Project Management Capability – Differentiator of Organizational Change Success

Abstract

Organizational change has become a permanent process in the worldwide daily reality, sparked by the necessity to adjust to economic environment or to take profit of it.This paper aims to present a few conclusions of a study on the project management capabilities of Romanian organizations that experienced organizational changes in the last 2 years prior to the study.Many researchers analyzed the organizational processes that lead to successful finalization of projects while some procedural standards were established by professional organizations in the field of project management. Starting from their work, our effort is based on the hypothesis that the organizational capability to implement successful changes is the organizational project management capability, which is a second-order multidimensional construct that can be evaluated through four latent reflective variables: (1) planning capability, (2) organizing capability, (3) implementing capability and (4) monitoring / control capability.The investigation is built on by using second order structural equation modelling (SEM) technique applied through SmartPLS software. This technique exposed the relations between the project management and components such as planning, organizing, implementing and control capabilities as prerequisites of the organizational change success.The data for this study was gathered from executives who had comprehensive knowledge about the results of organizational change initiative within Romanian companies.Through its results, our research highlights the project-management related capabilities that are important for organizations pursuing a change attempt. It identified that Control Capability is the most relevant capability necessary for change success in Romanian companies pursuing change, followed by the Implementing Capability. The results of our research create the ground for a more effective approach of future organizational changes.