6 Adopt and adapt
“No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other. Frank Lloyd Wright”
6.1 The practitioner’s dilemma
Experience tells us that a successful change management programme is based upon the practitioner’s ability to successfully adopt and adapt the principles of change management to the needs of their organization. ‘Adopt and adapt’ has rightfully become a guiding principle in best practice. I’ll make one brief note on the words: adoption is a choice that an organization makes to accept a practice, to adopt it as its own. Adaptation, on the other hand, is the process of adjusting (adapting) the adopted practice to make it work in the specific organization.
Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for doing this; no shortcut to a successful change management programme. As tempting as it may be to try implementing change management processes ‘by the book’, this is where many well-intended efforts go astray. Trying to ‘implement’ change management from best practices without considering the unique challenges of your company, the business it’s in and the organizational culture is ill-advised and almost certain to deliver far less value than anticipated.
This is the challenge faced by the IT service management (ITSM) practitioner – how to make change management work in the ‘real world’ – in your company.
The successful practitioner must have:
• A clear understanding of the organizational objectives for change management
• The knowledge, skills and experience in ITSM best practices and standards
• Skills in adapting ITSM to fit the needs of the organization
• Skills in managing organizational change.
The practitioner must expertly synthesize these in the right combination in order to put together a successful change management programme.
6.1.1 Understanding the organization’s change management objectives
It stands to reason: if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, you’re not very likely to achieve it. The only legitimate reason to embark on a change management programme is to achieve company objectives. What are those objectives, in specific, measurable terms?
As I mentioned previously, change management efforts are often started on the heels of one or more significant or impactful outages believed to have been caused by poorly managed changes. And while effective change management can help organizations in many ways, it’s not a panacea.
Care must be taken to ensure the organization’s expectations of the change management programme are realistic and do not exceed the limits of what change management, as a practice, can offer. This point is often given minimal attention, if any, in the rush to get on with implementing a change programme. I encourage you to carefully consider what the organization hopes to achieve with change management and ensure the outcomes are realistic and attainable with the proposed effort.
Recall from Chapter 1 that change management seeks to:
• Support timely and effective implementation of business-required changes
• Appropriately manage risk to the business
• Minimize negative impact of changes to/for the business
• Ensure changes achieve desired business outcomes
• Ensure governance and compliance expectations are met.
Keep in mind that all these objectives tie directly to managing changes. In other words, change management does not seek to manage all IT risk and impact – only change-related risks and negative impact.
6.1.2 ITSM knowledge and experience
Knowledge, skills and experience in ITSM frameworks and standards are essential for the ITSM practitioner to be successful in implementing an effective change management programme. You should have training and practical experience in both best-practice frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT and standards such as ISO 20000.
I encourage you to become deeply familiar with the fundamentals of change management from multiple perspectives. You would do well to pursue foundation and advanced training and certification in the related frameworks and standards. Develop professional relationships with other change managers and those with practical experience in adopting change management.
Understand more; implement less
In the early stage of planning your change management programme, learn everything you can about the transition phase in general, and change management in particular. Seek to understand the big picture, paying special attention to understand the outcomes and business value of change management.
Don’t assume you know how it should work. You may have experience with change management in another organization, but every organization is unique.
Immerse yourself in all things change management. Learn from those who are doing it, and don’t assume that they are fanatical because they are talking about and doing things that you don’t yet understand.
If you understand just enough when you begin with change management, you are more likely to do things that you’ll later regret, or that make future iterations harder.
Think about how change management will fit with other processes that may be implemented later – configuration management, release management. Think too how DevOps and Agile will influence it.
Once you have a solid understanding, implement far less than you now understand. Your deep knowledge is what will help you be successful in the initial stage. While it’s very tempting to do more, it’s far better to be successful with a small programme and make incremental changes going forward.
It is also important to understand the difference between standards and best-practice frameworks.
Frameworks are a collection of best practices structured such that they suggest what needs to happen to achieve the objectives of each capability.
Standards, by contrast, describe what elements must be in place to successfully achieve the capability. Whereas frameworks are suggestive, standards are designed to be benchmarked against. For example, organizations can pursue ISO 20000 certification as a means of demonstrating compliance with the ISO ITSM standard.
The practitioner should be familiar with both frameworks and standards, especially as they adapt processes.
6.1.3 Adapting ITSM
All processes require adaptation to work in a given company environment. There’s no such thing as a ‘standard’ IT organization, and there’s no such thing as a ‘by the book’ implementation of a best-practice process.
Best practices being collected from successful organizations, it’s not at all surprising to find many elements of change management being practised in most of them. Where process elements are present, they should be acknowledged and readily embraced as how the organization is fulfilling that part of the process. It is not necessary to change the name of existing practices to the ones suggested in the frameworks, either. Simply design your change programme around those existing elements that are working well.
You’re doing everything wrong
An organization had commissioned a process maturity assessment that indicated a maturity level for change management of zero. There was little evidence of any formal change management, most notable of which was the absence of a change advisory board (CAB). The assessment of zero was accepted and change management implemented.
There was a growing resentment and cultural resistance to the new change programme, and it took the change manager months to realize that many of the fundamentals of change management were indeed being done already, just in isolated, informal processes.
IT staff felt that their existing efforts to manage changes had been disregarded and were being replaced without acknowledgement of the value they had brought to the business. In short, the message they felt they had been given was, ‘You’re doing it all wrong’, which, of course, was not at all the intent.
In time, the change manager recognized that many parts of change management were already in place, and moved to embrace them, but staff morale had already been undermined.
A more comprehensive inventory of existing practices would have gone a long way to identify and allow the incorporation of existing practices that were working.
A word of caution on embracing existing processes: I’ve seen too many organizations attempting to use ITSM terms in ways that are significantly out of sync with the spirit of change management. Changing the name of existing practices does not mean they are fulfilling the intended purpose. Using ITSM terms to describe process elements that don’t fulfil the objectives for that process also gives a false sense that you’re ‘doing change management’, when in fact, you may be falling far short of its requirements.
This is why the focus of change management must be on the end-to-end lifecycle of changes. It starts with an identified need for a change. Once the need has been documented in an RFC, it enters into the change lifecycle. Change management is responsible for managing the change through the process from idea to fully realized business value from the implemented change. Along the way, change management must facilitate some key decisions on risk, business value and operational considerations. The end result of the change management capability is business-required outcomes.
Just because you have a CAB does not mean it is fulfilling the objectives of change management. (By the same token, outcomes can be achieved without a CAB, or other process elements.) The point here is that you shouldn’t adopt new (ITSM) terminology for the same old practices if those practices aren’t achieving the desired business outcomes.
Having said that, however, there are limits to how processes should be adapted. Process adaptation is neither a licence to do violence to the spirit and intent of the process nor to mangle it beyond recognition.
Let’s look at some poor practices in process adaptation.
While the practitioner must modify the process in ways that make it work in the organization, adapting a process does not mean simply throwing out parts that you don’t understand or care for.
Best practices are distilled down to the most essential elements commonly practised in successful organizations. Each element is included for specific reasons, not all of which are intuitively obvious, especially in the early stages of adoption. In many cases, those parts that don’t seem to make sense are associated with other processes that have not yet been implemented (and may never be, depending on the organization’s needs).
Before eliminating parts of a process, carefully consider:
• Does it support any of the organization’s stated goals for change management?
• Is it already being performed in the organization (and can it be embraced)?
• Can it be modified to work better in the organization (rather than eliminated)?
• Does it support a compliance objective (governance, regulatory or audit)?
This is where knowledge of standards such as ISO 20000 or more prescriptive frameworks such as COBIT can be helpful. In these, you will find core elements that must be present for it to be considered that changes are being managed effectively. Think very hard before eliminating any of these core functions.
In some cases, it may be better to implement the part in question at a very basic level rather than eliminate it altogether. Building in a ‘placeholder’ for future enhancements can make it easier to mature the process when the time comes.
6.1.4 Organizational change management
Organizational change is an area of study all to itself, but it is so critical to successfully adopting a change programme that I’ll mention it briefly here.
As I said before, organizational change management deals with the people side of changes – how to successfully transition people and organizations from one state to another. In Managing Transitions, William Bridges (2009) describes three major phases of personal and organizational transition:
• Ending – letting go
• Neutral zone
• New beginnings – seeing new possibilities.
Bridges suggests: to help people move from the old state to the new, it is important to transition through these three phases. All too often, when implementing IT change management, the focus is primarily on the process aspects at the expense of the people. This is a major source of failure when implementing a change programme.
It is important to acknowledge what is ending as you’re implementing a new change management programme. In some cases there’s loss of autonomy in managing changes. Staff may have fond memories of times they successfully implemented changes through heroics and camaraderie that they feel is now being replaced with a cold process. In many organizations, senior staff are trusted to implement beneficial changes and allowed to implement and fix changes with little or no oversight.
Whether these are real or perceived losses, the impact on people is the same, and wise is the change practitioner who is mindful of, and acknowledges, these losses. It is important to recognize the work staff have done to implement changes and protect the customer from inconvenience, or worse.
This can be tricky if your change programme is precipitated (as it often is) by some rather embarrassing change-related outages, and management is demanding better change management. The messaging here is very important. Stories are part of organizational culture. It’s helpful to let staff recollect and celebrate past change efforts – perhaps particularly difficult implementations, or times when they delivered changes under extreme pressure or to unreasonable timescales – and came through for the business.
If you start your change programme with ‘your change management is bad, and management is demanding we fix it’, be prepared for a lengthy battle in implementing change management. The process may be implemented but, as Bridges points out, people will not have transitioned.
The neutral zone is entered when people begin to realize that change is happening. In this phase people can feel demotivated and anxious. This is where a lot of resistance begins – as people resent the change and try to protect what was.
To help people move forward through the neutral zone, they need to understand why the change is necessary, how it fits into the big picture. Here again, it’s important to focus on the business outcomes, not the process. The business outcomes of change management are hard to disagree with. Talk about these outcomes more than the process details. It is also helpful to emphasize what is in it for them.
The last phase of Bridges’ organizational change management model is where people start seeing new possibilities in the change. As you can imagine, when staff enter this phase they become powerful allies to help achieve the objectives of change management. This is where you want people to arrive. I’ve included a lot of people-related aspects of implementing a change programme throughout this publication for this very reason.
6.2 Understanding best practices
Some will argue that best practices, because they’re aggregated from a large set of organizations, are, by definition, average. Adopting them, so the theory goes, can only make you average. That point of view misses the point. Use best practices as the starting point to provide the most effective and efficient way to produce a particular outcome. This revised view makes the application of best practice hardly average – it supports maturing the organization to be more competitive.
Best practices are sometimes seen as ‘inside the box’ thinking, where ‘the box’ has become the standard against which creative thinking is measured. This type of thinking is basically solving problems from within the bounds of a well-understood set of solutions for a given field.
Some even go as far as equating best practices with copying others, a view that will not motivate innovative staff to embrace them. While this argument may seem logical on the surface, it doesn’t hold up under closer examination.
With an unapologetic nod to Jim Collins’ Good to Great (2001), I maintain that establishing a solid ‘good’ foundation with best practices frees up resources to solve your unique problems. Great companies don’t try to be great at everything; they focus their resources on what’s most important. That being the case, why would you spend more than minimal resources solving problems the industry has already solved? Just adopt and go.
The concept is everywhere, hidden in plain sight:
• Does a solid training in musical notation and harmony theory limit a musician to being average?
• Do building codes limit architects to the design of uninspiring, average buildings?
• Do creative civil engineers ignore the guidance in the Standard Handbook for Civil Engineers when designing bridges?
• Do professional athletes and their trainers ignore current practices in training and nutrition?
The answer is obvious: they don’t, and that’s exactly the point. Everyone in these fields has access to the same standard best-practice materials. They give guidance on how things are done – a foundation of sorts.
Reinventing the wheel
Did you know that there are thousands of patents for wheels? You could be forgiven for thinking that the wheel was being reinvented. But it’s really not. In practice, the wheel concept is being adapted in creative ways to solve new and unique challenges.
Imagine the effort it would require to invent a completely new transport method without adapting the wheel in some way. I’m quite sure it’s possible, but why would you do that when you could simply take the wheel, adapt it as needed, and have a quick solution that’s based on well-tested principles?
Excellence outside the box
Every organization has limited resources, and each must decide how to use the resources they have to best achieve their goals.
Leading organizations are very intentional about where they spend their resources. They know full well that you won’t lead markets or be excellent by mimicking others. This is exactly why they don’t waste time and effort on problems that have already been solved, but instead leverage best practices to quickly build a solid ‘good’ platform. In so doing, they free up their talent and other resources to work on those challenges that are unique to their business which will give them the advantage they need to compete in the marketplace and make their enterprise truly great.
Far from limiting you to being average, best practices, when used correctly, are the fastest way to excellence.
But what makes some great and others average is what they do above the foundation of these best practices. To be great, you have to build on best practices, not ignore them.
I contend that best practices do not make an organization great; they reduce the effort required to be good. They are the proverbial wheel that needn’t be reinvented.
6.2.1 Adapting change management
Understanding applicable standards and the associated best practices is invaluable to the practitioner in achieving change management success. However, there are some poor practices that go under the umbrella of ‘adapt’ that I want to address specifically.
6.2.1.1 What adapting is not
Adapting does not give licence to eliminate the core functionality of change management without considering how its removal will impact on the outcomes. This is one of the key reasons I’ve consistently emphasized the outcomes over the process. If elements of the process need to be modified or removed and the objectives are still met, then you’re in a safe space.
The practitioner must know what elements can be modified and/or eliminated and still deliver the required outcomes, or else the ability to mature when required could be unduly hampered. Excluding certain elements will jeopardize the realization of desired outcomes.
Adapting is not importing new terminology to use with the same old practices. Here again is why I focus on outcomes. It doesn’t really matter what you call elements of change management – if they’re not producing the needed outcomes, then nothing you call them can make them right. And by the same token, if they are producing the desired outcomes, the ‘wrong’ names are irrelevant as well.
Adapting is also not making an organization follow the practices of some other organization you may have worked in (as an employee or consultant). Familiarity with a successful change programme elsewhere does not mean it’s the proper approach in the current company. Adaptation must be done intentionally to make change management work in the environment and culture of the organization adapting it. It must address the specific circumstances of the target environment.
6.2.2 Continual service improvement
One of the key strategies for successful adoption of change management has roots in continual service improvement (CSI). CSI, in short, is an approach to incremental improvement. It’s especially powerful for adopting and adapting a new process because it starts with a minimal process and provides both staff involvement and process evolution – which does wonders for acceptance of change within the organization.
This method of adoption is based on Kotter’s model for achieving change (Kotter, 1996). Obviously, I can’t do it justice in a short section here, but the key steps are:
• Build a sense of urgency
• Form a coalition
• Create a vision for change
• Communicate the change
• Empower action
• Create ‘quick wins’
• Build on the change
• Keep the momentum.
The first three are investing in creating an environment that supports change, while the next three encourages engagement with the change. The final two encourage sustaining the momentum gained (and not drifting back to the original state.)
As I’ve said time and again – if it’s a change process you want, you can have that in a few days. But if it’s a change capability (including the cultural changes required for success), that’s going to take a bit more time. More time, because culture takes time to change, and process changes are deeply rooted in organizational culture.
The hardest part of adopting change management (or any other process for that matter) is changing the attitudes and behaviours that make up the culture.
CSI is an excellent way of getting the people who can either make or break your change programme on board. You’ll know you’re making progress when staff propose changes to the change programme that make it more effective or efficient.
6.3 Chapter 6: key concepts
The key concepts in Chapter 6 can be summarized as follows:
• Change management must be adapted to fit the organization.
• Multiple frameworks and standards should be consulted.
• Be cautious about eliminating parts of best practices; consider limited implementation rather than complete elimination.
• Leverage continual service improvement methodology as an adoption and buy-in strategy.