In a previous post I talked about the importance of governance for a PLM implementation and mentioned that overcoming issues related to management of change (MOC) is an important consideration.  In this post I’d like to drill into that topic a little deeper.  To me MOC in the context of PLM is about people in an organization understanding the value of their PLM solution and accepting it as an improvement over the processes they were previously using.  You can’t necessarily depend on “if we build it they will come” with such an important undertaking; human nature is to want to continue to do things the way they have been done in the past.

I’ve had the opportunity to manage a large number of projects over the years from very large to very small and I have often found that the main challenges related to successful enterprise solution delivery are usually not technical.  Yes technical obstacles will exist, will need to be overcome and engineering tradeoffs made.  But in my experience the major roadblocks to enterprise implementations stem from improper governance, issues related to management of change (by that I mean organizational acceptance and understanding of value) and strategic investment shifts.