8 Managing Organizational Change

In our experience, transformations do not fail because of technology, architecture, governance, processes, or even regulatory concerns. Rather, the two most common causes for transformation failure are the lack of clear and well-executed long-term change management strategy and the lack of constancy of purpose. It turns out that the soft stuff is the hard stuff. We can overcome these long odds for our agile and digital transformations, but it takes a committed effort over the long term. The VMO is well situated to help drive long-term change and help the entire organization hew to its enduring purpose.

Historically, and in contrast, few traditional project management offices (PMOs) are situated to drive change. In fact, a PMO is typically designed and charged with maintaining the status quo by ensuring that the traditional processes are well documented and followed pedantically. How then does the PMO evolve and become the driver of change and constancy of purpose? This chapter provides future VMO leaders with the tools that they need to become organizational change leaders. To successfully change organizational behavior across the board and over the long haul, leaders will need to do the following:

• have a believable and passionate reason for why change is absolutely essential

• have data and stories that demonstrate that the new approach is relevant to the firm’s situation and goals

• have the change be a stated objective in the overall organizational strategy, and have executives be accountable for the initiative’s success

• allocate funding to the change initiative

• demonstrate quick wins to gain momentum and definitively prove out the new model

• design and support a long-term training and education model that touches every part of the organization

• create a multilevel, multifunction leadership team that is accountable for driving the change

• leverage early wins and momentum and incrementally add additional projects or teams to the initiative

• design and implement a sustained omnichannel communications effort to market and support the change over a substantial length of time

This set of goals provides the foundation for a change management playbook that will take retrograde PMOs and launch them into new territory where they shine as dynamic VMOs that lead change instead of impeding it.

Recognize That Change Is Extraordinarily Difficult

Behavioral change is extraordinarily difficult. Those of us who have tried to lose weight, quit smoking, or stop drinking know that even changing oneself can sometimes seem impossible. To change the firmly embedded behaviors of hundreds or thousands of people in an organization is one of the greatest challenges in management. Many leaders do not recognize that this will be their most likely stumbling block. There are several reasons for the difficulty. The main one is neurological wiring. Our old ways of working and functioning are firmly embedded within us through our education, upbringing, beliefs, and learned processes; who we were hired by and why, evaluations, and job descriptions; and a host of other contributing factors, even our biochemistry.

As individuals and as an organization, we have acquired deep learning on how to get things done in certain ways, and most of us have been successful working in these ways. In most organizations, when there is a nontrivial task to accomplish, various people start getting it done, often with minimal orchestration. Things just start to happen because the organization has performed this activity many times, and the behaviors and actions are now codified and somewhat automatic. These learnings are embedded in us and in our organizations and they are not going away, perhaps ever.

Understand That Organizations Are Wired, Just as Individuals Are

Some behaviors are encoded in our neurological pathways and they never really go away. Certainly as individuals and as organizations, we can learn new ways of doing things, but our old embedded behaviors will still be there in the subconscious, waiting, and ready to creep back in as soon as we let our guard down. As they say, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” The meaning is that the more we run a behavioral pattern, the more established it becomes. To change behavior, we will need to add new learned pathways through additional training and education and practice to form and institutionalize new circuits of behavior. As we learn new ways to do things, our brains develop new secondary pathways, but the old paths have not been deleted. They are still in there, and in times of stress or confusion or frustration or in a lapse of concentration the old, default pathways will get activated. Multiply this by the hundreds or thousands of people in your organization and it is easy to see why the old ways will keep reappearing over and over again. They’re like weeds; we can keep pulling them out, but they just keep slowly growing back unless we can change the default behavior.

Begin with Leadership Alignment

On top of the challenges provided by this natural neural pathway approach to change, there is the added challenge of misalignment. Many of us cling dearly to our beliefs. We certainly see this in the political realm, and we see all of the societal dysfunction to which this can lead. Organizationally, we have leaders and influencers who have strong beliefs about how things should be done, and there will be disagreement among them. This will lead to fractured and inconsistent messages from our leaders, half-hearted or reluctant buy-in, or even antagonism (figure 8.1). These fractures are exactly the chinks in the armor that will get exploited. The mixed signals from leadership will provide ample opportunity for old ways of working to continue to thrive. The result is that the change will happen more slowly than we would like, or it may not happen at all.

Figure 8.1: Misaligned leadership

The net result of all of this is that organizational change management continues to be one of the most difficult leadership undertakings. Luckily, this fact is relatively well known, and there is a wealth of research, tools, and techniques for managing change. The trick is knowing ourselves and our organizations well enough to recognize that we need this help.

Spend More Time on the Soft Stuff

Many of us become leaders through some technical path. We are good at engineering, accounting, project management, writing, law, finance, or some other specific discipline. We therefore tend to find our solutions through the lens of our known disciplines. If we are having technical issues, we look for the answers in architecture or system design. If we are having issues with cost and schedule, we look for answers in estimation and more advanced use of project management tools. However, we are typically not so good at looking beyond our areas of expertise for the answers to our problems. The result is that if we are having agile process problems, we continue to look to yet more agile processes for the answers. We do not tend to look for answers in individual behavioral change, organizational change management, or other “soft stuff.”

The most successful agile organizations have one clear advantage over others. The successful ones have leaders who understand organizational change and who have designed and executed a holistic organizational change strategy. We have come to believe that this is a cornerstone of organizations that are successful over the long term. These organizations are able to change and adapt to new business landscapes, new technologies, and changing customer demographics because they have a repeatable method for changing the behavior of thousands of people. They are able to do it again and again and again. This allows them to reinvent themselves as conditions change.

Prepare for the Long Haul

To drive successful change, we need a comprehensive strategy for driving new ways of working, and we need enough time for these new ways to become the new default behaviors. Invariably, this takes constancy of purpose, with several years of sustained effort. An absence of the long-term view leads to another common failure pattern: the lack of perseverance. We frequently see leaders who underestimate the difficulties of change and therefore think that they can change major processes in six months. Once we get into month 9 and see that there is still a long way to go, some leaders will either start to lose interest or get pulled into the latest issues of the day and lose focus. If we treat large-scale agile adoption as a check-the-box activity, it will never really take hold. Train folks? Yep, did that. Define new process? Yep, did that too. This myopic approach almost never works. If we are not fully committed over a period of several years, the new system is not likely to stick. When firms are still struggling after a year or two of trying to be agile, they often lose interest, say that “agile doesn’t work here,” and move on to some other big initiative. News flash—the new initiative is also not likely to work for exactly the same reasons.

Don’t Forget the Personal Toll

We also have to remember the personal toll that this change will have on people and their lives. We remember an important conversation that happened at a client site that we have never forgotten because it really brought home the real day-to-day struggles that too many people have. We were speaking with an employee of a big firm that was going through the challenges of an agile transformation. As is usually the case in these situations, people were having to go above and beyond their normal duties. They have to keep everything running while also developing and operationalizing new processes and systems on top of their normal day-to-day activities. One employee told us, “I understand the need for change, and I support it. But I am a single parent, and I have three kids at home who are waiting for me. I just need to do my job, do it well, and get out of here. I can’t be working long hours every day for months on this stuff.”

Transformational change is going to be long, it’s going to be difficult, and it is going to take a sustained effort from a wide cross section of leaders. It cannot fall on the shoulders of a few. That is just not sustainable, and it will most likely not work. We need to develop a holistic system that calls on help from across the organization to create a network effect that supports and enforces the transformation from as many angles as possible. By working together in an aligned and coordinated way through the VMO, we can successfully execute what is probably the most daunting task of any leader: driving successful organizational change.

Design and Set Up a Holistic Change Management System

Not everyone is resistant to change, some people even love it, but enough people are resistant enough to make change profoundly difficult. One chief information officer that we worked with said that he felt that “one-third of the people are with me, one-third are against me, and the other third don’t care.” This means that two-thirds may not be fully on board. For transformations to be successful, we need to create a system that makes it difficult for the old patterns to survive.

By system, we mean the broad interconnection of activities and structures that work together to accomplish a goal. We have to design and set up a delivery system so that doing things the old way is harder than doing it the new way. The waterfall system, in its entirety, is set up to define, support, enforce, and measure our traditional ways of working. Each part of the current system supports the other parts of the system. We need to do exactly the same thing for agile to succeed.

We need the entire system to support agile ways of working. Therefore, many of the current practices across a wide variety of functions will need to adapt to create the best possible environment for change to succeed. Some practices will need to change a little; some will need to change substantially. To put it another way, if we try to change as little as possible, then the chances of successful change are very low.

What does a holistic change management system look like? It would be set up so that hiring, working environments, metrics, organizational structures, process controls, contracts, performance plans, training plans, deployment processes, and lots of other functions are all set up to support, encourage, and even enforce agile behaviors and practices. Furthermore, corporate communications would help to lead the way through a strong and extended communications program. In short, we would design a system so that it would be difficult to not do agile. Here are some elements of what successful agile change management systems look like.

Start with Why—Develop a Clear Purpose and Vision for Change

Leaders will need to make a strong case for change. Why are we doing this, and why are we doing it now? What data are we seeing that supports the claims that this is needed? Leaders will need to sell the change to others in the organization, and the reasons given will need to be real. If the need is not genuine and this change is just to be like everyone else, then the chances of success will be diminished because people will not feel the importance of going above and beyond the call of duty to both run the business and also drive the change. Ultimately, individuals will support the change if they understand the need for it and also how at a personal level they will benefit. Communicating the organizational need will have to go on for quite a while, a year or two at least. The team will need to be reminded regularly of the reason for the transformation and why it is important in order to build motivation, create urgency, and drive action.

Plan and Deliver Strong Omnichannel Communications for Multiple Years

Messages about what we are doing and why we are doing it need to be communicated over and over and over again. This is another case where we cannot simply state the reason and check the box and call it done. Famed organizational change expert John Kotter says that you need to plan on communicating 10 times as much as you think should be necessary.¹ Why? People will not really hear it or pay attention to it until it impacts them directly.

In a large organization that is undergoing a transformation, it could be months or even a year before everyone is touched by the change. Every month or two, new waves of people will be impacted, and they will need to hear the message again because now it matters to them personally. We often end up delivering the same messages over and over again but to new waves of people who are paying attention for the first time because it is just now starting to involve them directly. People are going to focus on what their leaders tell them right now, not what they said six months ago. So we need to say it again and again and again. There needs to be a constant drumbeat and constant reinforcement. Marketing and advertising people know this well. They have to create hundreds, perhaps thousands, of impressions before a would-be customer is willing to change behavior and become an actual customer. How should this communication happen? Omnichannel of course, as visualized in figure 8.2. By that, we mean that we need to use every channel available to us to get the message across. Here are some examples used by our successful clients:

Figure 8.2: Omnichannel communications

• all-hands meetings

• corporate email blasts

• internal website for the initiative

• one-on-one meetings with managers

• posters hanging in the hallways

• videos playing on big-screen monitors

• guest speakers

• internal private conferences and webinars

• celebrations of success

• happy hours

Basically, we are creating a sort of internal marketing system where we are using a variety of advertising means to create impressions on the internal population. Through these many impressions, the internal population starts to become more aware of the initiative and gets more and more comfortable with the idea. From this comes interest and perhaps even desire and demand. Good advertising excites people to try something new, and this is the kind of marketing thought that we need to put into our internal communications. People are people, and the same ideas that work out in the consumer space get the internal consumer to try new ways of working.

Set Teams Up for Success with Focused Coaching

It is not enough to just say that we are going to make the change. Change will be difficult, and it will require extensive support as roles evolve. Without success at both the individual and the team levels, we will not win hearts and minds; we need to set our people and teams up to succeed. There are several ways to do this, and the primary one is through significant education. We cannot expect people to do what they do not know how to do. Training is another area where we cannot take a one-and-done approach; we have never seen that model be successful. The most successful organizations develop long-term training plans that span years. At Citizenship and Immigration Services within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, they have developed a world-class agile education program that has been going strong for over five years. In the early days, the training was focused on agile basics. Later it evolved into DevOps, test automation, agile portfolio management, and other more advanced topics.

Training, while necessary, is not usually sufficient. To bolster the training, successful organizations also grow their coaching and consulting capability with experts who have significant real-world experience. These coaches work directly with teams to help them apply what they learned in training to the job at hand. An entire team of folks can go through the same training class and still come away with a dizzying array of different interpretations of what was said. A coach or consultant can go a long way toward translating the message into actions that are relevant to the situation.

Develop Agile-Aligned Metrics That Everyone Can Rally Around

Metrics can work to either support or undermine the transformation at multiple levels: individual, program, and organization. At the individual level, if we try to change processes but do not change the metrics by which we measure performance, then the performance metrics will usually win. If my performance plan says that I am going to be evaluated on X, Y, and Z, then that is probably what I am going to do. HR and performance management have a key role in the transformation. In addition to providing education and support as mentioned previously, we also need to provide incentives in the form of aligned performance management.

At the program level, if we continue to measure and report on traditional phase-gate performance and waterfall metrics, then we are going to get traditional phase-gate behavior. Agile is all about continuous delivery and getting feedback from users. Therefore, we need to measure the frequency of delivery and measure the collection of market feedback, or neither activity is likely to happen. Several of our clients have put in significant and nontrivial goals to help drive the change. At one Fortune 500 organization we worked with, the CIO called on the firm to “cut days per release and dollars per release in half.” Another CIO that we worked with mandated that “no program will go longer than three months without delivering value to users.” These kinds of agile-aligned metrics require significant changes in behavior to succeed, but they also are the following:

• relatively simple to understand

• a rallying cry that we can all get behind

• unifying in that many parts of the organization will need to participate for the outcome to be achieved

These sorts of metrics put pressure on the business to focus the functionality more narrowly and accelerate decision-making. They put pressure on agile teams to quickly develop working and tested software. They also put pressure on infrastructure, security, and deployment to find ways to accelerate the final mile of delivery.

Process metrics also need to change. Instead of measuring traditional phase gates, agile organizations need to measure things like release burndown, Sprint burndown, Sprint predictability, backlog health, and other metrics that should help drive agile behaviors.

Finally, at the organizational level, successful firms make agile adoption a measured part of the overall corporate strategy. These kinds of goals put pressure on senior leaders to drive the organizational adoption at the macro level.

CASE STUDY: A TALE OF TWO CIOS

Position the VMO to Drive the Change

In reviewing all the preceding topics, it should be obvious that a lot of change management support is required, and it needs to be coordinated and aligned. Without strong coordination, either the actions won’t happen at all or they will not be in sync with one another, leading to confusion. To effectively manage the change, we need a cross-functional group of leaders who understand agile and who are committed to making it work. They are senior enough to drive change but grounded enough to know what is happening at the team level. Sound familiar? It’s the VMO.

The VMOs that we help set up and with whom we work use agile planning and delivery techniques to manage the agile change itself. These VMOs help set quarterly targets for agile adoption, help develop Sprint plans, use daily stand-ups to coordinate, and use retrospectives to help teams improve how they manage agile adoption. They use the same tools that the teams use to manage and measure their own work. In this way, they get in deep and really understand the approach, the challenges, the tools, and the process. This full immersion into agile puts them in the best position to drive the agile change for their organizations.

Summary

To find success in agile adoption, VMOs should help their organizations create a holistic system that enables behavior change. In our experience, this is the number-one predictor of success. They should engineer for success: get the right executive stakeholders on board by developing a set of change leaders and set aggressive new metrics that will force new ways of working. VMOs can help handpick projects and people and set them up to be successful. Leaders can help to ensure their success by providing them with training, consulting, and air cover. Communicate their success heavily and hold it up as an example of how to operate in the future. Look to the tools of marketing for keys on how to understand and influence the behavior of team members as consumers. To enlist them as loyal customers of agility, VMOs need to do the following:

• create many impressions

• get them to understand why your new and improved process is better than the old one

• get them comfortable with your agile process offerings

• get them to try agile, and ensure that they have a great experience when they do

Any marketing executive will tell you that it can take years to grow a new market, and so it is with agile. VMOs will need to sell it and nurture it and grow it for years, ensuring that the next wave of teams continues to be successful.

Hopefully, with this level of attention, agile will thrive and become our new way of working.