Management of change, feared by most program and project managers needs to be and can be carefully handled across the 3 key layers of an organisation – Strategic, Design & Transition, and Operational.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
In my previous post I talked about the methodology used by Sentinel consultants to assess the extent and impact of new and updated technology platforms and services. I’m going to build on that in this by looking at the delegated nature of Change Management and the different layers and roles within an organisation who need to be involved.
Most change happens at the Operational layer. Existing systems have been deployed, with known errors and issues, and the user community has been becoming acquainted with the “features”. They will unearth bugs, performance and configuration issues and these will need to dealt with in an expedited manner. This falls within the remit of the Service Delivery and the Operations’ Managers. They will turn to the support teams and the SMEs, and try to find workarounds, quick fixes, get to the root cause and implement a resolution. This is business as usual. Users learn to live with the quirks of the systems and in many cases form their informal support groups with shared knowledge which bypass formal processes. There are organisations who have recognised these “knowledge communities” and appointed one of their members as the lead, with instructions to make sure that issues get logged and become visible to the SDMs and Operations’ managers. Visibility of issues is key, especially when issues are related to configuration drift; how many variations of a desktop image can you support and how do you support and enforce standardisation? Configuration and Drift management must be fully deployed to enable standardisation. The ability to discover assets, to detect unapproved changes, to lock down without restricting functionality; these are part of the base set of tools for any ITSM delivery organisation. These can be complemented by Digital Experience Management systems and their ability to perform to gather configuration data, analyse and automate remediations and gather user sentiment – Nexthink is an excellent example.
The more disruptive changes come from the Strategic layer; market innovation, updates and new release of current software, the drive to become more efficient and effective, to increase productivity, to better serve and retain customers, all of these contribute to the need to impact the top and bottom lines. Assuming that due diligence has been carried out – and you will be surprised just how much business is generated on the golf course – a business case created and expected outcomes documented the changes coming down from this level will be major, with the possibility that every business domain will be affected. Clearly there will be technology change, but the organisational structure may need to re-aligned, processes and ways of working remodeled, staff retrained, automation introduced, data integrity and quality controls put in place, security mechanisms updated. The successful introduction of these “disruptors” requires close managed by skilled practitioners; a program manager with MSP qualifications and experience of change across all of the business domains; a team underneath them who are specialists in those business domains; metrics to track the progress and effectiveness of the implementations; user sentiment collection and a communication plan and mechanism to manage the expectations of all the stakeholders.
The role of the Design and Transition layer is that of a gatekeeper; at this level another set of due diligence activities are carried out and changes can be refused, delayed, put into a backlog based on priority and urgency and pending justification. How do you keep business as usual running smoothly while introducing pebbles and boulders into the gears? Skilled Change and Service Transition managers are key; people who know that every domain within TOPICS is important and cannot be ignored. A proper impact and risk assessment and a mitigation plan need to be in place and to be actively managed. You’ll notice the emphasis on “actively managed”; there are too many organisations cutting corners for the sake of saving a few bucks, and only pay lip service to this element, and then wonder why they have not achieved the outcomes they wanted. The importance of this layer cannot be underestimated; without this there is “chaos”.