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Forming the Structure for Change Management in Virtual City Projects |
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Written by Mehrdad
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008 |
Forming the Structure for Change Management in Virtual City Projects For implementation of virtual city projects, there are a lot of things that should be considered technically and a comprehensive analysis of all necessary requirements for the target organization should be done. All existing systems also should be studied and possibilities to keep existing systems and integrating them in a new solution or migration plan should be prepared. But there is one thing in front of implementing and even before that, which is a pre requisite for all these activities. That is change management and preparation for it. In such projects, a change management plan should be designed in advance and before starting the project, possibility of this change should be evaluated which helps and guarantees success of the project in next steps.
In many change management documents and papers, there are several steps and considerations for this activity but what SafaRayaneh has experienced for Virtual City projects, the best change management happens when we have a layered and hierarchical structure and it should be developed as early as a project is forming through management meetings. We have understood that each level in a company should find its own counterpart in contractor’s side and the coordination and interaction among contractor and customer should be managed through a special structure. When we are still in management level activities, team should find its responsible people in the two structure for effective communication. Also with entering to implementation phases middle level and lower level structures can be formed which will include technical and managers for knowledge transfer, training and implementation of new system. In Virtual City projects the workflow for doing different jobs and activities changes and hence the resistance in front of this change is considerable. Many people job description will be changed and citizens contacts with operators of the system are not in a way that they used to have and may be there are many assignment changes or reduction in non-professionals and professionals happens in municipality structure. All these changes requires a special structure to sustain in front of a resistance in each level and layer of municipality. That’s why we believe that forming a structure for managing change is the basic thing and a prerequisite for any further development in such projects. Just a sample structure is provided here which shows relations and structure which is formed in each project by SafaRayaneh: 
As you can see in the above diagram we have three main layers top management layer, middle layer management and technical layer. Management layer is the first layer that will be formed earliest and even during negotiation for offering the project and also during proposal preparation in joint meetings at this level it will be formed. Although later during project implementation and even after that this team and this layer remains with different objectives. 2nd and 3rd layers will be formed during project implementation and even after that should remain active until defined periods to make sure that new system functions well and these teams are front layers for facing change resistance and one of their main objectives is finding possible solution with regard to existing situation, municipality criteria and their framework of responsibilities, duties and authorizations.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 29 January 2008 )
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