Communicating Change to Your Environment Effectively

"Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts." ~Arnold Bennett
Some of the biggest mistakes I have made as a professional have centered around insufficiently communicating change and its effects to the user community of the project I was working on. If you look at the statistics from IT Cortex, I am hardly alone. They cite a full 57% of the survey respondents listed bad communications as the top reason for project failure. If that is the case, what can we do the help ensure that we don't fall into the same traps again? IT can be summed up in two simple words that have big consequences: Empathy and Participation