I attended a workshop today on deploying change management in an IT organization. The presenters were a team from Northeastern University in Massachusetts who are in the 8ths month on an IT change process. The group put together an informative and interesting presentation.
What is change management? At the most basic level it is nothing more than a common terminology and communication framework. The Northeastern group are using the ITIL framework. This framework doesn’t actually help you bring change about, but it does help with the management and coordination of ongoing operations. Change is already happening in our organizations, but all too often in an uncoordinated fashion. So even a well managed change process in one unit might cause problems or conflicts with another unit because of a lack of communication.
Northeastern’s change implementation started with a real bang. It seems a proposal to upper management was so well received they were told to start the implementation within 2 weeks! The standard schedule calls for a 6 – 18 month time frame. But they hit the ground running, throwing staff into meetings where they weren’t clear on what was to be done. Training was done on the fly. It was a rocky start, but over the 8 months they’ve been making revisions and refinements. For instance their Change Advisory Board (CAB) has altered from an initial group of 18 down to a more managemeable 9. The official ITIL recommended number is 3 – 5, for for Northeastern the 9 represent their major IT divisions.
I asked if they think the rapid start up was a problem. Certainly it caused panic and hard feelings at the time, but after getting through it successfully it seemed to me that the trial by fire might be a benefit. I certainly appreciate a reasoned and well planned start to a major new initiative. But there is also such a thing as too much planning, especially for something so new and unfamilar. Before you start actually doing the thing, you really don’t know what to expect. But you spend months at planning meetings making decisions anyway. Once you actually start it is often realized that what was thought important during the planning really isn’t, and you didn’t adequately plan for what you should have. Or something like that. Northeastern started up really quick, and had to plan, train and do at the same time — a true just-in-time process (JIT). So how did they respond? Maybe the wounds haven’t healed yet, because they all still think the rapid implementation was a mistake. Perhaps, but if so they seem to have risen above it, and are off to a good start on their Change implementation.
NERCOMP – Northeast Regional Computing Program
Controlling a World of Chaos: Deploying IT Change Management in Higher Education
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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