Change Matters - Overlook the people issues... at your peril!

Paul is a Principal Consultant at ProActive Services with extensive experience working with clients on service improvement programmes.

In this article, he discusses some of the cultural change issues that we often come up against and ways in they have been addressed.

8 Steps to Cultural Change

Improving delivery of IT services has always required a multidisciplinary approach that moves beyond the traditional process led approach which is now acknowledged in the latest release of ITIL® Version 3. However it is my experience that many Managers continue to underestimate the criticality of addressing the people issues when embarking on service improvement programmes and as a result fail to achieve their goals and objectives. This is a frequent theme in surveys.

When working with organisations undertaking service improvement programmes, I continually utilise and reference a range of frameworks and theories in order to be effective as I can to assist them achieve their objectives. I find the issues that relate to organisational change the most challenging and it comes as no surprise to find that research and studies regarding the success of programmes are regularly quoting around 70% failure rates where cultural change was a key requirement to success.

Organisational change theorists and proponents have published countless books and articles on the subject and one of most useful and easy to understand texts that I have come across is by John P. Kotter so it was pleasing to see that his eight steps are referenced in the ‘Continual Service Improvement’ book of ITIL Version 3.

Kotter researched close to 100 organisations to understand what they did to transform themselves to winners and found that most people did not handle large scale change well and made predictable mistakes. He identified eight main reasons as to why transformations fail and developed an eight step model for organisations to use when undergoing change.

It is important to note that in his follow up research, Kotter observed that people mostly “see and feel” change rather than “analyse and think” about change and that successful organisations undergoing transformational change focussed on showing people what the problems were, how to resolve them and also worked on enhancing their feelings about change.

Kotter’s 8 steps are described in further detail on the following pages, along with practical examples of where it has – and hasn’t – worked.

1. Increase Urgency

Just because an organisation initiates a service improvement programme, it is rarely enough to get people up and ready to move. It is fairly common to find to complacency, fear or just hesitation and whatever the reason for the initial resistance, it usually means that the service improvement programme never gets off the ground or soon stalls if it does.

A sense of urgency needs to be created so that staff will stir and be ready to get going. Quite often, I find that the urgency of a service improvement programme has been intensified by a specific business requirement or as a result of general customer dissatisfaction.

The more successful improvement programmes I have worked on have been able to increase their sense of urgency due to other business projects driving change, such as company mergers or acquisitions where IT have to play a key role.

Other successes have been where process and/or organisational design has been required to ensure a more successful roll out of new technologies.

One of our clients conducted a customer satisfaction survey as the first initiative of the improvement programme and modified the programme accordingly to the feedback and recommendations made.

Another organisation engaged a leading TV presenter to interview their key customers and also their internal department heads to seek their feedback regarding delivery of IT services. This was all captured on camera and then played back to all staff in facilitated sessions. Although some of the feedback was surprisingly positive, other feedback was quite sobering. This stung the organisation into action to develop a series of improvement initiatives.

The more successful improvement programmes I have worked on have been able to increase their sense of urgency due to other business projects driving change such as company mergers or acquisitions where IT have to play a key role. Other successes have been where process and/or organisational design has been required to ensure a more successful roll out of new technologies.

2. Build the guiding team

When embarking on a service improvement programme, I find that it is quite common that one particular individual is assigned to manage the programme and implement the improvements and only engage relevant staff on a needs basis. In these cases the individual soon starts to struggle with the immensity of the task at hand as it is usually a long battle to get staff involved and get the change rolling.

It is critical to lead change from the top level and the more successful organisations understand the roles and competencies required for change and assign teams to provide leadership and guidance for the rest of the organisation undergoing change.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter termed these roles as change strategists who are responsible for identifying the need for change, creating a vision and providing leadership; change implementers who are the staff who act as change agents to “make it happen” and manage the day to day process for change, and change recipients who must adopt and adapt to the change. The change recipients represent the largest group and their response and reaction to the call for change will eventually determine whether the change is successful or not.

My observation is that the more cohesive the management team, the more successful the change. In many of the programmes I work on, the management team usually forms the change leadership team and supervisory staff the change implementers.

I always discuss these roles at the programme planning sessions and ask clients to assign staff with specific responsibilities for programme, project and change management.

It is important to select the right staff with the appropriate leadership skills for the change team and they should be the energetic and proficient. It may be appropriate to place outsiders in the team if you need to stimulate thinking and generate new ideas. It has been particularly rewarding to engage business representatives at the outset of improvement programmes but I must say there is usually reluctance from one or both parties to do this.

Strategies of more successful organisations I have worked with include identifying and working with the key “influencers” in the organisation to promote the benefits of the improvement programme, carefully selecting, screening and publicly endorsing change champions within the IT department and creating a specialist CSI team to provide governance for the programme and lead the change.

3. Get the vision rightHere it is important to remember Kotter’s observation that people mostly always “see and feel” change. A vision for change needs to be vivid, simple and vibrant so that staff feel uplifted. It produces a clear sense of direction in what needs to change, how the new organisation will be and the sense of urgency required.

I continue to find that an effective vision for change is the one of the most difficult things to achieve and I am amazed how many organisations still don’t understand how powerful visioning techniques can be.