Lean Change Management: Innovative practices for managing organizational change

by Jason Little

Another leading indicator we used to measure the overall software quality was in-process defects. In-process defects are problems found by the team within their development cycle.

Use lagging indicators to validate your Experiments, and not as binary success and failure metrics that typically punish the people responsible for them.

TEAM-DEFINED MEASUREMENTS

1. How can change practitioners convince stakeholders who sponsor change initiatives to accept the uncertainty that change brings, and use a feedback-driven approach to change instead of a solely plan-based approach? 2. How do change practitioners start a change initiative using the non-linear approach that Lean Change Management brings? That is, how can they plan without generating Insights? How long should they work on generation Insights before coming up with Options? How do they show change sponsors progress in times of high uncertainty?

1. Change managers and organizational development people know that a feedback-driven approach to change is more effective. They also admit that all the upfront planning is helpful, but the plan doesn’t survive first contact with the people affected by the change. 2. Creating alignment with lighter-weight planning tools is the key for convincing stakeholders that a plan is in place. The difference is that the plan is created through organizational feedback, as well as the observations and expertise of the change team. 3. Using some specific Agile practices, like retrospectives and lean coffee sessions, can dramatical reduce the symptom of resistance by creating an extra feedback loop about the change. 4. Visualizing the change through canvases and big information radiators are much more effective than traditional communication plans and software-based tools (*cough* SharePoint).

There are four components to developing your own change management process: Develop your Strategic Change Canvas Align Your Organization Develop your Change Agent Network Execute the Lean Change Management Cycle

DEVELOP YOUR STRATEGIC CHANGE CANVAS

The canvas helps align people in your organization because it answers the important questions they have when change is introduced: 1. What is the vision for our organization with respect to this change?

2. Why is this change important to the organization?

3. How will we measure success?

4. How will we show progress?

5. Who is affected by the change and what will they need to do differently?

6. How will the change team support people through the transition?

7. What’s our plan?

use these questions as a guide to complete your Strategic Change Canvas 1.0: What points haven’t we considered yet? What are our assumptions about this strategy? What is our riskiest assumption? How often should we review this strategy? How will we collect feedback from staff? What other important information should we put on this canvas?

There are many approaches you can take to aligning people around the change you’re implementing, but the objective is to validate the Strategic Change Canvas and collect Insights from everyone who is affected.

In larger organizations, re-purpose an existing department meeting and have the manager and a member of the change team present the Strategic Change Canvas. 2. In smaller organizations, bring in lunch and do a full-day all-company session using one of the large group facilitation approaches you searched online! 3. As-needed-basis: Facilitate this session starting with the first people, departments, or teams that are affected by the change. 4. Administer an ADKAR® Assessment Survey.

we didn’t use the ADKAR® assessment, but instead we: Created the Strategic Change Canvas with the VP leadership team, which consisted of six people. Aligned the change team based on the output of the first session. At the time, the change team consisted of about 20 people. Aligned the teams affected by the change when new teams were created. Collected Insights during monthly all-team retrospectives and weekly Lean Coffee sessions.

Tactical Change Canvases

Here are some tips for expanding your change team: Get at least one person from each department that is affected by the change. Set strong expectations with the early adopters that being part of the change team is extra work. Make becoming a member of the change agent network exclusive in order to attract the right people.

Agree on rotating the change team members periodically, depending on the type of change you’re implementing.

Most of all, give these early adopters support, training, and some autonomy.

"Change goes viral when people start helping other people adjust"

We hosted weekly lean coffee sessions and monthly retrospectives designed to build alignment and generate feedback about the change, and slowly, people outside the core change team started showing interest in helping.

Change fails when the people managing the change blindly follow a structured process that isn’t compatible with the organization.

This is why you need to build your own change management process, using the Lean Change Management cycle. Here’s how to do it: Create a change program room: Make your plan visible, that includes your Strategic Change Canvas and Experiments. Decide how often to have these meetings: Change Team Daily Standups: Yes, it’s called a daily standup, which is a practice taken from the Scrum methodology, but you don’t actually have to have it daily. Meet for 15-minutes on a regular schedule depending on how chaotic your change is. At The Commission, we started with dailies, and as we became busy, we reduced it to twice a week. Change Team Retrospectives: This meeting is for the change team to tweak their change management process and figure out how to work more effectively as a team. At The Commission, we did this monthly. Strategic Change Canvas Refresh: This meeting is for revising the Strategic Change Canvas based on how the change is unfolding. I usually recommend doing this quarterly, but at The Commission, we did it when it was necessary. That was usually due to an un-expected event, like when the external consultants left, and when their was a major organizational change that was triggered from somewhere else in the organization. Lean Coffee 2: This meeting is to continually reinforce alignment and collect feedback from people affected by the change. At The Commission, we did this weekly. At a different organization, we had a face-to-face lean coffee every other week, and a c...

Avoid creating on too much process at the beginning, stay lean!

"A documented, detailed process cannot match the complexity of the human brain!"

But wait, what about a communication plan?

Do as much as you can organically

As you execute your change using Lean Change Management 3, remember these two guiding principles: You cannot control how people will respond to change when it’s introduced. People are more likely to support a change when they have input into its design.