Change management: The only constant?

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Work environments, expectations, demands, regulations and budgets seem to be changing faster than ever before, and managing all the change presents a growing challenge. Michelle LaBrosse, CEO of Cheetah Learning, offers a few tips on how to deal with some of the most common changing variables.

A reduced budget or reduced staff can present a particularly unsettling change. Rather than trying to finish a project without the resources originally allocated, it can be useful to rethink and relaunch the project with the reduced resources in mind, LaBrosse suggests. If an employee is not going to be replaced, it's important to engage the remaining team directly, solicit feedback and make sure instructions are clear.

"Long-term projects can no longer rely on keeping the same team in place," she writes. "The worst situation is to lose a team member who will not be replaced, but even the addition of a new team member can disrupt a project's progress."

If you are receiving diminished enthusiasm from the higher-ups in your organization, you may want to find a new sponsor for a project or find out if priorities have changed within the organization.

It can be especially frustrating when customer requirements change, but you have to be prepared to deal with them.  LaBrosse advises keeping customer requirements to a maximum of seven, and insist on trade-offs when new requirements emerge

For more:
- see Michelle LaBrosse's post at ComputerWorld

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