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Don’t be afraid to go outside of your own organization to get training. Some project man-
agers are tempted to develop their own training programs, but they often underestimate
the effort involved. Doing it right is extremely time consuming, and it’s likely that you
won’t do nearly as good a job as someone who has used and refined his training many
times. In addition, you’d be reinventing the wheel—just like programmers with NIH syn-
drome do with regard to new practices.
When an improvement effort seems to lose some steam, an effective way to get it back on
track and renew the organizational commitment is to engage in group training about pro-
cess improvement techniques, and raise general awareness about your efforts. Hearing
from an outside authority figure that you are on the right track can be enough to gain sup-
port from those who might not have agreed with you in the past.
When you bring an outside expert into your organization, the fact that this person is paid
to give advice will cause many people to treat this person as an authority figure. People
naturally defer to an authority. In many organizations, bringing in an expert will cause
people to change their minds, even if that person is saying the same thing you already
said. Even if you are in an organization with NIH syndrome, bringing in an outside expert
or a consultant can help bring people around. By hiring an expert, the organization
already has committed to listening to the person. The expert’s advice can immediately
become “how things are done here,” because money has been authorized and spent on
the expert. Once money has been spent to obtain an expert opinion, people are much
more likely to take suggestions for change seriously.

NOTE
More ideas on organizational change can be found in Peopleware: Productive
Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister (Dorset House,
1999). Information on the psychology of influence, attitudes, and persua-
sion can be found in Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini (Allyn
and Bacon, 2001).

UNDERSTANDING CHANGE 229