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Tag: Change Management

Volatility is the New Norm – Are You Ready to Thrive with Change?

Written by Lisa Anderson on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Volatility is the New Norm – Are You Ready to Thrive with Change?

Volatility is the new norm in today’s business environment. How often does your supplier decide to close up shop? Or, does your 20 year customer decide to go through a rigorous selection process? Or, does natural disaster cause a disruption in your supply chain? How about political strife? Are you planning a new ERP system implementation or upgrade? Undoubtedly, if you want to succeed in the new normal, you will learn to thrive amidst change!

Although change has always been around, it seems to be one of the most challenging roadblocks my clients face. How do you give your employees, customers and suppliers confidence to successfully navigate these ever-changing times? You must find out; otherwise, you’ll likely spend the next 20 years hoping to survive. Who wants that sort of existence? Thus, a few strategies for success should come in handy: 1) Leadership. 2) Exemplars. 3) Modeling. 3) Trials. & risk.

  1. Leadership – Success in change begins and ends with leadership! There is no way around it. If you do not have solid leadership, it’s best not to focus on change. Of course, it is nearly impossible to avoid change in the new normal; however, you can at least minimize change. You better as you won’t succeed without exceptional leadership!

    For example, I’ve seen clients with minimal resources navigate complex change and succeed with solid leadership, yet I’ve also seen robust clients fail miserably with simple change efforts with mediocre leadership. Solid leadership starts by giving folks the confidence to follow the leader through the change process. I’ve found that employees are not resistant to change. Instead, they are resistant to change if they don’t understand the destination and are concerned about getting lost along the way. Leadership resolves those issues.

  2. Exemplars – One of the best approaches to succeeding with a change management initiative is to find respected exemplars and get them on board with the change. People will follow those they trust and respect. It can be as simple as that.

    For example, in one client project, we had to dramatically increase the production output from the gating work center area in order to increase customer service levels. It was a constant battle until we found an exemplar to trial new approaches. Once folks saw that the exemplar was willing to try new methods to increase production rates, others followed. Suddenly, we reduced the past due in half as momentum took hold.

  3. Modeling – Modeling the change can be very helpful. Sometimes, employees are not resistant to change but do not understand the change or how their jobs will be affected by the change. Thus, if the leaders find a way to model or illustrate the change, it gives folks an opportunity to learn through observation. It is significantly less scary to try something new if you’ve seen it modeled successfully – you know you can try to repeat what you saw “work”.

    For example, in an organizational realignment project, the project leader modeled the new behavior expected of department leaders. Instead of viewing goals which would negatively affect her department but that would positively affect the company as a whole as negative, she modeled a new behavior of support for the company objectives.

    She talked about the value to the organization and how her department was key to the outcome as it was expected that they’d perform slightly worse in order to increase new sales (in support of company objectives). Instead of agreeing to the goal but not modeling true support which might result in giving free reign to perform poorly, she developed new metrics and aligned them with stretch goals assuming the negative effects took place. Everyone got on board with the change – and succeeded.

  4. Trials & Risk – Last but not least, it’s essential to create an environment where employees and leaders can trial a new idea, approach or organizational style. It is one of the reasons why leadership is essential – if leaders do not create the right type of environment, employees will never try new approaches which might cause them to fail and/or get in trouble.

    For example, in one client, in order to bring up service levels, we had to forecast demand and build inventory to forecast. This approach was previously taboo – no one even thought about increasing inventory! Thus, in order to make this change, we not only had to talk about why it was important but we had to create an environment conducive to the change. We had to celebrate employees’ taking a risk with the forecast (assuming it was a reasonable risk) even if the forecast didn’t come true. This is really challenging as it’s likely to negatively impact quarterly results initially; however if we beat employees up for changing as we’ve requested, we’ve guaranteed no change!

Since the only thing that is constant is change, we must become adept at managing change – even excelling at change. Those who are flexible and can readily adapt to change will thrive in the new normal. Will you be left in the dust?

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Lost in the Culture Change Maze? 4 Strategies to Succeed!

Written by Lisa Anderson on . Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on Lost in the Culture Change Maze? 4 Strategies to Succeed!

Anderson FeatureArticle Mar13In my 20+ years of experience as an operations executive, a global supply chain consultant and a non-profit trade association leader, I’ve found navigating culture change is a requirement for success – no matter the initiative. If your company isn’t merging cultures, embarking on a major change initiative such as an ERP implementation or dramatically changing the business to ensure top notch customer service in today’s volatile new normal environment, you’ll probably be left in the dust. Thus, those who thrive in this chaotic business world learn to be proficient at culture change.

My clients who cover diverse industries (from aerospace to consumer products to healthcare products) unanimously find culture change to be one of the most challenging obstacles to overcome. Successful culture change is not dictated. It isn’t a one-time event. And there’s no formula for success. Thus, a few strategies for success should come in handy: 1) Strategic clarity. 2) Give it a boost with enthusiasm. 3) You get what you measure. 3) Make it visible.

  1. State the vision – Before going any further, it is essential to state the vision. Why are you undergoing culture change? How does it relate to where the company is headed? Why is it important to the executives? To each employee? Give your employees, customers and suppliers an opportunity to understand the vision – and to find out whether the new culture will be the type of place they’d enjoy working and collaborating. If so, they can become a champion. If not, it’s better if they get out early!

    For example, one of my clients wanted to change the culture from a focus on purely revenue to one focused on customer service. They started by communicating the new vision and culture. It gave folks an opportunity to ask questions and debate upfront. In another client, we had to transform the culture from a robust, process-driven culture to a more innovative one that kept the essentials of the processes without the baggage. We communicated upfront about the expectations for the future so that folks could determine whether they fit in this new culture.

  2. Give it a boost with enthusiasm – Even the most exciting culture change will sound hum-drum if presented in a monotone and without enthusiasm. Assuming you wouldn’t be embarking on the challenging process of culture change if it wasn’t essential, don’t put obstacles in your way. Be enthusiastic! Find the positive. Show folks why they should be interested and excited for the new culture change.

    For example, my customer service culture change client communicated the vision for a customer-centric culture with gusto. What could be more important than ensuring customers get what they need when they need it? And for the innovative culture, we emphasized how we could build upon the solid foundation they had built with a bit of innovation and talked about how they could have a larger effect on the future by combining the best of both approaches.

  3. You get what you measure – It matters little what you say if you hold folks accountable to a different set of metrics. Who wants to listen yet fail?! It’s easy to overlook this strategy yet it is vital to success. Find simple yet meaningful metrics that will measure what you’d like to occur with your culture change.

    For example, in the customer service culture change client, we changed the metrics from revenue, revenue, revenue to a focus on on-time delivery with the caveat that older was worse in terms of the metric. Thus, if you shipped an order 1 day late, you received a higher score than if you shipped the order 30 days late. It spurred interest in the customer! And for the innovative culture, we didn’t track process efficiencies solely as it didn’t encourage risk-taking. Instead, we tracked new ideas for resolving issues and trials.

  4. Make it visible – Last but not least, it’s essential to make the change visible. Give people an example of what the new culture change looks like. Find role models and make sure they are on board with the culture change. People will follow those they know, like and respect.

    For example, in the customer service culture client, a respected executive made sure he was not only available to discuss the culture change but also was visible and easily accessible. He sat in the midst of everyone involved in the culture change. There was no open door policy as no door was required! And in the innovative culture example, we congratulated team members who tried new ideas to move the company forward – whether they failed or succeeded. The idea was to encourage innovation which doesn’t occur without failure.

Few executives and companies achieve culture change smoothly and successfully. In the rare occasion of rapid success, each of these strategies was utilized. Follow these simple yet powerful strategies and success will follow.

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Stop Pushing Back on Scope Creep – Embrace It!

Written by Robert Galen on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on Stop Pushing Back on Scope Creep – Embrace It!

I was a pup of a programmer back in 1980. I was working at Sperry Univac (yes, Univac). I recall as if it was yesterday, a grizzled project manager came up to me as I was about to add a feature to the mainframe (yes, Mainframe) software I was working on.

Bob, he asked, why are you adding that feature to the I/O Sub-system? It isn’t part of the requirements nor is it part of the plan. Don’t you know about Scope Creep he asked? No, I said, I hadn’t heard of that concept.

He sat me down and began to put the fear of God in me with respect to Scope Creep. He said that it:

  • Was one of the primary contributing factors to all failed projects;
  • Was a stakeholders way of getting ‘free’ work done;
  • Was instrumental in making programmers work overtime;
  • And most importantly, it was his job to prevent it from occurring.

He said to immediately stop working on the feature and let him negotiate whether it made sense or not. I walked away from the encounter starry eyed and appreciative of my project manager. I also had a newfound wariness for scope creep in its many forms. I vowed that I’d be much more vigilant in the future against this terrible enemy.

Fast Forward a Bit…

I was introduced to the agile methods in the late 90’s. It was an introduction to the Agile Manifesto, agile principles, Scrum and Extreme Programming that very much intrigued me. They were a very different way of handling many aspects of software projects. With respect to change and scope creep, their advice was contrary to my teaching. They invited us to embrace change to the advantage of the customer—letting the customer make late-binding decisions whenever they were responsibly possible.

I remember flashing back to my project manager from Sperry Univac and it took me quite a while to come to grips with agile change management. He had taught me well it seemed.

How does Agile “handle” Scope Changes?

Let’s start with a reference from the Agile Manifesto and it’s underlying principles for general guidance. From the Manifesto there are two of the four base principles apply to scope changes:

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 

Responding to change over following a plan

And the following two principles behind the Manifesto also apply to scope changes:

  1. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
  2. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

Responsible Moments

In my coaching I often speak about responsibility when it comes to change management. For example, it is irresponsible for stakeholders to try and change content in the end games of most projects. However, early on in the discovery phases, it might be the most responsible thing they could do. So the timing of change certainly matters.

Also, continuously changing things isn’t responsible; instead it’s chaos. Technical teams are an incredibly valuable resource in most organizations, so stakeholders need to change scope and direction with care. It needs to “make sense” to the team and they need to “see” the benefit. So, selling the rationale behind the change truly matters—so that teams can buy-into the changes. 

Embracing Change

I coach agile teams to embrace responsible change. To allow the customer, normally a Product Owner in Scrum terms, to ‘drive’ the teams’ focus. That as long as the Product Owner represents the best interests of the business and customers, the team needs to try and be as adaptive as possible.

And what about change trade-offs? Well, there are no free rides in the agile methods. If a stakeholder changes their mind, I fully expect them subtract as well as add or change scope. The team has a fixed velocity and, if there’s a fixed date, then they’ll normally have to remove an equal or greater amount of work. That happens in construction projects and it should happen on software projects.

The advantage in agile projects is that the team makes everything transparent—their backlog of work, the sizes of the backlog elements, their velocity, their current progress towards any release plans; EVERYTHING.

There is no padding in either direction. This fosters integrity and honest between the team and the stakeholder when changing scope.

Emergent Understanding

Finally, one of the key underlying drivers for scope change is not from outside stakeholders, but by the internal explorations and ongoing understanding of the problem space by the team. The agile methods are an “emergent process”. They don’t even try to get things right up-front in technically complex systems development.

Instead things like design, architecture, and technical tradeoff decisions occur largely on-the-fly as challenges are discovered and solutions created. In agile terms, this is referred to as “emergent everything”—as understanding unfolds for a team as they actually learn as the implementation proceeds. This happens in all software projects, whether we acknowledge it or not—as we rarely know everything in advance.

The distinct advantage of the agile methods is that they wrap this emergence in an iterative envelope, which allows the team (and the stakeholders) to react to new learning.

Wrapping Up

I have to give credit to my inspiration for this article as it came from the PMI Post here: Fighting the Dreaded Scope Creep.

While I may have exaggerated in this article, more for theatrical intent than anything else, I am strongly opinionated about this point. The article’s title is what intrigued me. If you read the content, the author takes a much more measured stand on scope creep. But the title harkened me back to my days at Sperry.

It also forced me to want to respond. I’ve learned the hard way that you shouldn’t fight, control, document, resist, or even tolerate Scope Creep. Responsibly embracing it to your customers’ advantage is truly the way to go.

Thanks for listening,

Bob.

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Getting Buy-In and Engagement For New Requirements-Management Environments

Written by Derwyn Harris on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Getting Buy-In and Engagement For New Requirements-Management Environments

To effect change, market a process not as something new, but as something everyone is doing already. Whether your organization follows the organic or top-down approach, appeal to human nature to drive adoption of new processes and tools.

In a recent webinar on elements of successful requirements management, one of the attendees asked a question I hear all the time: “How do you get people to buy-in and participate, actively collaborate, in a new RM environment?” 

Essentially, when it comes to adopting new processes or tools, how can one help effect change in an organization? Individuals take time to learn best practices—they attend webinars, read books and articles—and get inspired to apply them at work. 

Then they face the daunting task of getting the new thing adopted. Sad to say, change is ultimately a difficult task made even more difficult by human nature. People resist change, especially within the corporate world. 

Traditionally, change can be accomplished in two ways.

The first is the ground-up, or organic, approach, in which an individual evangelizes and implements a solution for the team. This has distinct advantages because it can be more controlled and ultimately more focused. However, this process can result in cross-department conflicts or disenfranchisement by people not part of the process but who are directly impacted by the change. The resulting confusion can bring more harm to the organization as a whole, than the gains realized by the small group.

The alternate approach is a more top-down approach, wherein a corporate directive (with numerous committees and meetings) is set to standardize on a process or toolset. The advantages here are clear: providing an alignment between teams or departments. Of course, there are also issues. Selecting a universal approach or tool potentially disenfranchises large groups of people who were not part of the decision process or simply find themselves required to do more work than before in order to incorporate the new process (even when there are clear gains from doing so). Word documents are a perfect example. Although a document is by far the simplest tool for capturing written information, the long-term impact of multiple documents (organizing, updating, collaborating on, extracting information from) can be costly. Moving to a new solution may require additional time for entry, but the broader perspective is a positive gain.

So, both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. Neither is that effective.

So what can be done to improve the success of process change? Again let’s embrace an equally basic truth about human nature. Humans inherently desire to feel connected. They also desire to have that shiny new object.

A recent article in the Boston Globe describes how to effect change.

The two quotes that caught my eye:

  • “To really change how a group of people thinks and behaves, it turns out, you don’t need to change what’s inside of them, or appeal to their inner sense of virtue. You just have to convince them that everybody else is doing it.”
  • “The pressure to conform to what is typical … tends to be stronger than the pressure to follow top-down rules.”

With this in mind, market the change not as something new, but as something that everyone is doing already. Do this whether your organization follows the organic or the top-down approach.

Once you consider the early adopters, and the shiny-new-object factor, effecting change becomes simply a matter of tapping into that cool factor that makes things more interesting. When selecting a new tool, consider the user interface, intuitiveness and the cool factor as part of the decision process. These attributes will draw people in naturally and create the necessary groundswell for widespread adoption.

It will help to work with marketing or management to alert the organization that teams are being successful with change and others should follow.

In summary, change will not be truly accomplished with force, regardless of the approach. Human nature is part of the process, and we work better when we feel that our work is enjoyable and when we are connected with our coworkers.

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Increase the Perceived Benefits of Project Management Methodologies

Written by Kiron Bondale on . Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on Increase the Perceived Benefits of Project Management Methodologies

FeatureArticle Jan9 BondaleA PMI survey conducted a few years back supported the premise that companies which have instituted consistent project management practices enjoy a higher project success rate than those which have not. PMI’s March 2012 Pulse of the Profession publication stated that in organizations which used standardized project management practices, 71% of projects met their original goals and business intent which is higher than the norm.

These two statements would seem to support the merits of implementing a project management methodology (PMM). However, the December 2012 issue of PMI’s Project Management Journal includes an article which challenges this conventional wisdom. This article covers the results of a qualitative-based research study to assess the effectiveness of project management methodologies through a series of four case studies.

The research revealed that key benefits identified by instituting PMMs were supporting senior management in their drive to control, monitor, standardize and unify practices as well to help staff with lower levels of project management knowledge or experience. Unfortunately, minimal benefits were perceived by the group which you would expect would benefit the most from PMMs, namely, project managers!

Although somewhat counter-intuitive, these findings align well with my own observations of how successful organizations I’ve worked with have been at improving their project management capabilities.
PMM compliance tends to be strongest with junior practitioners as they find that PMMs act as a guide to give them structure and confidence to lean on in place of tried-and-true experience. Senior management also support the use of PMMs to the extent that compliance with a PMM increases the predictability and consistency of status reporting and governance practices.

On the other hand, experienced project managers don’t recognize the benefits to themselves as they will likely have worked with multiple PMMs over their careers and would have honed a set of practices which work best for them – in other words, they have developed their own customized PMMs.

Occasionally, there might be breakthroughs – for example, seasoned project managers who have never benefited from a fully automated project management information system might appreciate the reduction in project administration effort provided by these tools. However, even when using such solutions, flexibility or creativity constraints will exist which generate frustration for senior practitioners.

Just as a person can be spiritual without observing all or even some of the practices of a particular religion, competency at project management is not an effect of compliance with methodologies. In fact, some project managers I have observed as being totally compliant with their organization’s PMM regularly demonstrated poor judgment in the management of their projects.

The Guide to the PMBOK (Fourth Edition) states “Good practice does not mean the knowledge described should always be applied uniformly to all projects; the organization and/or project management team is responsible for determining what is appropriate for any given project.” This may also be a key reason why agile methods continue to gain new disciples – a key tenet of agile is empowering self-managing teams to define the best methods of managing their work efforts.

So what can you do to increase the perceived value of your PMM in the eyes of your senior practitioners?

Start by classifying the practices within it into the following three categories:

  1. Mandatory practices for which compliance to a standard is essential
  2. Mandatory practices for which compliance to a standard is nice to have
  3. Optional practices

An example of a practice from the first category is creating and maintaining project schedules which adhere to a set of guidelines to enable the ability to report on a project portfolio as a whole. If project managers do not follow these guidelines, it becomes impossible to support enterprise resource management or to visualize cross-project impacts.

An example within the second category is storing the current versions of key project documents within a common folder structure in an online document repository. While it is convenient to store documents across projects using a consistent folder structure, this is a “nice to have” so long as team members and stakeholders are able to locate documents for a particular project.

Lean Six Sigma practitioners might consider the third category as “waste” as these practices are unlikely to be followed by all but the most compliant project managers.

The benefit of this categorization is it allows you to focus compliance efforts where it is crucial, but provide flexibility for all other instances. While project managers might like full “artistic” freedom, most will understand the benefits of consistency where it matters. Go one better by engaging them in the development or refinement of the must-have practices. Finally, kick it up a notch by establishing practices to address some of the pain points experienced by more seasoned project managers and you may successfully turn your former Luddites into advocates!

As Peter Senge said “We all know the difference in ourselves between doing what we’re here to do versus doing what someone said we ought to do. That’s the difference between aspiration and compliance.”

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