Improve

At SEPG 2009 in San Jose, I presented a half-day tutorial titled “Change Mangement Tool Kit.”  The idea of “managing change” may be a lot harder than it sounds, thus the idea of developing and evolving a change management tool kit to help people and organizations in their change efforts. What? I thought process improvement based on the CMMI was about building processes, procedures, standards, guidelines, templates, and checklists that could be matched up against the CMMI practices.

Of course if your process improvement focus is strictly on obtaining a Maturity Level 3 or higher, you might think something like this. But here is my challenge. How many of you are in organizations that built action plans based on assessments / appraisals along with other appropriate input and had a major section in that Action Plan that focued on supporting the changes that would need to be made by the people in your organization. You see, if you want to claim, your organization is engaged in a process improvement initiative, you should be claiming in the same breath that you are engaged in improving the people side of the change as well as the technical process side.

What would you think if someone out of the SEPG or EPG or just PG today, walked into your office and plopped down the latest set of organizational processes. What would you think if the person that brought you this latest and greatest work, told you that this represented “YOUR” new way of working and that you and your project were going to be audited against it from now on? You might be a bit upset. After all, you  are an adult and a professional. Right?

Does your action plan have “people expectations” inside of Change Management side? If you perform testing, you are required to have “expected results” inside of your test plan so that the testing results can be compared against the expected results.

This is exactly what should happen in process improvement efforts!!! When you hand out the new and improved process descriptions, you should have the expected people reactions written down along with the risk mitigations to deal with the people reactions. What? People, risk, risk mitigation. Hey, we are trying to reach ML 3! The people should be following the organizational processes – right?

If your organization’s process improvement Action Plan does not have a complementary Change Management component with expected people results, you might want to revisit and revise it. And if you are not sure what Myers Briggs personality types, or birth order, or risk taking personality has to do with the process improvement initiative, you might want to give us a call and ask about what type of Change Management Tool Kit Method Park can help you build and evolve to answer these questions and ensure you are focus on your most important asset, your people as well as your process descriptions.

See You Soon in Prague

Best Regards,

Tim Kasse