I’ve noticed, however, that people seem very comfortable talking about People, Process, and Technology in the As-Is or To-Be states – but precious little time is spent about the difficulties in getting Change to happen in any of these areas. Project teams and project leaders need to be effective at making Change happen with People, Process, and Technology; maintaining the status quo is comfortable, and envisioning the “nirvana” Future State is easy, but the real challenge comes in making the transition from A to B.
Project teams need people that have Change skills:
- People Change – Soft skills and Emotional Intelligence are typically required, but effective team leaders need to be able to command a room of strong personalities and competing agendas. Some meeting facilitators are direct…
I’ve noticed, however, that people seem very comfortable talking about People, Process, and Technology in the As-Is or To-Be states – but precious little time is spent about the difficulties in getting Change to happen in any of these areas. Project teams and project leaders need to be effective at making Change happen with People, Process, and Technology; maintaining the status quo is comfortable, and envisioning the “nirvana” Future State is easy, but the real challenge comes in making the transition from A to B.
Project teams need people that have Change skills:
- People Change – Soft skills and Emotional Intelligence are typically required, but effective team leaders need to be able to command a room of strong personalities and competing agendas. Some meeting facilitators are direct, and can shout folks down and/or eloquently shift the group’s understanding. Others work indirectly, creating understanding and acceptance in non-threatening, semi-private conversations.
- Process Change – It’s easy to say “automate a mess, and you get an automated mess”, but the challenges of process redesign are known to many folks. A certain amount of patience and insight is required to ferret out muda (waste) in the process, to understand and identify the critical elements / tasks, and to aggressively involve the eventual process owners, cementing their commitment for implementation by making them part of the design.
- Technology Change – Typically the easiest (and preferred) work area for IT folks, but for those who want to make a difference in IT, it takes the ability to understand and implement new technologies quickly, in a sustainable and supportable fashion. Points are taken off for quickly implementing a fragile system.
Looking for ways to create concrete objectives for yourself or your teams? The significant Value Add that projects and project teams bring to organizations covers all three areas – People Change, Process Change, and Technology Change. Improvement and effectiveness doesn’t come from raw skills in People, Process, or Technology, but a demonstrated ability to make Change happen in any and all of these three areas.
The opportunity, of course, is to pick one or two of these areas, and build your skills in making Change happen. If you aren’t good in front of a group of people, and are more comfortable working directly with the technology, work on your Change skills by understanding new developments and methods, and figuring out how to use that stuff to make projects and processes happen faster, with higher quality and more predictable outcomes. Looking for a stretch? Get into Process design and development; it’s not always about the bits and bytes, but systems thinking is a big plus, and Process skills are often a great way to bridge from Technology to People skills.
Do you express your value to your team, and your value to the company, in terms of People, Process, and Technology skills? If you want to be successful in IT, work on demonstrating your value by making change happen in those areas. At the very least – be able to articulate how you have succeeded / can be effective at making Change happen.
