Making Retrospective Changes Stick

This article first appeared on Stickyminds.com. Recently, a reader wrote to me with a concern about retrospectives. “We make decisions,” he wrote, “but we don’t have the discipline to carry them out. The team is starting to feel like...

Influencing the Pattern: A Systems Approach

Systems drive behavior. Therefore, if you want to change behavior in an organization you need to understand the factors that influence the current pattern. An Example The managers in an organization have decided that they want the productivity and morale benefits of...

Musing on Organizational Change

A while back, I sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on organizational change.  The main theme was bemoaning the difficulty changing even mid-sized organizations. When people talk about how hard it is to bring change there’s a tendency to blame:  people who...

Seven Lessons from a Top-Down Change

You’d think that since I’m president of a one-person company, I could change anything in my office in a snap. But a recent incident reminded me that top-down change is always a process. My dog, Miss Pudge, comes to the office with me every day. Until recently, she...

Adaptive Planning and the Personal Learning Curve

Most of my clients want to change something: they want to deliver software faster, reduce the number of defects the software they do deliver, and improve financial results. Affecting these changes neither simple nor easy. Improving organizational results involves...

What to do with a struggling employee

Esther Schindler recently put forward a scenario about a struggling employee named Frank, and solicited advice from her network.Briefly, the scenario is this: Frank was a great maintenance programmer, but the company is retiring the system he worked on. Frank has...

Conditions for Change

I attended an Organizational Change BoF last evening at the AYE conference. Among other things, we talked about why it is that some managers fail to act when there are many signs of big problems. I see three conditions that are prequisites for change (at any level):...

They don’t get it (…well, maybe)

I got a call from an acquaintance, Gloria, who is trying to convince her organization to adopt agile methods. “I’ve given them every logical argument I can think of,” she said. “They just don’t get it. All I get is blank looks. How stupid...

Overcoming “resistance”

Back in February, I wrote a post on helping people change and pointed to George Dinwiddie’s post on Overcoming Resistance. His post has grown up to be an article, and it’s posted on the AYE Conference website.

Estimating hard-to-measure benefits

Last week, I wrote a post about decisions that look only at easy-to-count costs and ignore hard-to-count benefits.Here’s one method for estimating hard-to-count benefits, subjective impact analysis:1. Identify the proposed course of action.2. Determine what’s...

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