The Need for Data
A lot of people will speak volumes about the idea of organizational change management with simple questions like “Do you follow the Kotter method?” or “Do you follow a Six Sigma approach?” Seriously, I was asked that question once.
The problem statement lies in the fact that most folks are less ready than they think for organizational change, but they’re ready to follow organizational change management processes. It’s a very simple fact that unless there is data to support the change proposed that change will fail.
Case study #1:
A major player in the car auction industry wanted to implement a DevOps culture into their organization. They began by defining the groups of people that would be impacted by the change and started immediately on branding the effort and executing interviews centered on that effort. They talked at length anecdotally about the change and the fact that it was needed. The simple truth of it was that the CIO read about it in a book and wanted to have it done.
Numerous meetings and conversations over a space of three months were held to discuss how to go about the change and what would be done to execute the change. At the end of one status meeting, the change management consultant (yours truly), brought in to help, asked one very simple question:
“Where is the data that supports the need for this change?”
Three vice presidents sitting in the room looked at each other in confusion and couldn’t provide an answer. It was decided shortly after that meeting to cancel the organizational change management initiative all together until such data could be gathered.
Case Study #2:
A top-tier health insurance provider decided to go through a performance improvement effort that included a new methodology that would impact the 2,500 person IT organization. The apparent need for the new methodology was driven by numerous production outages. It was determined that there was also little in the way of process used for IT changes.
Over the space of about 15 months, they contracted tens of consultants to come in and create processes that the IT department would use. There were process coaches and once those processes were created, thousands of hours were spent in training the people in the organization.
The program created to oversee this change spent something on the order of $9M on the creation of processes, training/coaching, and implementation.
It took 3 months for the processes to be “re-evaluated” and stripped back.
What is the need for data?
What am I talking about? Numerous outages don’t call for the need for change?
But why were there outages? Poor selections in infrastructure? Bad code? Database failures?
Root cause analysis is required before any change can be developed and implemented. Then that information can be used to put the correct change in place.
I mean, you wouldn’t want a surgeon to amputate your leg because you have a sore throat, right?
Too many times in life people make decisions without the proper data. We just want to do something, but don’t know exactly what to do so we don’t do anything. This is not the way to manage a business or a project. Never stop moving, but move in the right direction for the right reasons.
Your path to business success.
