

Mark is also interested in 'Encouraging and Supporting Postgraduates Who Wish to Publish Work from Their Studies'. I think his approach works well with enquiry based learning, mode 2 and could be adapted to web 2.0.

References

• Pollack, J. (2007). The Changing Paradigms of Project Management. International Journal of Project Management. Volume 25, Issue 3 pp 266-274.
• Rittel, H.W.J. and Webber, M.M. (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, pp. 155-69.