Pols Consulting

I’m reading the excellent book Fearless Change by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising.  It’s a book of patterns for introducing new ideas.

I’m experimenting with the patterns to help me introduce agile developement into organisations.  So far so good.  I recommend it.  They have an interesting  quote from David Baum’s Lightning in a Bottle

If your change process is like most, about 15% of your folks are going to be thrilled and will only want to know what took you so long. About 15% will utterlly reject the need for change, and won’t be happy no matter what you do. The remaining 70% will sit on the fence and quietly watch to see who’s winning.

This middle 70% is where you need to put your most time and energy.  That is where the victories really count.  The 15% who are positively exceited will need very little support and encouragement .  They are already motivated by the change.  For the negative 15%, there may be nothing you can do.

How true.

Continuing on the theme of breaking the self imposed rules I heard a wonderful story about a team working in an environment that involved a customer requirement to provide an audit trail of all project design decisions.

This was a real rule.

Many teams would interpret this as a requirement to have lots of heavy documentation and associated traceability. This would have been a self imposed rule.

This team solved the requirement in a wonderfully low energy way. They simply attached a long roll of brown butcher’s paper around the room. Whenever people on the team made a decision, they made a note of it on the paper, dated it and signed it. This acted as a short term information radiator of team decisions. Once it was full, they rolled it up, marked it with the date range and filled in it the corner of the room.

The auditor loved it as it was quick and easy to see what was happening over time.