What to change

Understanding Change

After deciding to embrace change, what comes next? It's time to understand where the need for, and the skills, will come from. Before diving in, take some time to figure things out. While not changing anything maintains the status quo, changing without understanding the system is tampering, and is likely to make things worse, rather than better. It's important to understand the system, and it's foibles, before reacting to them. For that reason, it's worth putting aside any preconceptions and talking to the people who currently do the day-to-day work, whether it's QA, development, infrastructure, or accounting.

People's accounts of the work they do will provide evidence of which things are broken, and why. Are staff demoralised because they can't find the right libraries to do what they want? Do infrastructure and development teams point fingers at each other when something goes wrong? Are customers unhappy with timeframes for, or quality of, delivery? Do delivered features or products satisfy the letter, but not the spirit, of what was requested? These all indicate systemic challenges that people don't know how to solve; if they knew how, they'd be doing it.

Where to start

All sustainable change must include senior management. Management is responsible for the company being the way it is, chasing the things it chases, and valuing the things it values; management built the system that all staff work within. For the organisation to change, the thinking of senior management needs to change. Having seen this play out in many places, it's clear that while many changes can start at the front line, or middle management, they tend to revert over time, as the pressure of the system gradually erodes at the changes. Long-term change requires changing the way people think and, like it or not, the way people think is largely dictated by the system.

That's not to say that the front line cannot inspire management to change. Confronted by a set of symptoms from the front line (politics, poor decisions, unhappy customers, etc), or by a change process that's really effective, senior management may decide that change is required to improve the lives of customers, staff, or shareholders.

The first step in achieving sustainable change, then, is to get senior management involved. Understanding what the senior team is trying to achieve, its pressures, and its goals over the next 3-5 years, means that any desired change can be put into context of how it will assist with those goals. This is a dialogue where motivations, likelihoods, obstacles, people, processes, and technology all need to be explored, in order to ensure that things start from an agreed point. The goal is to get everything on the table, which can take hours, or days. During this dialogue, it's important to agree timelines, ensure everybody is going to be available, and designate a point person (and possibly and escalation contact) for the work. Some understanding comes about, during this meeting, of what counterproductive processes are already in place, and how they're created by management itself.

Next Steps

The next step is to meet with all staff, or as many as is feasible. The minimum required is a representative sample from everybody that works with IT, as well as everybody within IT. Most of this meeting is spent listening, drawing out motivations and goals, on the one hand, and the things getting in the way, on the other. They know, and they've either raised it and failed to achieve change, or have convinced themselves that it's pointless to raise the issues because their management will do nothing/ignore it/deny it/blow up/fire me. There doesn't need to be any evidence that any of these things will happen, only the belief that they will. Upon leaving this meeting, staff talk about feeling like they've come out of therapy, as if a weight has been lifted. Notes taken during these meetings are direct observations and quotes, which make it possible to refer back to source data whenever necessary. Direct observations will make proposed changes and inferences easier to back up with data.

From those conversations, a pattern emerges. Things stand out. Some issues occur more frequently, than others. Collate these, and do a root cause analysis - use a flowchart, or logic tools to connect the issues until it's clear which factors are causing the others. Sometimes it's processes, sometimes it's people, and sometimes it's technology. Frequently, it's a mix of all 3, as predicted by Conway's Law.

Once it's understood what's causing the problem, steps can be taken in addressing it. First, figure out what metrics, if any, can be used to determine whether a given change is effective. Most ideas about how to fix things will come from staff, though there's a chance that the changes that are needed are so radical that nobody has any experience with how to make them happen. This is where consultants are really useful. They can bring specific knowledge about how to achieve change, and how to model the behaviour you want to see.

Conclusion

Starting a change program requires a few things: understanding the system, senior management buy in, and a willingness to listen to front-line staff to see what's really happening. Without that inclusiveness, and the involvement of people at all levels, any change is temporary.

There are numerous different styles, strategies, and methods of implementing change. All we've done so far, is identify where to start it. We have yet to talk about how to achieve change, the importance of people as opposed to behaviours or actions. There's still a lot to talk about, but after coming this far, it's possible to figure out what's wrong, how change fits with the bigger picture, and where attention will be most valuable. Getting this far, despite how it feels, is the fast, relatively simple bit. Still to come? Implementation.