More on Change

Some additional thoughts about change and Rule 4.

Change - necessary, good for the business but as Bill pointed out in his comment change can’t be indiscriminate it has to be thought through.

This weekend I celebrated my sister in law’s birthday – with a group of very intelligent, very articulate people working in and around the U.S. government. Aside from a great party - we talked about the challenges in working with government. We also talked about the challenges in dealing with all the levels of a large organization. Specifically – how do we deal with wide range of ability and need to deal with change.

We have people – frequently at the lower levels who are not interested in change. People who we rely on to get the daily reports out, to resolve issues with our systems, to change code in our primary systems and other routine jobs that have to get done to serve the business and maintain our service levels. We frequently don’t think about these people or the processes that they follow when making changes to our organizations or to our processes.

As a Sr. I.T. leader - it’s clearly difficult to think about the impact of an organization change on people who sit several layers below us in the organization. But in an organization that relies on process to operate key systems day after day – we have to think about those processes, those people and the impact.

More later.