Category: Change

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Why am I training experts?

On the last few months I have been into a very special challenge. I have been given the task to train experts around their own work.

This is strange, as soon as they are the experts, and even if I know the subject in depth, they know it better, because they are the ones who really perform the work.

Around 5 years ago this company came to us with the task to understand what were the best practices around their global operations, in this case, project management. Their objective was to standardize their processes globally based on them.

They had an enormous quantity of projects being planned and implemented, but each region had a different standard to be followed, and the documents provided, even though fulfilling the requirements to go through their tollgate process, were not standardized. Basically, each project was presented in a different way.

This allowed huge quality variation among the information delivered, therefore, it was getting harder to streamline the decision making around which project of the portfolio was more fit to the company strategy.

At that point, I was invited to support an initiative that would gather all those project documents which were successful, and presented good quality throughout all company’s regions.

With good communication and stakeholder engagement plans, we were able to understand what they had in common, and create a list of what should be the minimal information to be supplied, and how was the better way to present it according to the company’s values, culture and expectations.

After getting this done, we were able to define templates and guidance documents to create a standard to be followed globally.

As it’s been done for more than five years now, even if the main objective remained, the scope of work for each phase of this initiative changed. Here is a summary of what was done so far:

  • Formed a team able to gather the information needed
  • Select best practices and understand what added value or not
  • Create templates based on used and successful documents
  • Validate and deploy template and guidance documents, providing examples
  • Determine and structure a centralized repository of knowledge, methodology, information and documents
  • Engage teams on using the new framework

This incredible transformation process has been implemented using several good practices around business analysis, project management, requirements elicitation, stakeholders engagement, change and knowledge management. There are many other side initiatives and next steps to this new environment that were created.

Now, the challenge is to keep the teams engaged and adherent to the new procedures implemented. Even if they are the experts and they know it better. I am happy to being able to explain the reasons they are using the tools provided, how they would be better used and how they relate to the current company’s policies.

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What’s worth doing something good, if that’s not expected?

Last week I have been confronted with a very interesting situation.

It was presented to me a simple yet powerful list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) that was shared to a global team, regarding to transformational initiatives that are being deployed through all levels of their operations.

That, per se, is a big deal, and a FAQ is a must in these cases.

I received an email asking my thoughts around it in a table, right after receiving another notification of a news article mentioning the importance of this FAQ, and where to find it.

When I received both notifications and gone through the article and the file, an idea came to my mind. Why not use the same content using a better tool?

The table format is awesome to brainstorm, understand the problem and visualize the results at once, but it is not responsive enough to be used in every situation.

So I turned it into an online list that could provide different views of the same content at once, solving the responsiveness issue of the table.

Problem solved! Everything worked and I added one more ability to my skillset! Awesome, eh?

Not so much, I was so enthusiastic about what I did, that when I shared it with the person who provided the first table, I didn’t remember to send him a simple heads up mentioning what I was thinking, and asking what he really needed.

There were some next steps to this process, such as advertising this new formatted list to everyone, and settling that as a normal procedure when they need information about the transformation process.

Now I have this additional step: Understanding what was the expectation around it, and if what was done, as good as it is, matches this expectation.

We all go through this, we sometimes infer what’s to be done, and do it right away, without checking with our stakeholders what they think about it, to save some time.

Making it right the first time becomes a matter of luck in these cases. But it is uncommon, and we end up making it wrong, which makes us lose all the work done, or worse, work twice to correct it.

Doing something good is different than doing it right, because the right thing to do is what is expected, or even better, exceed expectations!

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The summer is gone…

The summer is gone, the crops are under snow and we are stuck at home, no way to get out after a major blizzard.

There are many stories about preparing to the bad times while we are in the good ones.

Personally, I heard fewer stories of those who, during bad times, in spite of getting desperate, or even hibernating, and waiting for the good times to come again, spent that time preparing to speed up the come back.

Independently if there is a crisis or not, record every good idea you have, even if you don’t have time to put it in place due to all the daily activities, these would be our “standby bank”.

We know that everything will change even if we are part of the cause, or the consequence. When we are part of the cause, and we are driving change, the main effort is to face the inertia of the “status quo”.

What if this force gets into standby, and we are part of the consequence of a change?

This is the time for us to pick every idea we had in our “standby bank”, or even in those changes we were suffering to put in place in the good times, and use them as a contingency plan.

Then, the effect of our changes will become stronger, and when the blizzard is gone, and the sun is shining, we will feel like we are up to speed quicker, but in the the end, we didn’t even stop.

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Something new happened! Old news…

I am happy to announce that I have a blog! It is brand new, just three months old!

When I wrote that first paragraph, I saw the word “old” there, and it made me think about the process of starting it an how it is deeply related to transformation.

This blog is not old, nor it is new anymore, as there are some posts before this one.

When new ideas come, we make tryouts, prototypes, we discuss it, create expectations alone or in small groups. That’s what I did here, and all this effort is not seen as change yet, as nothing is different from before.

We understand all of this as “change” after it is announced and involve more people because then it becomes tangible, there is a pressure to have it solved, at this point, it doesn’t matter if the change will take place or not, it has to become the new status quo or to be terminated.

That’s how changes happen, they are never brand new. They are always there, under the surface, growing quietly as whispers. We can sense them, but they are not clear yet.

They need to become a change when they already have momentum, a starting force that provides inertia to be resilient against all the opposing forces that will try to stop them.

In Project Management we use the kick-off meeting, where a lot of effort has taken place and its time to announce to all the team and the stakeholders it is an actual project.

In my case, I am creating a posting routine, maintaining it for some months before announcing it, so here it goes…

I started my brand new, three months old, blog!

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This change is so simple! Why does it take so long?

When we start thinking about transformation and changes, there are two good quotations to keep in mind:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.

Leon C. Megginson

Nature does not make jumps

Charles Darwin

The first one is intimately related to the second, even though people tend to prefer one over another, depending on their role in the change process.

Those who are promoting change, generally refer to the first phrase, the survival of the fittest, as a mantra to justify their actions and to add speed to the change.

They are right, but when we talk about speed, then we need to respect the second quotation and their defenders. There are no leaps when we talk about nature.

Technological leaps are happening in front of our eyes, and we’re caught amazed by that. Common people like us have access to an incredible number of tools which we can’t fathom the idea of where they are from, or even how they work.

Then the second quotation remembers us that we are still natural beings, and we need to be aware that for us to absorb something new takes time.

A new paradigm, a new information, a new environment, all of those take time to understand, to desire, to know, to perform and to sustain it.

The excitement around the novelties has its extreme opposite right beside it: the fear of not being able to handle it.

That may be the reason newer generations* are not afraid of being disruptive, as for them, everything is new, one way or another. They are faster to adhere and sustain changes.

Environments such as communities, companies and teams are generally a mix of generations. When they are pushed into changes, it is important to understand their generation balance to determine their level of resiliency.

Understanding the level of resiliency of this groups will lead to the correct planning of each change, and the overall transformation of an environment.

That, added to the pressure for the change, will determine the speed of change, independently of how simple it seems to be.

*Generation here is not restricted to physiological age. It expands to the time this person is exposed to a paradigm or a process.

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We have a problem!

After setting up a WhatsApp group with my neighbors, I found out that we were not as secure as we thought. Too many things were going on around us that we simply ignored, because we couldn’t know what was beyond our sight.

We got scared, even without having any real trouble happening directly with us. That fear was our motivation to gather around and solve the problem!

It was amazing! We created a strong relationship with our neighbors and solved our problem with a simple and effective solution. End of story!

No, it was not the end of the story, we “created” a new problem that became harder to solve.

We put in place monthly meetings to discuss the performance of the solution, shared the minutes of the meetings with everyone, created surveys to collect their opinion, and several other good initiatives risen. We had energy and enthusiasm to bring new ideas and make them happen!

But, with the solution of the greater problem – security – people started to feel comfortable. There was nothing else compelling them to be part of the meetings, or even to collaborate with their opinions in the WhatsApp group. It is easy to understand. Why to use your energy to solve a problem that doesn’t exist anymore?

What we discovered then was that our solution would be as good as the commitment of the neighbors to keep it. For when people got relaxed, we experienced some smaller security problems. Nothing to fear yet, but they were there.

We also known that we needed a minimal number of neighbors to sustain our solution, and if they were not concerned anymore, we wouldn’t be able to sustain the solution at its best.

This problem we created was not as big as the first one, but took much more effort to solve exactly because of the difficulty to prioritize it throughout the community. The monthly meetings were getting empty, and people didn’t care to answer our surveys.

After some time struggling, our best strategy to overcoming it was by accepting that we would only have full meetings and surveys answered if there was a real need for that, and we focused on specific meetings, with a tangible purpose, even though it sometimes was with a smaller audience.

The engagement risen with that, because we were adding value every time we met, and those who attend smaller meetings with their problem solved are prone to interact with bigger events.

Today I use that experiences lessons learned in the transformation project I’m involved. When the primary motivator for a project or a process is already gone for good, don’t be afraid to change your paradigms, remodel your ways, find new goals to keep moving forward.

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Everything is working so well. Let’s change it!

I have developed an efficient process and an Excel tool to support it two years ago. The team is happy with it, and have been using it and showing results! Success!

Now they are calling me again to change it. Why?

If you have already used Excel, you will feel like me. In a nutshell, you are able to create whatever you want, ready in the speed of a cheetah, and available to everybody through a cloud server with versioning control.

Then changing may not be a feasible option, as everything is fine. If you think like this, you are right, no need to change, at all.

Two years ago, there was no structured process, it was an endeavor which the results were unknown, and Excel excels in that case.

Now, the process has settled, and it requires continuous improvement – side note, it was built to a CI team – and scalability, decentralization, accessibility and agility are the new requirements for this process.

Now the tool became the bottleneck of this process, and that’s change is required. Added to that, the company evolved their digital solutions, and have some pretty good tools broadly available now , why not use them?

Instead of choosing the tool blindly, and deploying it, we are taking a step back, and understanding the tools available and comparing them against the business requirements, putting weights to them.

We are aware that the perception of value for each requirement changes, and at this moment, the weights for the requirements are enabled to change, as the tests are run.

Again, everything is working so well, why change, and have all this work around it?

My current answer to this is because it is important to have structured decision, even if the decision is not to change.

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Igniters and “slow-cookers”

I am starting this without a title, maybe in the end it doesn’t even become a post.

Just like this, I started today without a title, as I was not very excited about it. But I have discovered a great risk for my life e for my future.

“There is one thing that never changes, and that’s the change itself. “

Some important philosopher

Maybe that quotation is another thing that never changes.

For all of my life I have been the one who embraced change, and made sense of it. That is a fact, as much as I am not the one that pushes the change. Most of the times I do not cause it, as I have got in my life people who do it, and I can tell you, they do it very well!

They are good igniters, and that is the very best term for them, as they start fires, but they aren’t good to keep it burning, it is not of their nature. After some time, I found out I am this slow-cook kind of person, I just keep it burning.

I accepted this situation, and made it profitable to those around me. It set them free to have their crazy ideas and to change as much as they want. They have their back covered.

That was never a secret, and I was talking to some friends about it, when I realized this: what if they stop trying to change, and they settle down? Who is going fuel me with something different and amazing to solve?

That would be a life changer, not to have anybody to keep changing my life.

The danger I saw was that I was trying to stop my igniters to do their part, by not giving them space for that.

If you understand the importance of changes, and see them as positive, always remember to have around these 2 kinds of people, the igniters and the “slow-cookers”. It does not apply only for business, but for personal life also.

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One step at a time, a dozen a day…

The best way to change, is by beginning it small.

Today it is easy to come to this conclusion, but it was not always like this. Actually I had to fail miserably to understand that.

I am going to put myself as a third person from now on, because I am not that guy anymore.

I am very proud of that guy! He accomplished many good things with such an ease that maybe I wouldn’t.

He was a young architecture student who had to produce a poster for a big company. A world map showing where they were making business.

He knew what to do, even at that young age he have already had produced several good things!

As he was adventurous, he made a plan! He was going to the next level using another tool that seemed to be the best at that time!

But he didn’t know how much effort he would have to put into doing both, making the job and learning the new tool.

His plans at that time were limited to the tools he would use, and the visual he would get, not planning as I see today.

Today I see that that was his biggest mistake, he tried to do it all, at once, without seeing the risks of changing.

I am also grateful for that fail today, as I keep using it to make my transformation decisions.

After that I still see as big and far as before, but now I do it one step at a time, a dozen a day.