On Change

Organizational change is difficult.

Jon Nitto President of a SME (emphasis mine)

It’s a liberating change. They can support more clients better and faster. But without us taking them through the process, they didn’t believe in it. We still have work to do. It has taken almost a year for everyone to grasp what the product is doing, but more important, where our company is going. And with that knowledge, we’re ready for our next challenge.

Some good lessons

1) Change Management is not one or two meetings, not a couple of weeks; Almost a year

2) Your people can’t do it alone, effective leadership means that as a general manager; Change needs you, or it fails

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Real SMB IT: BHAGS or Baby Steps?

 

Big Hairy Audacious Goals

Jonathan Fields dives into a great comparison of goal setting via James Collins’ BHAG’s (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) vs. more incremental Baby Steps in this post titled; Goalsetting Smackdown: Big Hairy Audacious vs Baby Steps

He prefers BHAG’s – follow the link to read more!

But First…….

I have to make a preface here! If you are a dozen people in a dorm or basement intent on generating revenue directly through technology by inventing the Next Big Thing, or building that killer iPhone app the world does not know it needs yet, this is not for you.

Because in that type of environment you have (by default!) set your sights on that Big Hairy Audacious goal, the Game Changer! the World Beater!

But for the majority of us in the SME space?

Well, we run on a continuum from fairly low technical maturity where technology is just to run accounting and E-Mail, to higher maturity levels where technology is used to enable and improve business processes. Either by assisting in revenue generation or reducing costs.

In our case, we are not trying to invent the next Twitter or Friendfeed.

Sure – We want to beat the world too – but by reducing cost of sales, getting word of our product or service out there. And reducing our SG&A.

And in our IT Goal setting, do we want BHAG’s or baby steps?

Well – Here is one warning with BHAG’s when it comes to IT goals.

The effects of change on both business and IT processes from any change in your IT and IT strategy are not linear. Like mortgage interest, they are compounded.

And like compounded interest, a little change can have some big time effects. And larger changes? if you change X Y and Z all at once, odds are that something is going to break, and as 80% of outages and IT related downtime is just finding out what broke. Well you see the risk.

Sure Keep Your Eye on the Prize!

Maybe that goal, or that prize is a BHAG – a Game Changer.

But I recommend you get to it by baby steps. Or as I have called it before, Learn To Dance.

Step, Pause, Adjust, then step again.

Enough from me – which do you prefer?

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Photo Credit NASA

An Insidious Disease

Last week I wrote a post referencing Tim Walkers Watch out for chokepoints! In that post I wrote that IT can be a key bottleneck in those chokepoints. 

Both directly, and indirectly. 

In the comments to that post, Mr. Walker noted that when it comes to indirect chokepoints;

..indirect ones are far more insidious, like a wasting disease.

He is absolutely correct.

This indirect chokepoint is simply process waste.

This concept is nothing new, Michael Hammer and James Champy wrote a best seller about it almost 20 years ago; Reengineering The Corporation.

Here’s the Problem

In most cases, these process waste problems are invisible. People don’t recognize that the many steps, handoffs, and pieces of work that they perform are wasting time, money, and efficiency.

And unless you as a SME manager are involved, no one will care about it.

It is not like this waste is going to instantly sink your big deal or contract, it is just slow, leaking, wasted time and money.

And IT can’t do much about it.

These type of insidious diseases cannot be fixed by your technology staff or provider on their own. Because even if they do see it. Fixing it must be driven from the top.

A Real World Example

Using Microsoft Sharepoint Team Services (the freely available addition to licensed copies of MS Windows Server, not the full MS Office Sharepoint Server) I built three applications to remove that type of process waste.

Of those three applications, one of them has been successful, one was successful for a short period of time, the third was never used.

Here is why

The successful tool that I built was a brand new request – a manager needed to solve a new issue. So there was no fighting the way we always done it around here….

For the second one, another manager who was aware of our process issues worked with his team to do some process improvement on the old ad hoc process as it existed – this worked well until he left after about a year. His internally promoted replacement just let it go into misuse – back to the old way we always do it around here.

For the third, even though I had provided it, and demonstrated how it would reduce rework, and decrease wasted time, the divisional manager liked it but did not drive using it – and everyone on that team were too comfortable with the way we always do it around here.

The Lesson

Some things can bubble up from the grass roots.

But change can’t.

With this type of insidious waste, while technology can help remove it, technologists cannot do it alone – because it is change, and change must be driven from the top.

It requires strategic management of your IT. Not a tactical plan.

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Change Or Die

Succinct isn’t it?

That title is taken from an article at strategy+business titled; Change Management: Who’s in Charge? by Richard Rawlinson, Ashley Harshak, and David Suarez.

The article describes organizational change in a large organization.

But if you think that those of us in the SMB space are not as resistant to change than our larger counterparts, you are wrong.

And change is not a new financial program here, or manufacturing there. Those are technical issues.

….transformations succeed when top executives pay attention

Because change is not a technical issue.

It is a people one.

And a business one.

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ITIL Change Management and the Larger SME

Massive Change

In this previous post, I covered Change Management and smaller businesses in the SMB space. This one is for larger SME organizations (first post on ITIL Change Management is located here)

The official ITIL definition of the Change Management process is;

..the addition, modification, or removal of approved, supported or baselined hardware, network, software application, environment ….

But in simpler terms, the goal is to have change occur in the environment in a consistent and controlled way. And this covers any change in your Configuration Items (CI’s) within the IT environment -  your standard Move / Add / Change (MAC).

As I mentioned  in the post  for  smaller  businesses; The important point is that it must be managed.

Larger organizations are (by definition) more complex than smaller businesses, yet too often changes to the infrastructure are well meaning but unplanned modifications. These modification can cause things to break.

This larger SMB / SME complexity demands that more discipline be taken in the processes.

Three of the areas that require more discipline and diligence for larger SME organizations are;

• Change Review

• Tools

• Management

Change Review

For  larger organizations, a more formalized change review process is required.

Quite simply, While the basic questions may remain the same,in a larger organization one or two people may no longer have all the answers;

What Changes are coming?
Why is the change required?
Has the existing configuration been reviewed?
What is the risk & impact (classification); low, medium, high?
Are there external factors affecting the change schedule?
what is the plan B?

Tools

The formalized text in the ITIL processes cover; build, test, implement, review, update CI.

Nice to read, but even as larger SME businesses, we don’t have the complete duplicated environmental resources of a GE or IBM.  Still at this stage of our business, software tools such as MS Word & Excel don’t cut it anymore.

By this point you have, or are considering, more formalized tool sets for managing configuration and change management. Depending on your size, and the granularity of your configuration items, the tool sets may be different. (CI granularity will be a different post)

But automation in the tracking and management of these is now required.

Management

As you might have noticed, by this time, management and commitment are required.

As this eWeek article by Paula Musich points out; (emphasis is mine)

Despite the discipline that change and configuration management tools can impose on managing server configurations, a continued lack of control over the process and procedures for change management exists.

Management commitment means;

Unauthorized changes cannot happen.

Configuration audits, must happen.

Change reviews must happen.

Failure to update the CMDB must not happen.
Photo Credit

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ITIL Change Management And The Smaller Business

The first post on ITIL Change Management is located here.

The official ITIL definition of the Change Management process is;

“..the addition, modification, or removal of approved, supported or baselined hardware, network, software application, environment ….”

At its simplest; Change Management is the balance between the need for a change & the impact, or possible impact on your organization.

For a smaller business, you do not need complex software, a Change Log template in something like Microsoft Word will do.

The important point is that it must be managed, and it must be updated.

Managed – The Warning!

By managed, I mean that You; the small business owner or manager must be part of the IT conversation with your IT provider.

In a smaller organization you may not need a formalized change board, but without you being part of the IT conversation, it will fail.

Communication

Ideally all changes should be discussed in advance (you do meet with your IT provider weekly right?) In this discussion the following questions should be asked;

- What Changes are coming?
- Why is the change required?
- Has the existing configuration been reviewed?
- What is the risk & impact, low, medium, high?
- what is the plan B?

This is also the opportunity to verify times and possible schedule conflicts with the change.

Trust, But Verify

For your next meeting, initially you may want the change log brought to you. Later on, random audit checks may suffice. But it is critical that the changes are documented. At a minimum, it will be your change log, and if there was a modification to an existing CI, (Configuration Item, my first post on ITIL is here) the CMDB or configuration management database (or in a small business,configuration document) must be updated.

Lets tie this up with the example I used previously where IT technician number two reversed some device changes that were necessary to allow email to work with your mobile devices.

- With technician number 1, The change, impact and urgency is discussed
- existing configuration is reviewed
- change to device(s) is made
- change logs and device configuration documents are updated

Lets assume that technician number 2, that reversed it, made an unauthorized change.

Your documentation allows the mistake to be rectified quickly. But this is where your management comes in; unauthorized changes are not to be permitted.

If technician umber 2 was following the process, when the existing configuration document was reviewed, the change and its purpose would be clear.

UPDATE: Change Management for the alrger SME is here.

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ITIL & The SMB Part 5 Change Managment

Change Management is the last of the anchor 4 processes. It can also be the hardest, and the most difficult for SMB’s to do. (Part 1 of this series is here)

Yet without it, a lot of your previous work is wasted. For example, you have taken the time and effort to document all your CI’s as per the configuration management process, then the next day someone changes it.

For a real world example;

80 percent of system failures are due to change, and 80 percent of the “time-to-fix” lay in establishing just what changes had taken place.

I’m thinking of making this one a couple of posts, first a general summary, then breaking down some possibilities dependant upon organization size. (ie smaller businesses vs. more mid-market)

Within ITIL the definition of Change Management is;

…the addition, modification, or removal of approved, supported or baselined hardware, network, software application, environment ….

The intent of the process is to ensure that there are standard methods & processes of implementing change to the IT environment. That includes planning for the possibility that the change fails.

It covers any, and all, changes to the environment as to ensure that the changes are carefully contolled and consistent.

The fairly dry ITIL texts summarize the process as;

classification
Authorization & planning
Management & Coordination
Management Information

Yeah Right.

ITIL Masters that have done multi-million dollar implementations can keep those. Each of these breaks down into numerous issues, but again as this whole series is for a high level overview, I am keeping my poetic licence for over simplification.

The SMB Translation

Classification

Classification of the change can be simply considered as the risk or severity of the change. Will the change have a minimal effect on your business. (ie. a new printer is being installed.) Or is there a severe risk. (ie nobody can work)

Authorization and Planning

ITIL lingo gets into the concepts of Change Review Boards etc. In our SMB space it means knowing what and when. (noon is NOT a good time to install an upgrade on your e-mail server) And the planning is what the hell are you doing if it screws up. It is also the time to review the current configuration and the reasons for it.

Management & Coordination

Like the above, who needs to know that the email server is going to out of commission for an upgrade this Sunday? And if you have a Monday deadline for some project and people will be working on the weekend, You may want to schedule another date.

Management Information

I have gone over this previously yes, the ho-hum documentation and updates required. Too easy to forget – but critical not to. As well as the updates to your Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

This also covers the metrics that you can utilize;

- Visibility into the numbers and types of changes including success and failure rates
- How many In progress, completed, or in other stages of the pipeline
- problems that have occurred from change (fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!)
- and the costs of change, including resources or downtime

Next post will cover some examples.

Update: Change Management and the Smaller Business is here.

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Change – It’s Personal

An excellent blog post by Vaughan Merlyn on personal change and change management;

But the real point is a lesson in change management. If my colleagues had known, or had flushed out my personal value system, and related the change in browser to my “need for speed” I would have jumped at the change – no hesitation. Instead, they threw features at me, or benefits that I just did not relate to or was not interested in.

As a Business Technology Manager in the SMB/SME space, I know that change is an ongoing battle.

(you know it is a challenge when I use a word like “Battle” don’t you?)

When I see a phone call that requires 5 people to have a meeting to gather 3 small data points regarding a single project – and I know that I can put those data points within a few mouse clicks – it can seem so obvious to “Git ‘R Done”.

But it is change.

It’s the way it was “always done”

As Mr. Merlyn points out – it all comes down to WIFM – “What’s in it for me”

I know that it is incumbent upon me to present, and articulate WIFM to those 5 people. And I know that I ain’t no natural “sales guy”.

I know that to articulate it, I have to go in with open questions and options – because I will not always know with full accuracy the WIFM buttons of each of those 5 people.

Is it stepping out of the comfort zone? Sure.

Is it necessary? – You better believe it!

Tips from SMB/SME Managers on how they prefer technolgy change recommendations always welcome!