What ever happened to Digital? The Cloud? Agile? Flattening IT’s org chart? ITIL/ITSM? Or whatever other transformational change was supposed to, well, transform IT but instead petered out into just another disappointing management fad?
There’s no one culprit. But here are a few of the more popular preventable reasons that IT change efforts die on the vine.
Culprit #1: Wrong methodology
Sometimes, the change methodology is, not to put too fine a point on it, a chump’s game. Most reorganizations fall into this category.
Preventing reorganization failures is simple: Don’t reorganize. Recognize that if you want a more effective organization, redrawing the IT org chart is about as promising as the legendary Save-the-Titanic methodology of rearranging its deck chairs.
Culprit #2: Cheaping out
Sometimes the hoped-for change was underbudgeted. Understanding this one might take a history lesson.
Back in the late 1990s IT planners figured out that its data architects’ practice of saving money by only storing the last two digits of any date field had outlived its usefulness and had become lethal in the extremis. Remarkably, addressing this — the Y2K crisis — turned into what just might have been the most successful IT change effort in history.
Which led to the most colossal failure of appreciation in the history of the business world. In any event, in the months following the worldwide success of IT’s Y2K remediation efforts, various groups conducted post-non-mortem analyses to figure out what had, mystifyingly, gone right.
Among the critical success factors, one stood out: Around the world, Y2K remediation efforts weren’t starved for resources. And oh, by the way, the Y2K crisis was neither a hoax nor the result of incompetence. But given our species’ proclivity to assign blame whenever we have the opportunity, there’s little point trying to convince anyone.
But still, we might decide to learn from this success and give our change efforts a chance by giving them enough staff and budget.
Culprit #3: What starts out as a fad stays a fad
Ready for another organizational change killer? Here’s a simple one: They became failed fads because the whole reason for trying them in the first place was that they were a trend someone influential had spotted and promoted. They became fads, that is, because they started out as fads.
Culprit #4: The 7x7x7 challenge
The first three culprits are the easy ones. Or at least, they’re conceptually easy. Increasing project budgets, for example, certainly isn’t easy to do. It’s just easy to understand.
Now comes the hard one — the one where even if you do everything right the hill you’ll have to climb is steep. It’s like this:
Among the factors that make change hard is the need for all participants and stakeholders to have a deep and intuitive understanding of what the change will feel like when they’re living in it.
To understand the challenge, imagine that someone invented a flying car, and for some strange reason IT received the assignment of making a corporate fleet of airborne automotive vehicles real. What would that feel like. Pretty cool, right?
Well …
If you wanted flying cars to succeed, you’d need to give everyone who might drive one of the cars an intuitive feeling of what navigating through heavy traffic would be like.
“Terrifying” is the word that comes to mind. Spotting bikes, motorized scooters, other drivers, and the occasional fearless pedestrian is hard enough in a 2D driving environment. Your company’s drivers would have to spot vehicles above and below, and at all diagonal vectors, too. Even something as seemingly simple as a 3D turn signal gets complicated in a hurry.
Making this change successful would call for more than a souped-up drivers’ education course. You’re going to need future drivers to gain an intuitive sense of what driving in 3D traffic feels like. You’ll need photo- and haptically-realistic simulators.
Which gets us (finally!) to the 7x7x7 challenge.
Think about how you might describe how things are done right now in their pre-change state, as you would to train new employees. That might call for a PowerPoint slide with seven linked boxes on it, seven being the number of items viewers can easily grasp at a glance.
It’s a view that’s easy to grasp, but too superficial to be complete. To be useful, each of those boxes would need more explanation. So, figure you’d have to create explanatory PowerPoint slides for each box in the higher-level slides, with “explanatory” meaning that each of the seven boxes would need seven explanatory boxes of their own. That’s seven by seven: 49 boxes.
The 49-box view of things is more helpful but still oversimplifies the current state by quite a lot. It isn’t until you craft seven-box views for each of these seven boxes to provide enough information — 343 boxes worth in total — to fully describe how things happen now.
That’s the level of depth that the change’s stakeholders will need in order to understand what living inside the change will feel like — for it to be real.
Making a change sticky calls for an equivalent 343-box account of the future state.
And oh, by the way, this has little to do with the essential analysis required to make sure these new 343 boxes deliver the old results, and deliver them better. Living inside them doesn’t make them better.
And “better” won’t happen immediately either. The current way of doing things has, by now, been sanded and varnished to a shine. Even if the new way of doing things would theoretically be an improvement, it won’t be an actual improvement until it’s been sanded and varnished to its own shine.
The 343-box perspective isn’t limited to processes and practices. It describes the process optimization methodologies and frameworks organizations use to design the new 343 boxes; the new organizational chart (the real one, not the oversimplified version that shows only a couple of layers); not to mention the business culture a leader might want to change.
In the end, large-scale changes are hard to nail into place. Sometimes that’s because leaders make easy-to-avoid mistakes. But often it’s because of how difficult it is to help everyone feel what the result is supposed to feel like once the organization tries to make the change real.
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Read More from This Article: Why IT transformations don’t stick
Source: News