I have suffered through all of the experiences mentioned above; emails, staff meetings, town halls, etcâŚ
Luckily, at my latest engagement, I have some influence. True story; a client that somewhat listensâŚgo figure. Notice I said âsomewhat.â Anyway, we utilize many of the techniques that I learned in @jasonlittle Lean Change Management book to help promote bidirectional communication and transparency.
The first step was a creation of a mashup canvas, combining ideas from the Jeff Pattonâs Opportunity Canvas and Jasonâs Change Canvas for the Agile Transformation. I inherited a 42 page report from the company that hired me as a sub- contractor. This exercise enabled me to get my head around the challenges of the client, and serves as a visual for guiding the transformation.
We have a âsteeringâ committee that consists of representation of all business units. I know; the name sucks, but I was voted down when I requested we re-brand to âchange coalition.â This is the squad tasked with overseeing and guiding the Agile transformation. We sprint (adopted recently) on the same cadence as the teams. tackling small chunks of large change initiatives around the Agile Transformation such as standing up new teams,revising the performance review process, and re-engineering the governance process. Our board is big and visible, located in in the elevator area. We also have a monthly bulletin but that is mostly for PR purpose.
We (the coaches) push this group to get input from those doing the work before pulling the trigger, but occasionally we are overruled because management knows best:) We have had more success lately; being a coach on the ground floor for 9 months, I am able to provide a a realistic lens on whether or not an approach is feasible or not. However, sad truth is not all leadership wants to hear the reality, so we fall back on plan B which is to just let them fail.
We run a lean coffee once every two weeks. They were widely attended initially, and feedback was positive. Attendance has since tailed off, so we are looking for options to rejuvenate them.
Of course we had our failures as well. Our biggest problem was reliance on middle managers to disseminate info throughout the organization. Simply put, that didnât work. The info was either not distributed or watered down.
To address this we have launched a new experiment in which we are leveraging our COPs as a forum to gather feedback on a proposed change before we roll it out. We are three weeks into this experiment, and everyone is very appreciative of the new approach.