Wednesday 27 February 2013

You Can Lead a Horse to Water but it takes a Good Change Management Process to Make it Drink


Looking around the room where I am writing this gave me the perfect inspiration for the beginning of a Blog I've been wanting to write for a while but never had a way to structure it in own irreverent style. 

I'm currently neck deep in reviewing, amending and updating documents: statements of work, proposals, designs etc... (It's a busy day) and to do this I print them all out and go through them with a pencil and make my changes on this treeware I have created. I have M*******t Word, I have the ability to turn on track changes and that would be a much greener and efficient way of doing the task I am embroiled in, but for some reason this is the way I do it and it would take a metaphorical team of horses to make me change my behaviour. I'm the proverbial tradesman with a bag of tools but I will use the hammer in all circumstances.

Now this is a small trivial example but to those of you have released new systems into businesses you'll see how this problem, and others like it, scale out to be much a much bigger issue for enterprises. 

In my Salesforce.com and Cloud career I have spent most of my time scoping, designing and creating systems that encourage a collaborative and joined up way of working for businesses, the 360 degree view that Salesforce claim is not just a clever marketing message, it's an achievable target that you can hit with the right planning and vision, but building and deploying the system is only half the battle.

Now to go back to my original point, everyone has their own ways, their own little systems and processes that they go through in their day to day job and if you manage a team, trust me when I say the next line. 

You don't know how your team are doing what they are doing day to day!

I'll ask you a simple question to quantify that statement, how many of you reading this get critical information that they need to run their business from a spreadsheet that "someone threw together a while ago" as a temporary workaround? How many of you know where the data comes from that goes into that spreadsheet?

Now for the sake of variety I am actually going to loop my blog round to my original point in the beginning and actually finish on the topic I started with ;)

Imagine the scene, you've just paid out for Salesforce.com licenses, your implementation partner has come in and configured, customised and set up your org so that its now doing what you need it to do and three weeks after the launch you still receive the spreadsheet on Monday Morning with the sales figures for the previous week, what went wrong?

Change Management is a vital piece of the puzzle when implementing new technology, an old axiom springs to mind when I write this "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink". While this is true I'm hoping my audience doesn't consist of horse trainers or my next statement won't make much sense. You are not working with horses! You are working with intelligent people who want to do their job well. You are however trying to change their world and this is where we go back to my metaphorical team of horses being needed to make people change. But it doesn't have to be that way! change Management is not a hammer, it's not a stick you use to beat people into compliance, it's collaborative, it's informative, it's a way of educating people to see the benefits of doing things the "new way" . It's a vital component of any project where people are being asked to modify the way they work.

I'd like to finish this with a final analogy (last one I promise) and  a question that I hope will emphasise the importance of change management. A person who has been digging ditches for 3 years with a spade is suddenly presented on Friday afternoon with a JCB digger, no warning, no training, no consultation. Ask yourself this question, what do you think you'll find them doing on Monday morning?


1 comment:

  1. Great post and, above all, a great final point.

    ReplyDelete