PART TWO

A project exists from a group of individuals coming together through a common purpose, systemize effort, division of labor, and hierarchy of management and leadership to produce a unique product, service, or result. Oftentimes, these elements create complexity and ambiguity for individuals who are misguided about the different methods and processes within a project. The relationships between organization development, change management, and project management is interrelated to any given project within the organization. The relationship greatly impacts the operation and processes of both waterfall and agile environments. 

A project life cycle is composed of different stages that go through from beginning to completion. The most common development life cycles are waterfall and agile. Both provide different frameworks for running a project. The organization development, change management, and project management relationships play a vital role in the impact of these environments. 

Organization development plays an important part in both environments for improving the firm’s ability to align its governance, strategy, people, metrics, and internal processes. As in any project, people are the most important resource of an organization. It is crucial for any organization to create a learning, collaborative, and connected environment that benefits its people. Additionally, an organization is highly to benefit from efficiency and increased productivity through adaptation and response to market and industry changes and technological developments. 

An organization that continuously engages in the organization development process has a more sustainable competitive advantage over other organizations. There is also the advantage of increased communication on feedback and engagement to align its employees to understand, share, and commit to the purpose, values, and goals of the organization. One major benefit of organization development is enhancing creativity and innovation through employee development. This is crucial because the market and industry are susceptible to change. It is crucial for any organization to enhance its employee skills and expertise through continuous learning, training, and providing competency and skills to enhance employees' value to any given project within the organization. 

Change management is a major key factor that impacts the development, transitional, and transformational change of an organization. Change is an integral part of any organization that communicates the understanding of the need to transition from the current state and transform to influence individuals to value and adapt to change. Its purpose is focused on implementing strategies for effecting change, controlling change, and helping people to adapt to change (Lawton & Pratt, 2022). As in any waterfall or agile project, there is a need for structure through different phases. Whether it is through vigorous gathering and analyzing data by the team members or constantly seeking opportunities through customer engagement, change management can affect any project in any organization. 

An effective building block for understanding the change is the Prosci ADKAR Model which involves five sequential steps including awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement (Lawton & Pratt, 2022). Change management impacts the areas that matter most to any organization including internal stakeholders, customers, and profits. Because change takes place daily in settings like building new projects, improving performance, leveraging on profits, and sustaining competitive advantage, implementing change enables the workforce to ensure proper alignment with the compliance, vision, and goals of the organization. In addition, change management can have a direct impact on the systems, work roles, mindsets, workflows, individual and team behaviors, and more. An organization that employs and practices to build change competencies within the organization will not only improve the overall performance over time, but also build a strong foundation for a change-ready organization that is capable of achieving faster, more efficient, and more complex strategic advantages.

Project management is essential to an organization when initiating any project. As such, there are four fundamental categories to initiate projects in response to factors including meeting regulatory, legal, or social requirements, satisfying stakeholder requests or needs, implementing or changing business or technological strategies, and creating, improving, or fixing products, processes, or services (PMBOK Guide, 2017, p.7). These factors are influential to the strategies and operations enabling an organization to execute any given project effectively and efficiently. 

Project management is interwoven with organization development and change management because they create an impact on the overall individual and team performance, organizational changes, and project processes for both waterfall and agile project environments. Because the basis for all projects is to create value through a unique product, service, or result, all projects have a start and an end. The triple constraint is the project scope, schedule, and cost that project managers need to be aware of in managing competing project requirements. These constraints create an impact on a project because they change the dynamics of a structured process and set of tools for managing and leading the people side in order to achieve a sought-after outcome of a project. The impact also influences the organization's structures, policies, procedures, culture, and leadership which are all part of organization development. 

• Jackson, M.B. (2012). Step by step. PM Network, 26(6), 56-61. https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/step-iterative-waterfall-approach-4303
• Lawton, G, & Pratt, M.K. (2022). What is Change Management? https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/change-management#:~:text=Change%20management%20is%20a%20systematic,people%20to%20adapt%20to%20change
• Project Management Institute. (2017). A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: Pmbok Guide (6th ed.).
• https://www.g2.com/articles/waterfall-methodology