Don't Dis-Empower Change

Guilty as charged

Photo courtesy of OpenSourceWay
http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/

I never really thought about it before, but as I wrote  my last post about the challenges of task execution caused by work overload I felt pangs of guilt.

I realized that as I talk at work about too much email, I am guilty of communicating acceptance of status quo. Of avoiding the hard steps to make a change.

NOT exactly what I tell customers to do. That Service Management being a culture just as much as it is processes and tool support.

#1 Look carefully in the mirror

A number of years ago, I was talking with a customer - I'll call him Paul - about how speed up Change by reducing bureaucracy and speed up decision-making in IT. The customer explained that they were using a Virtual Approval Group on email - whatever that was.

Paul explained that he would send out emails to the team for approvals. I asked how long it took to get approvals, "5 weeks" he said.

Next I asked how many changes requests he receives a month. "About 100" came the reply. So you get another 125 or so while waiting for 1 to be approved, I ventured.

 "We're talking about the power grid and controls", Paul explained, "every procedure we have is based on Federal regulations. If we do something wrong it could cause a blackout or worse!"

#2 - Show your ability to Change 

Undaunted by his response, I asked Paul whether he could simplify the processes, reviews, audits, reports and approvals. He thought through whether his team could list out all the government required activities and which were defined internally.

A few weeks later he emailed me back with nice note sharing that most of the activities were based on internal requests - and could be streamlined significantly. He also sheepishly commented that they had found a few gaps which needed to be closed.

He expected the impact could be significant. By defining clear steps for technical planning and approval, then tightening up the formal approval Paul thought that changes could be approved in 1 week - reducing the elapsed time to implement by half.

The real difference

We all face constraints.The key is to figure out which are reasonable and which should be challenged and then taking charge.

It's up to you to put in the extra work to not just drive change, but also talk about it consistently so that you don't inadvertently undermine all your hard work.

Was this useful?

If you found this post useful, please help me share it with others and encourage them to subscribe to the blog.