November 1, 2016
Eww
Change is the currency of every organization involved developing, enhancing or maintaining software. Change includes the business process being automated, the techniques used to do work or even the technology upon which the software is built. Very little significant change is frictionless. For change to occur the need and benefit to be gained for solving the problem must overcome inertia – the work needed to find a solution and implement the solution. (more…)
October 27, 2016
The big (panoramic) picture.
In Systems Thinking: Difficulties we focused on the dark side of systems thinking. But, systems thinking is a powerful framework for change agents. There are two primary reasons systems thinking has a tremendous impact:
March 20, 2016
The Software Process and Measurement Cast 386 features our interview with Jason Little. Jason and I discussed his exploration of storytelling in change management. Stories are a powerful tool to develop and hone a big picture view of organizational change.
Jason began his career as a web developer when Cold Fusion roamed the earth. Over the following years, he moved into management, Agile Coaching and consulting. The bumps and bruises collected along the way brought him to the realization that helping organizations adopt Agile practices is less about the practices, and all about change.
In 2008, he attended an experiential learning conference about how people experience change, and since then he’s been writing and speaking all over the world about helping organizations discover more effective practices for managing organizational change. He is the author of Lean Change Management and an international speaker who has spoken all over the world from Canada, the US, Finland, Germany, Australia, Belgium and more. (more…)
October 13, 2015
A wrapping-paper-change barbarian
When you begin a change process it is important to remember a few critical points. If you were getting ready for vacation, the checklist might include identifying who is going and who is in charge, deciding on a destination, a map, and hotel reservations. Beginning a process improvement project is not very different. Here is my simple checklist with five of the most critical requirements for preparing to embrace a journey of change. My critical five are:
1. An Identified Goal
2. Proper Sponsorship
3. Sufficient Budget
4. A Communication Strategy and Plan
5. A Tactical Plan
The first item on the checklist is an identified goal. The goal is the definition of where you want to go; the destination in the vacation analogy. A goal provides direction and a filter to understand the potential impact of constraints. Examples of a goal can range from something as simple as, “reduce the cost of projects,” or as complex as “attain CMMI Maturity Level 5.” The goal also sets the table for discussing all of the other items on the checklist, such as the required budget. One piece of advice: make sure your goal can be concisely and simply stated. Simplicity increases the chance the goal will be broadly remembered, which reduces the number of times you will need to explain the goal, which will increase the amount of time available for progress.
Proper sponsorship is next on the list. Sponsorship is important because it is provides the basis for the authority needed to propel change. There are many different types and levels of sponsorship. The word “proper” is used in this line item to remind you that there is no one type of sponsorship that fits all events and organizational culture. One example is the “barbarian.” The barbarian is the type that will lead the charge, but typically is less collaborative and more a command-driven personality. Barbarians tend to be viewed as zealots who harness their belief structure to provide single minded energy towards the goal they are focused on. Having a barbarian as a sponsor can infuse change projects with an enormous amount of power. The bookend to the barbarian type of sponsorship is the “bureaucrat”. Sponsorship from a bureaucrat is very different. Instead of leading the charge, bureaucrats tend to organize and control the charge. They may provide guidance, but they rarely get directly involved in the fray. The examples show two different varieties of sponsorship each that will fit in different organizations. In a life or death situation, I would like to have a barbarian for a sponsor. However if I was affecting incremental changes in a command and control organization, the bureaucrat would make more sense. Remember sponsorship is important because sponsorship give you access to power.
Budget is next on the checklist. The term budget can cover a wide range of ground ranging from money to availably of human resources (effort). The budget will answer the question “how much of the organization’s formal resources can you apply?” The budget that ends up being identified to support change is always less than what seems to be needed. Use this constraint as a tool to motivate your team to find innovations on the way to attaining the goal rather and a reason to rein in your goal.
The first plan I recommend building is an organizational change management plan (OCMP). The OCMP is frames how your project is going to transform the future state of the organization. It will integrate the project roles and responsibilities with the requirements for communication, training, oversight, reporting and the strategies to address resistance, and reinforcement activities. The OCMP is a mixture of a high-level map and how-to document that is critical to ensure you are as focused on how you are change the organization as to tasks required to define and implement specific processes.
Finally you will need a tactical plan that lays out the tasks you need to accomplish and the order the tasks need to be done. The focus and breadth of the tactical plan you use will be different depending on the project management technique that you use. For example, if you use a time boxed technique like SCRUM your tactical plan will focus on identifying tasks for the current sprint based on the backlog of items required to reach your goal. Regardless of the planning technique used you must have a tactical plan or risk falling into random activity. Use the technique that conforms to your project’s needs and your organization’s culture. The bottom line is that you will you need to understand the activities and order they occur in to get to your goal.
Change is difficult to accomplish in the best of times, and almost impossible if you fail to start properly. This simple checklist for change readiness was developed and compiled to help you focus on a set of topics that need to be considered when beginning any process improvement project. Are there other areas that should be on the list? Can each topic area be deconstructed into finer levels of granularity? I believe the answer is certainly yes, and I would urge you to augment and deconstruct the list and further to share your results. In any case a checklist that focuses you on getting your sponsorship, goals, budget and plans in order can help you start well.
December 20, 2014
Communicate, many ways and many times!
Change is a fact of life. John P. Kotter’s book, Leading Change, defines his famous eight-stage model for change. The first stage of the model is establishing a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency provides the energy and rational for any large, long-term change program. Once a sense of urgency has been established, the second stage in the eight-stage model for change is the establishment of a guiding coalition. If a sense of urgency provides energy to drive change, a guiding coalition provides the power for making change happen. A vision, built on the foundation of urgency and a guiding coalition, represents a picture of a state of being at some point in the future. Once a vision has been established, it must be clearly and consistently communicated. Failure to effectively communicate the vision will cripple change.
Kotter lists seven attributes for effective communication of the change vision.
Effective change requires that enough people understand the change they are being asked to make and where that change will lead them. Ambiguously crafted visions and communications will at best cause confusion and at worst derail change. Regardless of the urgent need for a change or how carefully the vision is crafted people do not follow those they feel are on the wrong path. This true even if the change has powerful backers. Effective communication of the change vision helps to build the critical mass needed to make change actually happen.
December 6, 2014
John P. Kotter’s Leading Change established why change in organizations can fail and the forces that shape successful in the first two chapters. The two sets of opposing forces he identifies are used to define his famous eight-stage model for change. The first step of the model is establishing a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency provides the energy and rational for any large, long-term change program. Once a sense of urgency has been established, the second step is the establishment of a guiding coalition. If a sense of urgency provides energy to drive change, a guiding coalition provides the power for to make change happen.
Kotter defines a guiding coalition as a team built on trust and a common goal. The team must reflect the proper balance of four key attributes in order to be effective:
The guiding coalition needs to reflect a combination of all of these qualities. For example, a guiding coalition without leadership will either tend to wander aimlessly or not have enough influence to get the organization to follow them. Kotter drives home the point that a well-balanced team is needed by comparing changes driven by the lone, powerful champion and the underpowered committee. The lone powerful champion can work in scenarios where diversity of thought is not critical or the required rate of change is slow. Given the pace of change and level of complexity most development organizations face on a day-to-day basis, these scenarios are outside of the norm today. Many organizations appoint committees to lead and champion change that are merely groups of managers that meet to facilitate status sharing or don’t have the power needed to generate change and influence the organization. A few years ago I was asked to observe a project steering committee for a CMMI implementation. The implementation touched every aspect of the development group in the organization (including support and enhancements). The steering committee was comprised of proxies for the leaders all impacted departments. Each person on the committee had their own agenda insuring that the committee was a group rather than a team. Also, because they were proxies for other leaders there were very few decisions they were empowered to make because they had very little positional authority. The steering committee had a hard time steering anything. A guiding coalition needs to be a team that is focused on a single goal in order to effectively provide the structure needed to harness and guide the energy unleashed by a common well understood sense of urgency.
October 11, 2014
Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning good change. Change in a dynamic business environment has become an accepted norm. Organizations must adapt or lose relevancy. The concept of kaizen has been adopted within the information technology industry as part of core management practices. In business terms, kaizen has been defined as continuous incremental change. You need energy to make change occur, in many cases, a sense of urgency is the mechanism used to generate the energy to drive continuous change.
John Kotter, author of Leading Change and the eight-step model of change, suggests that without a sense of urgency people don’t give the needed push of hard work to make change happen. Urgency begins by providing a focus that helps people to first become aware of the need for change and then pay attention to the need and the factors causing the need by piercing through the noise. (See the awareness, attention, action model). The energy a sense of urgency injects into the process is needed make the step from paying attention to taking to break through complacency and disrupt the status quo.
The need for urgency in the equation for change can lead to problems. The first is the potential for confusing importance with urgency. In a perfect world, we would only want to react to what is both important and urgent. The second problem area is that of manufactured/false urgency. Both problematic scenarios lead to the sapping of the organization’s energy in the long term, which makes it more difficult to recognize and react when real change is needed. If further there is an over reliance on a manufactured or a false sense of urgency the focus becomes short-term rather than strategic.
My first job out of university was as a statistical analyst/sales forecaster for a woman’s garment manufacturer. We had six “seasons” or product line offerings every year. Quotas were set for the sales force (incrementally bigger than last year). The sales management team for regional sales managers to the national sales manager provided constant “motivation” to the sales force. Motivation always included the dire consequences of missing the quota. There was always a sense of urgency, which drove action, including account prospecting (good behavior) and order padding (bad behavior). The manufactured urgency generated both good and bad change, and when things were going well it was pretty easy to sort those out. However, the business cycle has never been repealed and when an economic downturn occurred it was difficult to differentiate the real urgency. Therefore the organization did not make strategic changes quickly enough. A 80 year old firm with 750 million dollars in sales failed nearly overnight.
Urgency can become a narcotic that makes the need real change harder to recognize and harder to generate. Signs of an over reliance on urgency can include:
The goal of kaizen is to continually improve the whole organization. The whole organization includes empowering everyone from development and operational personnel to all layers of management to recognize and make change. Motivation is needed to evoke good change, however we need to be careful that motivation does not translate to a need to generate a false sense of urgency.
March 27, 2014
A wrapping-paper-change barbarian
When you begin a change process it is important to remember a few critical points. If you were getting ready for vacation, the checklist might include identifying who is going and who is in charge, deciding on a destination, a map, and hotel reservations. Beginning a process improvement project is not very different. Here is my simple checklist with five of the most critical requirements for preparing to embrace a journey of change. My critical five are:
1. An Identified Goal
2. Proper Sponsorship
3. Sufficient Budget
4. A Communication Strategy and Plan
5. A Tactical Plan
The first item on the checklist is an identified goal. The goal is the definition of where you want to go; the destination in the vacation analogy. A goal provides direction and a filter to understand the potential impact of constraints. Examples of a goal can range from something as simple as, “reduce the cost of projects,” or as complex as “attain CMMI Maturity Level 5.” The goal also sets the table for discussing all of the other items on the checklist, such as the required budget. One piece of advice: make sure your goal can be concisely and simply stated. Simplicity increases the chance the goal will be broadly remembered, which reduces the number of times you will need to explain the goal, which will increase the amount of time available for progress.
Proper sponsorship is next on the list. Sponsorship is important because it is provides the basis for the authority needed to propel change. There are many different types and levels of sponsorship. The word “proper” is used in this line item to remind you that there is no one type of sponsorship that fits all events and organizational culture. One example is the “barbarian.” The barbarian is the type that will lead the charge, but typically is less collaborative and more a command-driven personality. Barbarians tend to be viewed as zealots who harness their belief structure to provide single minded energy towards the goal they are focused on. Having a barbarian as a sponsor can infuse change projects with an enormous amount of power. The bookend to the barbarian type of sponsorship is the “bureaucrat”. Sponsorship from a bureaucrat is very different. Instead of leading the charge, bureaucrats tend to organize and control the charge. They may provide guidance, but they rarely get directly involved in the fray. The examples show two different varieties of sponsorship each that will fit in different organizations. In a life or death situation, I would like to have a barbarian for a sponsor. However if I was affecting incremental changes in a command and control organization, the bureaucrat would make more sense. Remember sponsorship is important because sponsorship give you access to power.
Budget is next on the checklist. The term budget can cover a wide range of ground ranging from money to availably of human resources (effort). The budget will answer the question “how much of the organization’s formal resources can you apply?” The budget that ends up being identified to support change is always less than what seems to be needed. Use this constraint as a tool to motivate your team to find innovations on the way to attaining the goal rather and a reason to rein in your goal.
The first plan I recommend building is an organizational change management plan (OCMP). The OCMP is frames how your project is going to transform the future state of the organization. It will integrate the project roles and responsibilities with the requirements for communication, training, oversight, reporting and the strategies to address resistance, and reinforcement activities. The OCMP is a mixture of a high-level map and how-to document that is critical to ensure you are as focused on how you are change the organization as to tasks required to define and implement specific processes.
Finally you will need a tactical plan that lays out the tasks you need to accomplish and the order the tasks need to be done. The focus and breadth of the tactical plan you use will be different depending on the project management technique that you use. For example, if you use a time boxed technique like SCRUM your tactical plan will focus on identifying tasks for the current sprint based on the backlog of items required to reach your goal. Regardless of the planning technique used you must have a tactical plan or risk falling into random activity. Use the technique that conforms to your project’s needs and your organization’s culture. The bottom line is that you will you need to understand the activities and order they occur in to get to your goal.
Change is difficult to accomplish in the best of times, and almost impossible if you fail to start properly. This simple checklist for change readiness was developed and compiled to help you focus on a set of topics that need to be considered when beginning any process improvement project. Are there other areas that should be on the list? Can each topic area be deconstructed into finer levels of granularity? I believe the answer is certainly yes, and I would urge you to augment and deconstruct the list and further to share your results. In any case a checklist that focuses you on getting your sponsorship, goals, budget and plans in order can help you start well.
February 14, 2014
An eternal flame is a statement of values like a manifesto.
Every profession in the IT world seems to either have published a manifesto or is in the process of publishing a manifesto. With this proliferation, perhaps we could create a meta-manifesto that identifies a central core of behaviors most manifestos impacting software development and IT have in common. So, here is the beginning of our meta-manifesto.
There are consequences to all actions.
Statement: I accept the consequences of my actions; you must accept the consequences of your actions.
Newton said, “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Changing an organization requires the application of force; the amount of force is directly related to the amount of change needed. If all reactions were positive we could rationally move forward; however, even under the best of circumstances not everyone will react positively to change. You can help shape change and reap the positive consequences or you can fight change.
Deming said, “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory”. When he made that statement, I would suggest that he laid down the gauntlet to all leaders to continuously improve their organizations. I would suggest that companies like 3M, GE and Toyota (regardless of its current woes) provide good examples of what occurs when organizations embrace continuous improvement. If these examples are representative of what can be, “why is resistance allowed?” [NEED LINKS]
Get on the train by embracing the need for change and help direct it if you are uncomfortable with the direction of the change. If you choose to resist you may lose and end up being run over. Remember that history is written by the winners and there are very few Robin Hoods. It’s your decision and your actions are a reflection of those actions.
Favor intimate communication whenever possible.
Statement: I will use the most intimate form of communication possible at all times.
Intimate and synchronous communication is more effective during times of stress. Change creates stress, therefore anything that reduces stress or possible miscommunication is good. I will walk over to the office of the person I want to talk with rather than phoning or sending emails, IM’ing or scheduling a group meeting whenever possible and appropriate.
A few years ago Radio Shack terminated employees by e-mail. Informing anyone that you are changing their work by e-mail is at best insensitive, and at worst, inappropriate. The mismatch between message and communication technique reportedly caused significant stress. If you want people to follow, build connections through quality communication.
I am not a cog and neither are you (unless you choose to be).
Statement: I’m not a cog and I do not want to be treated like one; I will assume you are not a cog and will not treat you like one.
Changing the status quo requires authority to upset the apple cart. Authority within most organization is a reflection of hierarchy. Position in the hierarchy confers power that can be used to direct activities, but it does not mean anyone will follow. Individuals and teams act in a manner that they believe is in their best interest. As change leaders, we must understand what those interests are and understand that change may not always be in everyone’s best interest. To be brutal, the governed must agree to follow; therefore, we must collaborate to decide what is in the best interest of the majority. This often requires compromise (unless you own the company and think people are fungible).
One size does not fit all.
Statement: One single standard process will not solve every problem.
All roads lead to Rome. Most work in the IT space resists the application of detailed, single-path solutions because a large component of the work involves discovery and exploration. That being said, industry data shows that frameworks and methodologies increase efficiency, quality and predictability. Frameworks are most effective when they guide how work is done, while allowing discovery, rather than prescribing a single path. Frameworks and methods must reflect that all all projects need to deliver business value must like all roads leading to Rome. What frameworks and methods don’t suggest is that every project has to be done exactly the same way in order to deliver business value.
Why does this matter?
The large number of manifestos popping up are a reflection of a set of ideas about how we should approach work, how we should collaborate and communicate. there are similarities between many of these manifestos. For example, the Business Analyst Manifesto states “Out of disagreement, we create alignment” and the Agile Manifesto states “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.” Both of these value statements make extremely strong statements about communication. The core manifesto threads of consequences to behavior, the need to communicate early and often, that process does not equate to human robots and that there is not a single set of techniques and processes that works for all projects is really a statement of humanity. People represent a random factor in how work is done therefore each of the core ideas msut be addressed to make your process improvement programs more effective.
February 8, 2014
This is your mind on overload!
Hand Drawn Chart Saturday
We live in a noisy world. Between email, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the internet, we are simply awash in information. The economic theory, rational expectation, assumes that people fully and quickly process all freely available information. Unfortunately, humans only have a finite processing capacity. Enter the theory of rational inattention, which recognizes our limited ability to process information. Rational inattention theory, like rational expectations, recognizes that information is freely available, but since it can’t be quickly absorbed people need to make choices about what they’ll pay attention to. Attention becomes a resource, and as a scarce resource, it needs to be budgeted wisely[1].Budgeting translates to filtering. Filtering is one reason that some process improvement messages get heard and some seem to go in one ear and out of the other.
As change agents, we have a better chance of being heard if we recognize that the potential impact of rational inattention. Our audience is not going to be moved to action if 1) they are not aware, and 2) don’t pay attention, both prerequisites to taking action. In his book The Attention Economy, Tom Davenport outlines a model that begins with awareness, which is then filtered by attention to generate specifics from which action can be taken. This simple model helps us understand that getting someone to take action has prerequisites.
How do we break through the wall of noise? Yell louder? One popular approach is to wrap the message for change around a burning platform. The burning platform is a metaphor for a problem that if not solved will cause significant pain or anguish. There is data that shows we respond to negative shocks faster than to positive shocks[2] This means that our audience’s natural risk aversion may induce them to process negative news faster than positive news. In other words, a solution that solves a current, real pain will be heard faster than a promise of future benefits. Instability is change’s ally while stability is changes natural enemy (if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it).
Rational inattention helps change agents understand why some messages are heard and some aren’t. Our audiences will make the most of available information by analyzing those bits that are relevant to their decisions and to disregard the rest. Our goal when packaging change is to increase the incentive to be aware of the need to change and then to pay attention to the message. On many occasions we will convince our audiences that the world is not only noisy, but unstable so they can hear our message.
[1] Economic Letter, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Volume 6 No. 3 March 2011, p 2
[2] “Some International Evidence on Output Inflation Tradeoffs,” Robert E. Lucas, Jr., American Economic Review , Vol. 63, No 3, 1973, pp 326-334
Software Process and Measurement 