Avoid Big Change Up-Front — Start where you are

There are a plethora of articles scattered across the internet that will guide you on a successful delivery transition. From implementing Scrum, Kanban, PRINCE2, PMBOK, Design Thinking, Lean Product Playbook, The Lean Startup, ShapeUp, the Spotify model, and many more — there are many articles that will tell you all about the benefits of a given delivery approach, and the simple steps you too can follow to reap the rewards of that new way.

And what do us writers do to create engagement in those articles? Well, we break down a complex series of principles and systems into some simplified and consumable steps looking something like this:

Does your transformation model look like this?

While fantastic models for developing that early conceptualisation and engagement — this simplification often consolidates your delivery transformation into what I like to call big change up front (BCUF).

Now change management has been around a long time — so perhaps there are some things we can learn from the past?

The problem with Big Change Up Front (BCUF)

It is incredibly easy to latch on to a framework when you’re running out of ideas and are looking for a place to turn.

Frustrations set in, the delivery methods you have in place can create growing friction — until finally a tipping point is reached, and the business is convinced radical change is required. And suddenly, you decide to introduce another new method of working or major process.

What happens next is the overhead of trying to introduce, train, adopt that comprehensive new method — and all the while trying to ensure the business lets go of the old process without losing any continuity or velocity.

You’ve doubled your processes — balancing the old and new — overshadowing any perceived benefit this new method may provide.

XKCD reminding us why change needs to be carefully considered — https://xkcd.com/927/

And there you are — suddenly looking at the pile of process debt (business process equivalent to technical debt) that was your old process, while desperately trying to fill all the inevitable holes you’ve overlooked in what it actually takes to turn an overly simplified process model into something that actually takes your specific business and its people, and helps them deliver effective work.

So how do we approach change in a consumable manner?

Right-sized change is like eating an elephant

Change is like eating an elephant — you need to take it one bite at a time

With a build-up of process debt, just like a build-up of technical debt, we must regularly pay down that debt in a balanced and consumable way.

Like eating an elephant — we need to take it one bite at a time.

There are many ways to create powerful small changes — from limiting the investment, making those changes meaningful, and making them within reach⁴.

These will create momentum — small at first, but over time the flywheel effect⁵ will create greatness as Jim Collins taught us all about in his classic book “Good to Great”:

Good to great comes about by a cumulative process — step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel — that adds up to sustained and spectacular results⁵

It’s all about getting the momentum to trigger that tipping point. Which starts with a catalyst that gets the wheel turning, before the momentum of a compelling change process can take hold.

How how do you start?

Start where you are

We should heed the learnings of the greats like Kotter and his 8 steps of change³ — who reminds us of a number of important stages to really priming an organization for change in terms of structure, motivation, and alignment.

But it’s important to note that Kotter’s model was focused on supporting that paradigm shift of change from state A to B — bringing about, embedding, and stabilizing change in the new desired state. It says nothing about the adaptability modern organizations need to stay on the leading edge — with concepts like the need to outpace your competitors through the build-measure-learn loop⁶ requiring perpetual inspection and adaptation.

The modern way is to employ continuous improvement as we learned from Toyota⁷ and Kanban, regularly inspect and adapt as we learned from Scrum⁸, and the culture required to create safety for calculated risk-taking and experimentation from Westrum⁹.

Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC

In all of these approaches to support change and improvement — they all benefit from starting from your current people, processes, and tooling — and using empiricism and learning to drive change and improvement.

We need to start where we are¹⁰ — investigating, testing, and understanding our current culture, state, systems, process, tooling, and people. Yes, we need to establish a vision and build a coalition for change like Kotter taught us, but to do that we first need to observe and test:

The current state should be investigated and observed directly to make sure it is fully understood¹⁰

From our observations — we can then assess the guiding principles and systems of various methodologies and frameworks, and in turn, select the one that is most consistent with your business environment.

Any road will get us there

Don’t get bogged down with selecting that silver bullet framework or methodology — forming a vision around a utopian idea of performing that process company-wide. Success for your company doesn’t mean adopting something like Scrum, SAFe, Kanban etc. to the specification.

Be wary of starting with a framework of methodology

Instead, success is applying the Agile values and principles to continually adapt and improve your internal methods — applying continuous improvement to create something that works uniquely for you.

If that ends up looking like SAFe — then that’s fine, so long as it is truly solving the challenges your company has to complete the build-measure-learn loop⁶ quicker than your competitors.

Start where you are — use empiricism and validated learning to understand the current state your business exists within, and select and drive the change towards mechanisms that supports your specific business environment.

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there — Lewis Caroll

References

1. Shien. E (1985), Organizational Culture and Leadership, Jossey-Bass Publishers
2. Hearsum. P (2019), ITIL 4 transition: look no further than the Guiding Principles, axelos.com
3. Kotter. J (1996), Leading Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press
4. Heath. C, Heath. D (2010), Switch: How to change things when change is hard, Random House
5. Collins. J (2001), Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, HarperBusiness
6. Ries. E (2011), The Lean Startup, Currency; 1 edition
7. Ohno, Taiichi (1988), Toyota production system: beyond large-scale production. Portland, Productivity Pres
8. Schwaber. K, Sutherland. J (2017), The Scrum Guide, Scrum.org
9. Westrum. R (2004), A typology of organisational cultures, Quality & Safety in Health Care
10. AXELOS Limited (2019), ITIL Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition, AXELOS