HeadlessBody

After having been in two of the Weinberg workshops and applying its tools richly on oneself, to really learn how to do change artistry as a job in which one facilitates others by using oneself, an experience would be needed to learn and test the practical details of new ways. End nineties I had taken on (co)responsibilities as an internal process consultant to an Engineering Process Group of a Business Unit in a global telecom organization. The EPG team was populated with people from the quality department and with engineers. Its purpose was to introduce CMM and get the Business Unit to level 3 by improving the development processes.

Management was mad, and after running around, interviewing old hands, reading in historical documents about earlier attempts at improvement of work flow, observing the culture, gathering and uniting perspectives and coming up with an open ended plan, we learned that the most important thing not to “forget” is to double check executive management intent beforehand.

We were given 30 minutes to present the initial problem space, the solution space, our suggestions and to bring up the problem that management wasn’t really seen as “in there” by many of the supervisors:

The stakeholders on the operational level that experience substantial YaDaYa problems while trying to make things actually happen can feel powerless, as in, not having the resources for solving encountered obstacles.

Many change initiatives fail when the negative feedback loop to management fails and the non-mad stakeholders have to get buy-in from mad stakeholders for changes initiated from the operational level. The problem can be easily be solved by using existing operational product feedback loops for reporting encountered process problems. And instead of mad stakeholders having to struggle to get the system to follow their (changing) visions, the mad stakeholders can spare themselves the frustration and loss of energy.

In the case of the story above, the EPG put an additional improvement Change Control Board in place and entered a growing list of unfinished and unimplemented process improvement issues, signalling effects of the pressures exerted on the system back up to management.

-- NynkeEtkFokma, 2002