Well-practiced Change Management is a fact of life for the successful business or organization.
If we employ software to do our work, we tend to see Change Management as technology focused. Software vendors and their marketing departments love and foster this perspective. The mantra in the marketplace is pervasive and persuasive. That perspective produces the illusion that the most important change issues for the software users are all about the vendor and their product. Nothing could be…
Further From the Truth
For some Civil 3D users Change Management can actually mean you want to change as little as possible as infrequently as possible. Our belief is that improved production efficiency derives from our ability to execute the same tasks quicker and with less waste. Hence in the CAD world we tend to focus on CAD Standards as we search for more consistency and quality of results. CAD Standards are indeed useful, but they don’t get us to a more productive the future by themselves.
What often gets lost in the shuffle is the glaring fact that human decisions are being made, or not, throughout the entire production process. The words – quicker and less waste are essentially all about the improvement of the quality of those human decisions.
I like to say that well-practiced Change Management is a people skill. Simply put…
People Manage Change and Manage To Change
What is also interesting and often over-looked is the fact that there are both personal and corporate versions and aspects of Change Management skills. The statement is not an oxymoron. Let me put it another way to clarify exactly what I mean.
Remember Change Management is somehow always related to the measurable improvement of decision making skill or in other words - the measurable improvement of specialized critical thinking skill.
On the individual level, because we are talking about management as a user we can abdicate our personal accountability to participate in the process itself. At the practical level we nod our heads, but we wait for others to discover solutions and fix the problems that confront us. This lack of action is an action.
On the corporate level, because we are talking about user productivity as a manager we can abdicate our management accountabilities to provide reasonable and understandable direction, systems, and structure to effectively execute the necessary details and feedback loops required. The absence of leadership is not management.
There is no mysterious rocket science to a participatory and functional Change Management process.
Plan Do Check Assess
I like the classic PDCA loop vernacular but the process semantics don’t matter nearly as much as the number of repetitions executed. Frankly, most organizations fail at change management because personally or corporately they simply give up on the repetitions. There is that personal and corporate accountability thing again.
The simplicity of this manifest destiny is staggering.
More adaptive organizations always ritually do the change process repetitions.
Less adaptive organizations want the change to be over…
It never is.
The latest release of the Framework for Civil 3D 2019 hit the streets last week. Are you ready to run? For a limited time we’ve made the Framework for Civil 3D 2018 to 2019 upgrade even more affordable. That sounds like a change for the better?