About 50-70 % of all change initiatives fail and one reason for this is soft barriers, which mainly depend on people. These barriers are challenging to manage because individuals react to change in different ways. Due to these difficulties, companies look for help from consultants, who are perceived to have wide knowledge about change. Hence, the authors have studied the change process and the soft barriers from an external change agent perspective by interviewing nine experienced consultants. The results indicate that no phase in the change process is prominently more problematic than another, instead each phase is the outcome of prior phases. If the critical barriers in each phase are considered the change can be successful. Several soft barriers to change have been identified; lack of goals and vision, no demand for measurements and follow-ups, and a too large and homogenous project group without relevant competence or a clear driver of the change. Additionally, the findings suggest that top management is specifically problematic due to that they are often not united, are impatient and struggle with power and politics. Thus, the study indicates that resistance often starts from the top, which affects the rest of the organization and the outcome of the change.

The purpose of this research is to find evidence on how temporary projects change in connection to both internal organizational changes, in terms of change in management, as well as the external force of change of COVID-19. In addition, the thesis will also go into depth on how these changes have affected collaboration and work-satisfaction. The research is a case study of qualitative nature and ten semi-structured interviews, with five project leaders and five employees in a collaborative project, were conducted to enable interactions between theories and empirical findings. It was decided to obtain a case project in order to investigate how the external force of COVID-19 and the internal force of change in head management has affected the project's work settings, collaboration and the well-being/work satisfaction of the employees. Along with the interviews, the theoretical structure made it possible to perform a thematic analysis. The changes connected to the working processes and the structure given the forces of internal and external change have altered the way the employees perform and operate in the project. It is concluded that collaboration is of utmost importance and that building trust and relationships have clearly become harder in a virtual work setting, it has affected how the project participants work together towards common objectives. These major changes have also affected the work satisfaction of the project members to different extents.