Change and Organisation Culture
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An abridged (very abridged! - I had 20 minutes, but love hearing myself write) presentation on organisational change and culture for a recent job application.
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Change and Organisation Culture
- 1. Change and Organisation Culture Gareth Edwards 31st October 2014
- 2. How I have created / would create an optimised interactive customer-centric culture to maximise the effective use of IT and AV by individuals throughout the University community to promote institutional business.
- 3. How I have created / would create an optimised interactive customer-centric culture to maximise the effective use of IT and AV by individuals throughout the University community to promote institutional business. Action
- 4. How I have created / would create an optimised interactive customer-centric culture to maximise the effective use of IT and AV by individuals throughout the University community to promote institutional business. Impact
- 5. How I have created / would create an optimised interactive customer-centric culture to maximise the effective use of IT and AV by individuals throughout the University community to promote institutional business. Result
- 6. Cultural Change and Improvement Plan Act Check Do
- 7. Cultural Change and Improvement Observe Plan Act/ Adjust Check Do
- 8. Observing Culture Basic Assumptions Values Artefacts O P A C D
- 9. Planning Culture Change • Vision • Activities - Target Artefacts and Values • Iterate • Measurements • Communicate EVERYTHING O P A C D
- 10. Do… • Implement the plan • Collect data • If a long term plan, review periodically O P A C D
- 11. Checking Progress • The plan • Gathered data • Has the environment changed? O P A C D
- 12. Adjustments • Fixes to the current plan • Next steps O P A C D
- 13. Planning Culture Change – Take 2 • Refine vision? • Corrections to previous plan • New / deferred objectives • Measurements • Communicate EVERYTHING O P A C D
- 14. Benefits • Manageable – introduce change gradually, no big-bang, no system shock • Learning – understand the environment and update our assumptions as we go • Correctly assign cause and effect • Demonstrate value
- 15. Enough Theory!
- 16. Experience • Request Management - 2011 • Cross-silo working - 2012-13 • Innovation – 2013 • Supporting Academic IT - Ongoing
- 17. Justify the effort • Avoid change for change’s sake • Cost-benefit • Is the need clear? • Consider maturity
- 18. Future Gazing • Result: Supporting institutional business • Impact: Effective use of IT and AV • Action: Deliver an optimised interactive customer-centric culture
- 19. Observe Basic Assumptions Values Artefacts O P A C D
- 20. Plan – Articulate the Vision • Overview • The need for change – the driver • Behaviours & Experiences (stories) • Principles • Awards or certifications? • Aims for this iteration O P A C D
- 21. Plan - Activities • Update strategies, policies and procedures • New initiatives, tools, services • Training • Physical artefacts • Update induction materials O P A C D
- 22. Further Planning • Buy-in and support • Budget • Measurements – if it’s easy to measure, it’s probably not useful (e.g. MTTR) • Communication plan • Identify leaders O P A C D
- 23. Do… • Implement the plan • Collect data • If a long term plan, review periodically O P A C D
- 24. Check Progress • Were there problems implementing the plan? • Review data gathered • Check Culture O P A C D
- 25. Challenges • Resistance – passive and active • Poor assumptions • Subcultures O P A C D
- 26. Adjustments • Correcting the previous implementation • Adverse reactions • Institutionalising change • Next phase recommendations O P A C D
- 27. Planning the next iteration • Does the Vision stand? • Our adjustments • New activities • Revisit buy-in – any concerns or opportunities? • Measurements and communication O P A C D
- 28. O Into the future • Mind the gap • Low maturity organisation • High maturity organisation P A C D
- 29. Recap • Managing organisation culture change • Understanding culture • Cultural vision, change activities and challenges
- 30. How I have created / would create an optimised interactive customer-centric culture to maximise the effective use of IT and AV by individuals throughout the University community to promote institutional business.
- 31. How I have created / would create an optimised interactive customer-centric culture to maximise the effective use of IT and AV by individuals throughout the University community to promote institutional business.
- 32. How I have created / would create an optimised interactive customer-centric culture to maximise the effective use of IT and AV by individuals throughout the University community to promote institutional business.
- 33. Change and Organisation Culture Gareth Edwards 31st October 2014
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone, my name is Gareth Edwards. Today I’m going to be talking to you about organisation culture and answering this question.
- It’s a big question that I think you’ll see many times today so I’ll spare you a straight read through. What I did to start off was break down the question into manageable chunks so I could understand it better.
- This first section represents the action – it outlines the task – creating, or more accurately changing, an organisation culture to make it optimised, interactive and customer-centric.
- The next section describes the desired impact of that action – making sure the University community gets the most out of IT and AV resources.
- And the final section gives us the intended result of our action and impact – promoting institutional business.
- My view is that changing a organisation’s culture is an exercise in improvement. Many of you will be familiar with this diagram, commonly known as a Deming Circle or Wheel. It’s a useful management method for structuring change in many different contexts. It’s an approach that I’ve used, both consciously and accidentally, on several occasions in the past and one that I would use here.
- As so often happens with these models and frameworks, and for the sake of presenting a coherent approach, I’m tweaking this a little. I prefer a variation common in Lean manufacturing which suggests you Adjust, rather than Act, in the fourth step as the word better reflects what you do there. And while it wouldn’t necessarily be the case in an organisation I’m very familiar with, coming into a new organisation I would want to engage in some careful observation before launching into things. I hope Deming would be sympathetic.
- How do we observe culture? Swiss psychologist Edgar Schien defined this model for organisational culture. It’s something I discovered while preparing for this presentation and I was really surprised at how well it fit my thinking. Culture is presented in 3 levels. Artefacts are tangible elements in an organisation, things like architecture and dress code. If you think about all of the talk we hear about start-ups owning offices with slides between floors – that kind of thing. Espoused values are the rules and values of an organisation, defined in things like strategies, policies and stated principles. For example, Bath’s principles include references to quality, integrity, enterprise and collaboration. At the core are our basic assumptions and behaviours, typically so embedded they are unconscious or reflex.
- When we look at planning, we start with a vision. I don’t mean vision in the cliché management sense, but an articulation of what we want the future to look like. Through activities we target our cultural artefacts and values with the aim of indirectly changing the embedded assumptions over time. Plan to iterate. Culture changes slowly and introducing change gradually will have a greater chance of success. Set up measurements are appropriate to the vision and activities. And like any change, having a good supporting communication plan is vital to bringing your participants with you.
- Do. Two little, loaded letters. Implement the plan, communicate, carry out activities, gather data. If this is running over a long period then review progress periodically to make sure things don’t go wildly off course.
- At the end of implementation, check how things went. How did the execution of our plan go? Did any of it fail, or have an adverse consequence? Did anything go unexpectedly well? Review gathered data and ask if we’ve measurably moved in the right direction and as far as we hoped? How do the objective and subjective data compare? Has the environment changed in a way that requires a change of focus?
- Based on our checks we propose adjustments for the next round of planning. These generally fall into two categories – corrections for the plan so far or introducing new activities for the next iteration of the cycle.
- Then we iterate, going back to planning and taking into account the adjustments. Do we need to revisit our vision? We plan new or continued activities. Prepare measurements and a new communication plan.
- Why is a good model for managing cultural change? Cultures change slowly. An iterative approach encourages gradual change and avoids a big bang approach that can throw an organisation into shock. If you’ve ever been through a staff restructuring, you’ll know what I mean. We can learn as we go and adapt in response to a better understanding of our environment. We can correctly identify how our actions have impacted the culture, for good or bad, so we can better deliver change and demonstrate the value of the process.
- What would I do facing this challenge going into a new role? What I’ll do next is talk briefly about similar projects I’ve been involved in and then work through an iteration of this process. It’s tricky to describe specific activities I would carry out because, as I’ve explained, everything is dependant on a understanding of the existing culture, but you will see by the end how I would approach the task.
- There have been many projects in my management career that have been about culture and making the most of IT. Here are some of the key projects that I’ll reference during the rest of this presentation. In 2011, a combination of IT staff turnover, poor performance and negative views of IT support from users prompted me to run a project to change how the team approached request management, with the aim of improving staff experience, reducing the impact of incidents and helping pull together a team trapped in the Storming phase of team development. In 2012-13 I led a cross-department project delivering a new University-wide workstation management platform. As well as being a large technical project, it was an exercise in cultural engineering as for the first time we were resourcing a project from both business and academic IT, two groups which traditionally hadn’t worked well together. At the tail end of last year I took on a project promoting communication and innovation across University IT, a very successful exercise that I’ve had the opportunity to present at conferences. And my current project is to pivot the focus of my team away from delivering generic services like workstation delivery and support to be more directly involved in supporting teaching and research.
- I’d approach this kind of exercise with caution. The challenges and costs of a cultural change programme make it something not entered into lightly. There has to be a clear need for change. For example, the driver in my request management improvement project was a clear dissatisfaction with IT performance. The maturity of an organisation is a factor to take into account, helping us appreciate how much effort may be required to achieve any change at all. An organisation that has a low maturity against a process focused framework like CMMI will require greater time and effort to bring about change than a more mature one.
- Let’s remind ourselves of the task at hand. We’re setting out to support institutional business through the effective use of IT. What could that look like? To paraphrase ITIL, I would sum it up as staff and students having access to the IT services they need, when, where and how they need them. If institutional business is supported by good services, where does our action to deliver customer-centric culture fit in? The challenge hidden in the question is to create a culture where IT staff think in terms of business objectives and react accordingly. We can deliver the right services in the right way if we understand the customer’s needs in terms of what they are trying to achieve. There are a couple of adjectives in there to consider as well. Optimised is an easy one to understand. More interesting is Interactive, because of course there’s little point having a customer-centric IT organisation ready to effectively deliver the services the customer needs in the way they need them if the customer has long since given up trying. What we’re describing here is a relationship.
- So as I’ve described, the first step will be a period of observation to help understand the existing culture. Time spent with different teams, both front line and back office, will be invaluable, revealing not only basic assumptions, but also exposing cultural artefacts like working environment and the form interactions with customers take. I’d be looking to follow up with individual customers after these interactions to understand the experience from their point of view. Stated values will come from reading the organisation policies, processes and strategies and mapping these onto my observations in the field. I’ll be interested in how these directly (through instruction) and indirectly (through tone and language) impact how we interact with customers and respond to their requests and requirements. This is effectively an investigation and one that might lead anywhere. Investigating our request management performance in 2011 led to me to go so far as breaking down troublesome user requests using the expanded incident lifecycle to help understand where we were getting stuck. This wasn’t an exercise I’d anticipated doing at the start, it came as the result of investigation into the problem.
- With an understanding of where we are now and an idea of where we want to be, our first planning activity is to articulate the culture we want to create, our cultural vision. After a summary of our vision, I would explain what the driver is for change. What is making us follow this path. Why is it good for us. Why is it bad if we don’t. This is derived from our intended result – promoting University business and what it would specifically mention would depend on the organisation’s strategic direction. In Bath’s case I might use the strategic measures for success, which focus on research performance, teaching and student satisfaction. The driver we identified in our 2013 Innovation project was to maintain a focus on creative thinking and innovation, a priority for IT, in an increasingly difficult financial situation. I would then define a series of expected behaviours and experiences, perhaps in the form of user stories, which exemplify the culture we aspire to. These would cover a number of scenarios, from complex interactions between customers and different parts of IT, such as working through a major incident – through to scenarios where a customer fulfils a need through an automated service and without interacting with a member of IT staff. Our principles are the guidance for staff that we expect will deliver the behaviours and experiences we’ve described. For example, if we have a user story describing a customer fulfilling a need through self-help, we might have a principle that elevates providing information to users. I’m a big believer in the power of working towards an award or accreditation, such as the SDI’s certification scheme. As a motivator they are excellent, they help provide a tangible goal for everyone to work towards and they have longer term benefits for customer reputation and recruitment of quality staff. I’ve heard enough of my peers talk passionately and positively about this approach that I’d seriously consider including something like this. Finally we define our aims for this iteration – what aspects of the above will we make progress on in this cycle? I would look at making this smaller in the first round than I might in later rounds. It will be the first time that my understanding of the culture will be challenged so the risks are higher than they may be later on.
- Our culture defined – how are we going to get there? The activities we plan here target the artefacts and values in our culture model. I’d look at updating strategies, policies and procedures – the places where our values are expressed. Do we have a change process that is missing an appropriate level of communication with key stakeholders? Does our strategy emphasise technology at the expense of business outcomes? To address our request management problem I took away existing processes in favour of a simply defined value stream – pending, doing, on hold, done and a series of principles emphasising regular customer contact and minimum periods of inactivity to address the problems I’d discovered. While technology is rarely the answer, it may prove useful to look at existing or new tools and services to facilitate culture. Is our ITSM tool a barrier to customer focus, rather than an enabler? Would introducing ACD help users getting through to the service desk? Are there things we could introduce to help customers help themselves? To support our innovation project we bought in an idea management platform to help gather and progress the creative ideas submitted by staff. The platform wasn’t the critical part of the project, but it was a key enabling tool. Training may be valuable, if it can be shown to support your goals. While the usual go-to when facing this kind of challenge is generic customer services training, I would look to less traditional subjects, like dealing with conflict and building relationships. Not all training has to be about skills. If a problem we’ve identified is a gap in IT’s understanding of what is going on in the business then secondments, cross departmental briefings and sharing team-building events with staff in other departments can work well. And training isn’t necessarily something to be limited to IT staff. The impact the question challenges us to create is maximising the effective use of IT and AV. If it appears that the resources are there but they are under utilised then even simple user training can help realise value. Something like a uniform for staff is an artefact that is easy (if not necessarily popular) to change and can help customers identify IT staff, making them more approachable. And addressing physical barriers to contact, such as a hidden or poorly built help desk are good ways to help make IT more visible and approachable. As we make these changes it’s important to update any induction materials and training – this is a step that is often forgotten.
- We need executive support. Not just about approval and budget, it’s about persuading them of the need for change, to facilitate delivering the plan and to get them to be part of the change, living and selling the vision. A recent example of that for me has been donning a white lab coat and supporting an anatomy class as part of improving our support of academic IT. Culture change isn’t something that happens to “other people” in an organisation. Everyone has to buy in. Establish measures to track progress while you execute the plan and for review afterwards. Look for measurements that relate to the changes you wish to achieve in this iteration and don’t just focus on metrics that are easy to acquire. Communication to your stakeholders – in this case both IT staff and customers – is critical. Structured culture change doesn’t work in a vacuum and in common with any change management initiative you have to be sure your constituents are bought into your vision, goals and the direction of travel. Lastly, identify leaders. Not just your managers, but individuals both inside IT and in the broader community who are both engaged with and openly supportive of the cultural vision. These are your champions. In our big workstation management project at Surrey finding and working with these people proved critical to our success. These were staff well respected by all parties and who understood the benefits of the project’s cultural aims. Engaging and supporting them helped us get the job done.
- Do! Subject, of course, to the actions and caveats I’ve mentioned before.
- Having implemented our plan and let it run for a suitable period, perhaps just a month if the changes were straightforward, longer if not, it is time to assess progress. Was the plan implemented successfully? What worked, what failed and why? The positive and the negative of the story are worth capturing. Were there inadvertent consequences to our changes? Review the data and consider how we’ve done against our aims. Some of the data might be subjective, which is why I would treat this as a collaborative review, not something done in isolation. In reviewing our innovation project we were interested in some measurable aspects of performance, such as the number of ideas staff submitted. But we also found it useful to create weekly word clouds of the ideas being discussed, giving us a feeling for the mood of the department. Were we positive or frustrated? Customer focused or inward looking? We found this information so interesting that an adjustment passed to the next cycle of the project had us sharing this information in regular communications out to the department about how we were doing. Take the time to review our assessment of the culture. Does progress so far fit our understanding and expectations, or is have we missed something?
- What kinds of problems might come to light when checking progress? The obvious one that springs to mind is resistance. Passive resistance will manifest itself as individuals or groups quietly continuing to operate as they have before. Active resistance is similar, if somewhat noisier. Effective communication and a compelling reason for change can help limit this risk, but where it occurs it is important to understand the reason for the resistance. Is it a lack of understanding, a fear of losing influence, or is there an aspect of the culture that has been missed, leading to poor assumptions and resulting in inappropriate activities being proposed? Resistance at a group level can be evidence of sub cultures. Our workstation management project saw this at a team level, with the academic IT teams in particular approaching problems, tasks and decisions in different ways, leading to conflict. We addressed this over time by agreeing shared terms of reference for our working arrangements, adopting some agile development principles which allowed us to focus on project deliverables without dictating how work was completed and by working more socially.
- With an understanding of what went well, what went badly and the current culture, we create our adjustments to pass to our next iteration of planning. Feedback from my team during the request management project was positive. We could see the difference through our measurements and a fortuitously timed annual staff survey saw, in some departments, a 40 point improvement in satisfaction with IT. Yet despite this they were keen to establish a more detailed feedback loop and suggested that I regularly review in-train requests, naming and shaming team members not keeping up with the pack.
- What future iterations look like will obviously vary depending on how the previous one has gone. But each pass of planning will include a gut-check – does the vision still stand? Are we still doing the right thing? And have we reached our destination? The adjustments proposed from the previous iteration should be taken into account and any new or revised activities planned. Do we still have management buy-in? Are our leaders still out there walking the talk?
- How long might a project like this continue? This depends on the size of the gap between our current and aspirational cultures. And as I’ve mentioned previously, organisational maturity is also a factor as it determines the level of change an organisation is able to accept over time.
- So, to recap. Today I’ve discussed my approach to managing organisational culture change, the importance of understanding existing culture, and the elements of a cultural change plan such as the vision and activities. And the steps I would take to avoid and resolve challenges.
- I’ve discussed what it might mean to promote institutional business
- I’ve discussed the steps you could take encourage the effective use of IT
- And I’ve outlined this inside the process I would follow to create an organisational culture.
- Thank you very much.