Las Vegas 2020

Making Change Management Part of Your Modernization Plan

Software modernization is fundamentally about change, which can be exciting to change leaders and IT advocates. But software doesn’t stand on its own: It’s created, maintained, and used by teams of people throughout your organization—and those people have real limits to the amount of change they can adapt to at once.


Change overload can cause your modernization project to short out too quickly. How do you get people to embrace new technologies and practices without hitting a wall? We’ll show you how to craft a people-centric plan to smooth the transition. For example, retiring your waterfall methodology isn’t just about changing your development cadence, it should incorporate stewardship and regular feedback loops with your teams. Or if you’re switching from SQL to Mongo or updating your user interface, careful communication and training for the people affected should be a top priority.


An incremental approach to the changes that come with modernization will also help drive acceptance for project teams, stakeholders, and end-users. This means being realistic about what amount of change different groups can internalize and keeping that at the forefront of planning. Your IT team may be all-in on a new technology that’s completely unfamiliar to the business, for instance. How do you introduce the new thing slowly so that the business doesn’t balk and levels of enthusiasm start to align?


This talk is about putting all of these ideas (and more) into practice to save your modernization project. You’ll learn:


-Why the emotional threshold among different stakeholder groups matters to your project

-How to identify sources of resistance (is it the tech team? Is it the business? Is it both?)

-How to prioritize what to change and when, and measure whether it’s effective

-How an incremental approach to modernization can set you up for sustained success


Too much “new tech” is not an IT problem, it’s an emotional one. Don’t skip the soft stuff!

KB

Kari Brey

2VP Information Technology, Travelers

VP

Vasudha Prabhala

Senior Vice President of Service Delivery, Headspring

Transcript

00:00:14

Hello. Welcome. Thank you for carving out 30 minutes of your time with us on this journey where Carrie and I will talk about change management in large legacy transformation. My name is and I'm a senior vice president at Headspring and my chapter is essentially delivering large transformations for great clients. Or do you carry

00:00:44

Hi everyone? My name is Carrie Bray and I work at travelers insurance company. I May 2nd vice-president with travelers and my main charter is transforming a large legacy, uh, application, uh, to modern technologies. So I have a lot of experience in change, and I'm a very excited to talk to you all about that today.

00:01:12

So before we talk about change management, let's talk a little bit about legacy transformations. If you look at our landscape emerging landscape, you can see that there are a CEO's are at significant pressure, you know, to move ID at the same pace as the business, right? Organizations expect that, you know, our systems and our capabilities and the it organizations to reflect the business reality, which means they're asking for flexible, scalable, and secure systems, but most legacy applications right now, I'm going to say legacy applications. You can see some of the bullets. These are all data technologies, and you have some op aging workforce, or you have outdated skillset. Um, you know, a lot of them, you can't even put in more features and also what's happening is as people retire, uh, there's a huge change in the, uh, business, uh, the tribal knowledge loss of that.

00:02:16

And also a lot of them, we see that requires reengineering of business processes and given all of these, then this requires large transformation programs, large transformation programs have four characteristics. One is scale, and more often than not, these changes affects large parts of the organization. If not all of it magnitude, what I mean by that is it significantly alters the status code. And then the duration, the third angle is the duration, which means it lasts for months, if not years, and more often than not. Trust me, yours is the reality then months. Um, these are of strategic importance. So they are, again, you know, to change how the business functions, help, uh, business capabilities and also the it capabilities. So we are always working through these four aspects and long-term transformations. And what essentially that means is change management becomes the core of everything, how you manage change, how to incorporate change, how do you become an organization that is able to deliver these programs successfully and also in turn change your organization.

00:03:33

Now, one of the things that happens when you are talking about change management, there are a lot of definitions out there, you know, in terms of, Hey, what these change management change management is changing processes. Change management is change changing people, but if you look at it at its core, it is actually becoming a learning organization. And what I mean by that is it's a process of continually renewing an organization direction and its overall structure, and also the capabilities to serve the ever-changing needs of your internal and external customers. And I'm not saying this is easy. We are not saying that at all, but I have to understand that the focus is on becoming a learning organization and you want to get it right as much as possible. And I talk about that because man, managing change is really hard. And the sad truth is a lot of change management initiatives fail.

00:04:35

Gawker, did a study and it said about only 54% of these transformations actually succeed the change management initiatives succeed. And that's because of some of the reasons that you can see on the slide, but more often than not, it is because of the top two, the top two reasons that are there. The first one is a confusing communication with engagement and what we mean by this as while it's absolutely necessary communicating all aspects of things, but just because you are communicating doesn't mean the people in your organization are actually engaged. So you want to try, make sure that you have capabilities to manage both of those, you know, uh, the communication aspect of it and the engagement aspect of it. Now, what I've seen and experienced in my experience is, and I'm sure Carly can vouch for this is there's a lot of emphasis on a farm, all aspects of change management, who, the signup, who should be doing this, where should it go next?

00:05:42

Hey, are we following agile process? Are we falling XYZ? Are we capturing these metrics? What gets lost is the human element of it. How does this make, make people feel? How do you capture that into metrics? We'll talk a little bit about all of those, but that's essentially where we want to focus. So you want to make your culture a priority and make sure that you can learn, adapt as an organization. If you don't do certain, if you don't do change management, right, then you can have some unintended consequences. It is all the way from the job satisfaction of the individual and in software development, you know, if you're not really happy and you're experiencing burnout, it affects your performance. If it affects you as an individual, as a performance, it affects the organization that you are in. And eventually you are your delivery. Doesn't meet the expectations of what the business wants, and that creates a negative user experience.

00:06:39

So this, these things have ripple effects until you want to be extremely careful of how you implement change management and what the intended and unintended consequences are. A lot of times, you know, a people focus or our organization's focus is on, Hey, where are we on the maturity model of change management? Are we just becoming better or are we really evolve? What you want to focus on? Are we measuring the right things? Are we creating the right capabilities and our V becoming a learning organization and managing change means, you know, not to forget it's humanizing it. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Cari, to walk us through the best practices that we should be incorporating in change management.

00:07:34

Thank you for soda. Very nice. Um, introduction. Um, as we mentioned, I want to talk about, uh, some best practices within change management. These are the best practices that we have found to be successful through many transformation efforts. There's probably others that you could use or have you. So, you know, you will adapt and adjust, um, as you find necessary. So moving to the very first one, choose your direction. As we think about legacy change, one big component is actually in the dev ops and dev ops is a journey towards more, towards more frequent and reliable, higher quality releases via a pipeline. And with that, we're recommending you choose one direction and stay the course understand though, that things may come up where you might need to alter the course, but your overall course, direction and objectives don't really change. You also want to seek 360 stakeholder buy-in and feedback.

00:09:02

You want to talk to your stakeholders, understand how they define success, understand how they can help you through this journey and where you can actually leverage them in your direction. You want to identify your enablers and the Railers think about who and what you need to be successful. Engage those things in people as early as possible. Also think about derailers, which are a form of disruptor that you also want to think about. Derailers can be anything. So think about things that can take you off track and set you on a tailspin. What if I get fall behind? What does that really look like? How am I going to get back on track, anticipate what those disruptions will be? And pre-think through some mitigation strategies have them handy. So when something comes up that you didn't think about and it that's disrupting you or derailing you, you can focus on that and come to answers quickly, but having pre-thought through, um, mitigation strategies for what you anticipated will really help you answer things very quickly. Quick decisions are key.

00:10:39

So next we're talking about change. Leaders, change leaders are more than your end users. I chose the word leader in change leaders, very carefully and thoughtfully change leaders and leaders of the whole are really essential to your success. They set vision. They think broadly, they're not thinking about just the particular modernization or legacy effort that you're working on. They're thinking about the entire ecosystem and how does that fit into that? So leaders actually drive and make things happen without people really understanding how they're doing it and why they're doing it, and users are necessary and they help bring things in perspective. Um, and they're looking for and results and not the necessarily at the entire ecosystem. You also want to invest in champions at every level. This is very similar to your stakeholders. When you ask them, what, how do they define success? Make sure your champions at each level, understand that and can support the success and help bring that message back to your stakeholders.

00:12:18

You're also going to want to develop reinforcement loops. And these are places where key messages are, are made by stakeholders, by your change leaders, by peers, and invite them to speak at retros at staff meetings, at team meetings, or send out emails along the way, expressing their commitment and their support to this change effort that actually helps motivate people on the team saying my leaders recognize what I'm working on. They think this is important. And so you're going to want to make sure you deliver your best. You're also going to want to inspire others to perform at higher levels. And this can be done many ways, but you want to recognize people that are willing to take risks, go up a limb, have the, how can we attitude versus, oh, we ran into another hurdle. We're going to have to delay as their first response. You want people that when they run into a hurdle, say how high can we jump over this hurdle and keep on moving, push them to their potential and past their potential. Give them stretch assignments, even have some of your change leaders, meet with them and explain to them the importance of their performance and how it's really driving success.

00:14:08

Moving on to the next best practice is making culture a priority. Um, this is really important. You need to understand what is the culture I want to drive to? What does that end state look like once you define that you're going to want to map the gaps. And as you're thinking about that end state culture take things like this into consideration. Am I going to do this journey for just my brownfield development? Am I going to do it just for my green field? Or am I going to do it for both? If I do it for both, what order am I going to do it in? And then develop the culture around that? What's in it for those end-users. If I'm a developer, I want to be able to push my code anytime with the least amount of hassle, the least amount of overhead. That should be part of your culture. When you're working through a dev ops journey.

00:15:23

Another point is really around transparency and sharing your successes and your learnings. A lot of people do not like to use the word failure. Failure sounds bad, but failure is first attempt in learning. So remember that fail, fail fast. First attempt in learning, share those, learn from them, share what went well and keep on doing. What's going well. Communicate is another thing I can't stress enough. The importance of have everybody be involved in the communication. The more you communicate, the more people are going to be aware of what's going on. And that's important. Adapted blameless, post-mortem attitude and culture. It's really about what and why and not the who focus on what went wrong. What did we learn? What was involved? What can we do differently? And when can we start? It doesn't matter who was involved because it could be you. It could be me.

00:16:50

It could be somebody else. And that's the wrong place to focus. You will lose trust from your team. If you focus on the who, they won't want to tell you what is going on. And so that's what you want in your culture, a learning collaborative culture. So as we move on, uh, we want to talk about the best practice of expanding iteratively. Most people are doing agile type efforts nowadays, and everything's done in small shareable consumer consumable pieces bites. And that's the approach you want to do to your legacy. Modernizations. It's really important to commit, has small commitments hit your commitments. You will then build trust with everybody, your stakeholders, your end users, your change agents and leaders. You're not distracted by putting together status reports of how you're going to catch up. You're focusing on your next commitment, do what you can to be true on those commitments.

00:18:07

Make continuous delivery of mindset. When we think about mindset, that's really your attitude. And when we think about attitude, we want to make sure we're always thinking about continuous delivery and how do we bring that into everything we do? And it's not big bang. It's small bites over time. We also want to embrace continuous improvement. We want to learn. We want that learning culture. We want to adapt and adjust. And by having, um, a continuous improvement culture that allows you to grow, accept, change, adjust from change, and do the next thing and not dwell on maybe what went wrong. You also want to experiment in small slices. Um, you could take something that you do today. For example, you deploy quarterly instead of going to deploy daily, you might say, what if I were to deploy monthly, what's standing in my way of doing that. Take that slice, break it down, figure out how to deploy monthly, do that, do it well. And then move on to the next thin slice. Okay? Now I've got monthly down. Let's deploy weekly. Some people are going to start quarterly. Some people are already doing weekly. Some people already doing daily. It depends on where you are, but the point here is do small bites and do them well and then get better.

00:19:50

Okay? The next best practice is focused on capabilities and this in a way goes back to the direction you're heading. So all these best practices in one way or another tie to each other, um, identify and agree upon the capabilities necessary for a successful transformation. And think about things. If you're doing the dev ops journey, what are the capabilities I should focus on? Depending on your level of maturity, you might start with, do I have working software all the way to do I have the appropriate governance or automation built in and it could, your capabilities can span anywhere between those types of things, identify the ones that you will build your success for an on. Also then assess the skills of the team you're going to be working with. Recognize that not everybody is going to have the skills that you need. There might be new processes.

00:21:05

I should say. There will be new processes. That's probably a better way to state it. There's probably going to be new tools, techniques, different people to work with things that you haven't expected. Make sure you plan time for people to be upskilled, learn new things, unlearn things at the same time, adopt a willing, able, and ready strategy. Don't think you have to start from square. One. Other people have done this, learn from them, surf the net, find out what has worked and what hasn't worked, engage with experts, you know, find out a vendor that that can come and help you. And they will also help up-skill. They will coach and mentor your folks. Maybe even hire some new people that have the skills already surround the people that need to learn and grow with expertise. Lastly, learn from other mistakes. You don't want to repeat a mistake that somebody else has already encountered, learn from it, ask them what would you do differently? What would you do the same? Why is that? How long did it take you to learn that and, and embrace that this is a change. Change is hard, but it's very doable. So with that, I touched five of the best practices that we have in our topics today. I'm going to turn it back to the Suda. And as soon as going to talk about measuring change and the best practice and importance around that, the Sudip back to you.

00:23:04

Thank you, calorie. That was wonderful. Thank you for walking through those best practices. The last one, uh, equally important. One is the ability to measure and you heard the famous thing. If it doesn't get measured, it doesn't get done, but you also have measured. You also have code. If everything is important, then nothing is important. So the key takeaway is you want to focus on measuring the right things at the right time. And the other aspect that I'm going to highlight here is you want to focus on the directionality than the absolute. The reason we say that is when you're starting off the program, you don't have any absolute to compare it with. And especially, which is true when you're having end-user engagement or you're measuring the culture and the direction, you know, how effectively are you able to communicate? And how effectively are you evolving your culture?

00:23:57

That needs to be a directional aspect of it. And one of the metrics that is highly popular and is leveraged across organizations is EMPS. So E N P S a 20 is no, it doesn't make any sense unless you're measuring this quarter over quarter and it is moving on from on the positive scale. So tomorrow it is at 75 in, in, in six months, it's at, you know, 74. Now that's positive. And that's what you want to see. Yes. And let's say, if it comes down to 15, one of the quarters, you want to understand what have you incorporated that has brought it down and you want to gauge it. So again, directionality is more important. You also want to measure where, uh, things that will have impact. Let's say you are building a product and you are letting your business stakeholders know that this is, this particular piece is going to be available to you 99.9, 9% time, or some, one of those, you know, metrics that get thrown out these days, constantly the focus there is then you want to measure the meantime to restore a service because that directly impacts what you're promising your business stakeholders.

00:25:13

And we measure a lot of software development, uh, metrics, the last city, throughput, the variance of estimation from the beginning and end. But you want to also make sure that all these correlate to the business outcomes, business outcomes, as you know, you want to know the, the estimation duration, the variation, because you want to make sure the budgets that have been allocated are being leveraged correctly and how we are tracking the other aspect. When it talks about business outcome, is are we able to, uh, deliver what the, how long does it take for a feature set to get delivered? You know, that's an important metric and are we able to repeat this on an ongoing basis? And what can we do to improve, uh, based. So these are just some of the examples, but you want to focus on, uh, on the right measurement at the right time, uh, for your organization and which is a 360 degree view and not just end users, not just the business stakeholders, but also the people that are part of this entire journey, which is the people who are part of the legacy application, the people that are currently developing the management, uh, every aspect of it.

00:26:30

So please make sure that you have a cohesive, comprehensive framework to, uh, to measure some of these with that. I wanted to just reiterate all the five practices about making the right direction and also developing this change leaders. And overall, instead of me going through all the rest of them, what we want you to take away is are you able to build a learning organization and are you able to evolve the culture and make sure and thrive in this culture, you know, as you move forward and deliver, thank you so much for spending these 30 minutes with Carrie and myself, and we hope we get another chance to talk to you through these presentations are, you know, cross paths in some other way. Thank you.

00:27:24

Thank you. Happy change.