Change Management for Digital Transformation

Part 1 – Rethinking Change Management and Organizational Development

1. Traditional enterprise change management

• As-is vs. to-be
• Planning cycles
• Freeze-unfreeze-refreeze
• Modeling future states
• WIFM and navigating stakeholders
• Where’s the “why?”

Group exercise – What will remain intact?

Aligning your practices with digital priorities will introduce key differences in the way you manage change. Still, no one has to completely discard existing practices. On the contrary, many priorities will likely remain the same. We kick off the course with a group exercise to clarify expectations about what will and won’t change about your own change management.

1. What’s possible with technology

Most professionals are aware of current technology buzzwords, but connecting them to practical application isn’t always well-defined. Furthermore, the pace of today’s change means even seasoned leaders can benefit from a refresher on how to apply trends to actual needs. In this section we’ll walk through successful patterns for applying:

• Automation
• Business agility
• Goals for customer delight
• Tools for increased productivity
• Triggered actions
• Intelligence layers
• Speed, quality, and pivots at faster orders of magnitude

Group exercise – Mapping functional technology domains

1. Flow of work in a digital enterprise

In a high-performing digital enterprise, there are some prerequisites to how enterprise technology workflow is organized. There are also some leadership prerequisites. We’ll explain each in this section. 

• Team-level agility
• Culture of experimentation
• The impacts of blame and fear
• Servant leadership
• The problem with heroes
• Systems thinking & Lean concepts
• Value definition & value streams

Demonstration – Mapping value streams

This exercise will refresh and update your understanding of value streams, and how mapping them helps you visualize constraints. These constraints will be used as the course progresses to help organize your change management priorities.  

1. Change Agents and Change Agency

Every change relies on the behavior of your people. Furthermore, new changes usually have to start small and build momentum to achieve meaningful outcomes. In this section, we’ll explore a number of ways different people in the organization can move change forward.

• Leaders and executives as change agents
• Functional stakeholders as change agents
• Individual contributors as change agents
• Typical siloes
• Dissolving siloes in the organization
• Transitioning teams to cross-functional capability
• Beyond buy-in

1. Different Types of Change Management

The word “change” can mean something different depending on who you talk to. It’s important to know your audience. More importantly, different definitions of change – and the associated change management practices – must be aligned to realize a holistic change management strategy.  

• Change Management vs. Change Approval
• Change as defined by technology manipulation
  • Code
  • Infrastructure
  • Other digital artifacts
• Change as defined by technology service libraries
  • ITIL
  • ITSM
• Change Approval Boards (CABs)
• Challenges of the CAB
• Automation as a change approval enabler
• Shifting to peer-driven review
• Unifying change management

Part 2 – Transformation through Change Management

1. Complex Adaptive Systems

• What is CAS?
• Key characteristics of a CAS
• Operating in a CAS
• Managing change in a CAS

1. SRA – Stimulus, Response, Adaptation

• Understanding the SRA cycles of adaptation
• Constructive stimulus
• Organizing stimuli
• Sequencing and accumulating positive stimuli
• Planning SRA cycles

1. Kata – the foundation of improvement

• Linking behavior to stimulus 
• Behavior is the key to change
• Kata as foundational behavior
• Understanding organizational habits
• Finding and isolating positive behaviors
• Sequencing and accumulating good behaviors

Case Study – Toyota Kata at HP

1. HR and Talent Management as Transformation Strategies

If you can pinpoint a single ingredient as essential to digital transformation, it is having a defined strategy for establishing sustained, high-performing teams. Your organization’s teams are the fundamental building block of digital transformation and its outcomes. We’ll cover how talent management practices must be aligned to support your digital priorities.  

• Profiling technology workers
• Understanding the incentives of a technologist
• The job landscape from a technologist’s point of view
• Strategies for retaining technology talent
• Strategies for sustaining teams

Group Exercise: What do technology professionals really want?

1. Navigating the functional maze

Every functional area of the organization has a different set of incentives. What’s more, they often attract different types of people, and understanding the commonly-encountered personality types associated with each department is very useful. Understand incentives and personalities, and you’ll have a great baseline of empathy as you move change forward. In this section, we’ll present a fresh approach to what drives the people in typical functional specialties.

• Traditional change management 
• Finance
• Sales
• Project and program management
• Application Development
• Testing and QA
• Security
• Analytics
• Product-oriented roles
• HR and Legal
• Business unit owners

Exercise: Beyond WIFM

1. Organizational Change and Digital Infrastructure

A key component of successful digital maturity is understanding how to build the capacity of your organization's underlying infrastructure. Robust infrastructure capacity directly enables speed, flexibility, and agility: all critical assets for managing change in a digital world. 

• How technology infrastructure drives change
• Infrastructure ecosystems in a digital enterprise
• The role of automation
• Opportunities to automate
• Moving toward platform capability
• Accumulating technology capability
• Typical hurdles

1. Decentralizing decision making

This is one of the most critical elements of achieving sustainable, positive change at scale. To really take advantage of digital enablement, you must get decision making power into the hands of people who can exercise it the fastest. Of course, you also have to maintain governance, compliance, and intent. We’ll explain how to resolve the fundamental tension between change control and decentralized decisions. 

• How change agency enables better teams
• Maintaining leadership alignment
• Understanding intrinsic motivation
• Intrinsic motivation and high-performing teams

Case Study – Surprising examples of successful decentralization

1. Metrics, measurement and performance data

One thing will never change: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. In this section, we’ll explore how digital transformation and the associated change management practices can be tracked and measured.

• What to measure
• Traditional vs. agile metrics
• DevOps metrics
• Datapoints for tracking change initiatives
• Measuring the Kata
• Transformation metrics
• Management metrics

1. Continuous improvement – the key to successful organizational change

• Defining vision
• Sprinting
• Organizing time boxes and milestones
• Defining target conditions
• OODA loops and organizational momentum
• Learning, feedback, and re-orientation

Group Exercise – What should change about our change management?

In this final exercise, your group will create a list of concrete actions you can begin taking to immediately implement the concepts and tools taught in this class. Assisted by our coach, you will clarify the steps you’ll take as soon as you return to work.

This change management training course is designed for any stakeholder looking to successfully initiate or manage a large digital transformation.

• Business Change Agents
• Business Leaders
• Business Managers
• Technology Leaders
• Technology Managers