Archive for the ‘change management’ Tag

Toolbox: Seven Questions of Change Management

I’m always working with my teams to accommodate change. Whether those are small changes or large, considering Peter de Jager’s Seven Questions of Change Management has made me better at introducing those changes smoothly.

On beyond the who, what, and where classic questions, some questions are immediately in need of an answer when changes occur.
In short they are:

  1. Why is this change taking place?
  2. What’s in it for me?
  3. What do I do next?
  4. What stays the same?
  5. What could go wrong?
  6. What’s going to be difficult?
  7. When are we going to get there? (And how will we know we’ve arrived?)

I’m still not as good as I could be but when I go back to troubleshoot problems associated with change, I can often identify which question was left unanswered when I initially proposed a new thing.

Isn’t It Ironic?

Within a couple of days of posting the last blog post, The Pursuit of Perfection, a new and shiny opportunity came up.  It seemed like something that would be worth creating a whole host of new details and running around and changing things at the last minute — all the things that I was aware would stress people out.  Nevertheless, there’s a balance and responding to new situations is part of the balance.

Somewhere in one of the several things I have been reading recently about organizational culture and change management, I read the statement that change is more accepted when there is respect for existing roles and responsibilities.  Keeping that in mind while I made an (in the end futile) attempt to change the plans already in motion meant that at least this adidn’t do more damage than good.

 

The Pursuit of Perfection

I sometimes describe ThatCon as “ambitious”, by which I mean that we’re constantly trying to do better, bigger, and more exciting than we’ve done before.  One-upping our own past performance is part of the fun.   Of course there’s a downside to this.

There’s a time in the convention timeline when we have to just execute what we’ve already committed to and not subject people to more shifts and adjustments in their plans.  No matter how awesome a new idea is,  its cost in terms of stress and potential communications problems  gets magnified as we get closer to the event.  I’m noticing that different people have different thresholds for when that moment has arrived.  For me, it was about two weeks ago. For Mr. Enthusiastic (not his real name, of course), it’s possible that moment wont be here until we’re sweeping up at the end.

ThatCon will be live in less than a week.   Right now, the pursuit of perfection is causing frayed tempers and tired staff.  It’s true that every detail we get right now can save us a significant amount of time not fixing problems at runtime.  But no NEW details, please!