Kyle joined the chapter in 2014 and has been a volunteer since 2017. He is part of the team that has integrated and developed our technology tools so that we can focus more of our volunteer time on getting things done rather than on the mundane administrative operational tasks.

A little bit about Kyle, did you know that he was a police officer and deputy. His proudest moment was when his mom pinned on his badge. The people who know him describe him as a person with good intentions which makes sense since he has served his community.

Kyle identifies himself as an engineer and a gear head on his Mustang convertible so basically, he likes to fix things and make it work.  He thrives and is driven due to his family, his motivator. Kyle's greatest joy is taking his wife and grandkids on a car ride enjoying nature and letting time stand still. His advice to others, "keep things simple, or at least make complex things simple for others. It makes more of an impact than most people think it will." Continue to try new adventure, Kyle embraces being a grandfather and playing with the kids while teaching new things, like caring for the environment so the planet remains beautiful. "Educating youth makes me feel good - it is a connection to the new generation to get kids interested in cars and while making memories and it’s a cool thing to share." Kyle worries about the younger education quality. Everyone needs to focus on being educated and about their impact your personal world to make things better.

As an engineer he identifies with is analytical side and grew up with the arts. Kyle's heroes is his parents who taught him to mix technology and creativity, he was given the technical edge and found a way to merge technology and art. His other hero, Kyle's wife who is a teacher forming young minds so youth have a strong foundation to grow.

Kyle's personal motto is a quote borrowed from Teddy Roosevelt, “do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” It is a message he would like to pass on to prospective volunteers, there are plenty of opportunities with work to be done and feels it is important to help the chapter since it is volunteer led. It is important and fate led me to be a member of the technology team.

Kyle feels fortunate and likes his journey. "I am happy with my journey and am right where i want to be. I feel blessed."

Jun 28th 2021 PMI Insights

Navigating the dynamics of change can be a challenge for accounting firms. Employees may become anxious or resistant or even actively oppose new processes and technologies. Yet change is not optional. In CPA firms today, remaining stagnant is a recipe for extinction.

So how can you help your team embrace change?

Understand That Change Is a Process, Not an Event
Firmwide change doesn't happen simply because you made an announcement, invited people to a training session or scheduled a go-live date.

According to the Project Management Institute, when people experience change, they move through a three-step process:
Current state. What they currently know and do, including processes, tools, behaviors, technologies, organizational structures and roles. All of these elements might not be working great, but they're familiar and comfortable.

Transition state. This can be an emotionally charged time, and people may feel fear, anxiety and even anger. Productivity declines as people learn new processes, technologies and behaviors.

Future state. At this point, people achieve a new way of performing their work.Think about this the next time you undergo a process improvement and technology initiative in your firm and address how you will bridge the gap between the current state (where you are) and the future state (where you want to be).

Listen to People and Get Their Input
People feel more excited about change if they have a say in it.

According to Gallup, only three in 10 U.S. employees strongly agree that their opinions count at work, and organizational change is one area in particular where people feel left out.

Your people are a goldmine of information. Ask for feedback frequently, listen to what they have to say, and take action based on their input. People tend to be more open to change when they've participated in the decision-making process.
Connect Change to Individual Goals
Getting buy-in for change requires an answer to the question "Why?" When you answer this question, people are better prepared to fight their natural instinct to resist change.

What individual goals do the changes you're making help people work toward? Will new processes improve efficiency, reduce overtime during busy season and provide better work/life balance? Will new technologies and automation create people's capacity to work on higher-level work and help them level up in their careers?

In a TED talk, organizational change expert Jim Hemerling explains that people usually think positively about personal transformation and are more driven to accomplish personal goals. Instead of focusing on the firm's bottom line, show them how meeting the firm's goals will help them achieve their personal and professional goals. This will put more energy behind the initiative.

Firm leaders have a responsibility to lead others through change. Employ these three steps, and you'll enjoy more emotional buy-in and cooperation for the changes you want and need to make in your firm.

Tackling societal issues on a large scale also requires a radical reimagining of customer and stakeholder relationships, including exactly who it is that organizations are trying to reach. Only then can businesses ensure they’re solving the right problems for the right people with the right projects.

Consider Coca-Cola HBC’s Mission 2025 Team, which conducts an annual materiality survey of roughly 1,000 internal and external stakeholders to identify social and environmental topics that impact the company’s value drivers. “This is not just a one-off exercise,” Dickstein said. “It is the starting point for engagement activities that occur throughout the year.”

The survey results helped Coca-Cola HBC define its 2025 sustainability commitments, which, in turn, align to the UN SDGs. With that, the company is ready to take action on a wide range of issues, ranging from reducing water use by 20 percent in water-risk areas to increasing its management ranks to 50 percent female.

“We are engaging with our stakeholders to determine climate action in the new normal and what the whole global pandemic means for us as a business,” he said of the company’s 2020 stakeholder forum. “Listening to and learning from them is a fantastic best-practice platform and necessary to move the agenda forward.”

A customer-centric mindset, meanwhile, can yield more innovative ways of thinking that continue to deliver value to customers even in times of crisis. Take urban development: in London—as in other cities—there’s a “big conversation” about “equality in public infrastructure, and how access to healthcare, parks, and neighborhood centers disproportionately benefits some communities more than others,” Arup’s de Cani said. As leaders around the world contemplate a post-pandemic future, such discussions may spark more equitable project investments. And de Cani said more of Arup’s clients want to play an active role in developing those solutions. They want to understand the impact of projects in much broader terms and expect guidance on how to improve them to benefit more people through access to cities, data, and economic opportunities. “At a meta level, these measures now affect whether a project is approved or not,” he said.

It’s also important, as the UN SDG Fund stresses, for businesses not only to implement reactive measures but also to enable the right conditions for social inclusion to flourish. This includes engaging in a true dialogue with customers.

“We’ve seen in several projects that the cultural connection, the language, whatever it might be, is a real value,” said Gabrielle Bullock, principal and director of global diversity at architecture and design firm Perkins and Will, Los Angeles, California, United States. “Our clients’ values are not only focused on fee, schedule, and budget. It really is about the human connection, the cultural connection, and shared values.”²¹

In one instance, Bullock said Perkins and Will almost lost an opportunity because its commitment to the LGBTQ+ community wasn’t clearly demonstrated. “We hadn’t really promoted it like we should,” she said. Once the firm showed its team’s understanding and commitment to the community, it won the project.

Sources

21. Pulse of the Profession^®In-Depth Report: A Case for Diversity, PMI, June 2020.

So again, I say not only that we cannot go back, we shouldn’t go back.  That is not to say working in offices or having face-face meetings should be totally abandoned.  No, there are situations where they are necessary, but in most cases, they should be the exceptions not the de facto standard.  

So where do we go from here?  We all deservingly patted ourselves on the back for moving our people from the office to home when the lock downs occurred.  In reality, that was the easy part.  It was limited to the scope of physically moving folks but not changing the enterprises culture.  We are now seeing the limitations of an incomplete transition.  The hard part now is how do we make changes in our Enterprises’ culture and infrastructure to truly support distributed working.

If you noticed, I have not used the term “work at home” or “remote working.”  Those are terms that describe the partial transformation.  They imply they are the exception or that they are temporary.  When I use the term “distributed work” I am referring to the complete transformation of an Enterprise.  The concept that work will be conducted from anywhere that supports the workflow.

Let me provide an example.  I was having lunch with an Audio Principal for an Enterprise that has theme parks.  Most of his work can be done in distributed manner, if the infrastructure is in place.  In his situation the work location, wherever that “is”, would need good internet connections, large dual screens to handle the transfer of information from spreadsheets to schematics, secure access to proprietary files, etc.  

There are some workflows that would need a local centralized lab where they can work on the physical servers as they mock them up and collaboration rooms where they can periodically meet in person.

In this scenario:

• The demand for physical office space is significantly reduced
• Commute reduce significantly reduced
• Carbon footprint significantly reduced
• Commuting stress, reduced
• Speed to deployment increased
• Employee satisfaction increased

I think you get the picture.  So as industry thought leaders our mantra should be “We don’t want to go back.”  To accomplish this, we need to work with top leadership to:

• Agree on a distributed workforce enterprise strategy
• Develop an enterprise communication plan
• Identify individuals to be the Executive Sponsors for the project

Once the distributed workforce plan is accepted, we should work to build the Enterprise Infrastructure (IT and Facilities) to support it:

• Solidify, secure, and templatize distributed work configurations
• Redesign offices to support:
  • Hoteling
  • Drop in Collaboration rooms
  • Standardize our collaboration tools, implemented, and follow up with an adoption plan

2020 and Covid were painful but in a strange way a gift that forced us to move from an unsustainable office and in-person oriented “normal” to a more efficient and sustainable distributed work model.  It is now up to us to find effective ways to move to that model.   Build upon the temporary emergency configuration that exists today to a implement a well-designed and supportable permanent distributed “normal.”

You with me? Then let’s do it together.

Bob Kent ITIL, VSP

Director, Solution Architects

Converge One

The benefits of using an external risk consultant should include the following:

· They bring guaranteed expertise

· They can draw on proven solutions from other engagements

· Cross-fertilisation is possible, with the consultant bringing ideas from other industries

· They can offer creativity, innovation, and fresh thinking

· There’s no “start-up” time, the consultant is ready to work on day one, without training

· Consultants offer access to leading-edge thinking and practice

· Consultants should be familiar with all current tools and techniques

· They are able to perform specialist techniques, such as risk simulation

· Using a consultant allows hands-on training for own staff by shadowing or observing

· You can turn on and turn off the consultancy resource when required

· Using consultants allows cost-effective use of limited resources or funding

· You only need to use consultants for specific tasks with clear scope

· There are no overhead costs for your organisation

There are however a number of risks to consider when using an external risk consultant, including:

· The consultant may not understand your business or the specific risk challenge

· They may lack specific knowledge of your project or organisation or industry sector

· They may offer a “one-size-fits-all” solution, not tailored to your need

· Prerequisite information may not be in place to support the engagement

· You may need to share confidential information to get them started

· You need to manage knowledge transfer to own staff in order to avoid becoming dependent

· The initial engagement may reveal a need for further assistance from the consultant

· They may be more expensive than you expect, especially if follow-on work is needed

· They may not leave a solution that can be operated by your staff or organisation

· The consultant may use tools or techniques that you don’t have available after they leave

· Your underlying processes may be deficient, prejudicing results

· Consultants may poach your own staff or tempt them away

· Your proprietary information may be at risk

· The reality may not match the offer (many consultants over-promise and under-deliver)

· Senior risk consultant staff may sell the work but then junior staff may be used to deliver it

· The consultant may not be available when you need or want them

In addition to performing a benefit-risk analysis, the following criteria might be useful when selecting a risk consultant:

· Proven track record of successful delivery in similar situations

· Recognised and relevant risk qualifications

· Extensive client base in similar sector or industry or project types

· Good reputation

· Personal recommendation

· Demonstrable expertise

· Availability when required

· Affordable within budget

If you can find external risk consultants who meet all the selection criteria, and who offer all the benefits with none of the risks, you should engage them immediately!! 

To provide feedback on this Briefing Note, or for more details on how to develop effective risk management, contact the Risk Doctor (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), or visit the Risk Doctor website (www.risk-doctor.com).

Change-makers rely on key capabilities to succeed:

• New ways of working, including agile, waterfall, and hybrid methodologies, and digital project management approaches such as problem-solving tools, AI-driven tools, and microlearning apps
• Power skills, such as collaborative leadership, innovative mindset, empathy for the voice of the customer, empathy for the voice of the employee, and the ability to build trusting relationships
• Business acumen, encompassing a well-rounded set of capabilities that enables people to understand not only their own roles, but how their work relates to business strategy and to other parts of the business

First, however, change-makers must have the means to acquire these capabilities. Continuous learning is the only way to thrive in today’s disruption-driven environment. Some of that can come through virtual education, which, especially since the pandemic began, is seemingly everywhere. But organizations that raise the bar by using AI to facilitate continuous, agile, and innovative learning—collaborative human-machine learning—are the ones that excel at driving change. Or, as a 2020 MIT Sloan Management Review report put it: “They don’t just use AI; they learn with AI.”22

It doesn’t matter what sector an organization is in, where it’s located, or even what is driving its strategic mission. It must be ready to adapt to whatever megatrend comes its way. And this is where the ecosystem of employees, partners, customers, and stakeholders committed to change truly proves its value.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor was climate action or the diversity and inclusion agenda,” Coca-Cola HBC’s Dickstein said. “If you want change that is in itself sustainable, you need to do that together with the communities.”

Sources

22. “Expanding AI’s Impact with Organizational Learning,” MIT Sloan Management Review, October 19, 2020.

Agile is getting a lot of great press lately as we see companies like Amazon thriving by leveraging the concepts. But we also see push back from other business leaders on why Agile won’t work for them, or companies that have tried going Agile but are not seeing the expected improvements. Instead of realizing Agile as an all or nothing idea, we should analyze each of the Agile principles, taking a pragmatic approach to leveraging Agile within our own organizations.

This focused segmentation on each Agile principle is key since no individual practice will provide a competitive advantage. If something is easy to replicate, everyone will do it. Also, what organizations do is not simple – each one is completing a complex combination of different tasks to create customer value.

That leads me to this – The secret sauce of Agile is: It’s a framework built on strong principles you adjust to fit your organization. The goal is to make the right adjustments while not losing the underlying strengths that Agile brings.

To do that successfully, you need to understand each of the principles in depth. The four key Agile principles we have identified are:

BREAKING PROJECTS INTO SMALLER BITES

CONNECTING WITH CUSTOMERS

LEVERAGING THE POWER OF TEAMS

BUILDING IN CONTINUAL LEARNING

Join me over the next few posts, as we delve into each one of the principles throughout this Agile blog series. Today, we start with: Breaking Projects into Small Bites.

Smaller Bites

The first principle is breaking projects and initiatives into smaller bites, following the old adage that the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. As we think about how to break up projects, we need to also answer:

If you think about construction, where traditional project management comes from, these questions are fairly easy to answer. If you are looking at building a new bridge, for example, to see if there is value, it’s easy to see what those who would use the bridge are doing today, and if they are willing to pay for a replacement. This answers the first two questions, so then the real focus is on how we do it. Since this isn’t the first bridge that’s been built, we can get a reasonable idea and estimates from previous projects to help us answer the last question. If we found ourselves without previous information, we would need to experiment. That’s much harder on these types of projects since there may not be an easy way to break the project up into smaller bites. We could start with a rope bridge, but chances are it’s not going to add any value till we have a four-lane highway ready to use, thus failing the first question.

Construction projects are not the only ones that may provide this complication. IT infrastructure or software upgrade projects are often similar and are quite a bit different from software projects – which is where Agile came from. Software projects are far more unique and have their own conditions to be considered. You see similar issues in marketing, educational design, business process changes, or any project where we don’t have a good, previous solution to copy.

The problem with these types of projects is:

Even with this complexity, there is some good news. Unlike construction projects, these projects are easier to break up into experiments where we can test our assumptions and reduce the risk to the organization. The key is to focus on breaking the project up into the right pieces, that will help answer these questions as quickly as possible.

How to Break Projects Into Small Pieces

Let’s talk about how to break that elephant up with a real-life example. A company I worked with had a hypothesis that they were paying generous benefits but employees weren’t seeing that value since they didn’t know what those benefits cost. For the three questions, the hypothesis was:

How will this project deliver value to the customer?

If employees knew the cost of their benefits, they would be more satisfied

How will it deliver value to the organization?

Satisfied employees would provide more value to the organization (in this case reduced turnover)

How do we do it, including how long will it take, or how much will it cost?

We have access to the benefit information and can present it in the right format to make it easy for employees to understand.

Looking at how to break this project up, we would want to:

Present employees an example of a current benefit to see if this increases satisfaction. If possible, we probably want to start with the biggest benefit.

We don’t have time to wait for turnover, but we still need to measure satisfaction, perhaps with a questionnaire, targeting a group of employees that have the most turnover.

We need to test if we can get access to the data and test different ways to show the information to make sure it is easy to understand

As you lay out what you want to learn, it gets easier to understand how to break the project into the right pieces.

Value of Breaking Projects into Smaller Pieces

So whether you’re agile or not, let’s talk about the benefits of this approach:

As an organization – testing the value of ideas early lets you focus on the good ones. It also helps to uncover big technical risks quickly so you get a picture of the real effort projects will take. Finally, delivering the projects quickly, and in small increments lets you deliver value faster, speeding return on investment.

As a customer – teams are already testing on real customers today; all of them when they release. Smaller testing means you get to see what approach a team is considering early, provide meaningful input on finding the best approach, and only a small group of customers is impacted.

As a team – testing early means you waste less time on bad ideas. It’s demoralizing to put your heart into a project and then not find out till the end it didn’t deliver the value you expected.

By taking this approach, Agile is pushing an empirical tactic, pressing you to think like a scientist, understand what ideas are really theories, and find ways to test the theories early.

As you look at getting this same value with your own projects, think about the three questions around organizational value, customer value, and the approach. If you have good evidence to support your ideas, it may be more similar to the construction

project example, and focusing on how to efficiently put the project in place could be the best approach. But, if there are a lot of assumptions like we described above, it’s worth the time to set up a quick experiment and validate them.

On our next post, I’ll be reviewing the second principle, Connecting with Customers.

The Power of Teams

As kids, I think everyone of us wanted to be superheroes. Teams give us that ability – they turn ordinary people into top performers. In his book Scrum Twice the Work in Half the Time – Sutherland explains the difference between your best and worst individual performers is 10 times. That means the best performers get 10 times more done than the worst. That sounds impressive, until you hear the difference between the worst and best teams is 2,000 times (2,000 times better starts to sound and feel a lot like a superhero).

Part of the difference might be in existing team structure. Most of the time, we think about teams as individuals working on similar items with a manager directing traffic. That’s not a team. And, it won’t provide the advantage of leveraging the intelligence of the group. In his book Turn the Ship Around, Marquette talks about how, traditionally in a submarine, you have one captain thinking for the 140 crew. Marquette discusses how he got each individual to think for themselves. By doing that, he outperformed every other submarine in the US fleet. It was easy for him to see that no other captain, however smart they may be, is going to be as smart as 140 people.

For those who have worked in a solid team, it’s a great experience.  However, teams need the right elements to be successful. An example I like to share is a research project called Aristotle looking at successful teams that Google conducted. They started with an assumption that great teams would be made of great individuals, but couldn’t find any correlation. What they did find were five key elements that did correlate with team performance:

Psychological Safety

Can we take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed?

Dependability

Can we count on each other to do high quality work and meet commitments?

Structure and Clarity

Are the goals, roles, and plans on the team clear?

Work Meaning

Does our work provide us with an individual sense of purpose?

Work Impact

Do we believe the work we’re doing matters?

If you’re looking for structure, Scrum, the most popular Agile framework, provides teams a simple approach on how to plan, touch base regularly, review work against plans, and implement regular retrospectives to identify and make needed adjustments.

Benefits of Teams

There are so many benefits to high functioning teams, but one of the most valuable is innovation. New ideas often come from leveraging existing ideas in a new way. When you present a problem to a group, each person comes with a different perspective, a lifetime of different experiences, and the more diverse your team is, the more diverse those experiences will be. Great ideas come from one person seeing the problem in a different way, and then others in the group building on those ideas till at the end you have a completely new solution.  This means:

As an organization – innovation is the lifeblood of any good company. It is the ultimate source of competitive advantage. It is why companies like Google and Amazon are so hard to compete with.

As a customer – it gives you the best product at the best price. Customers are so tired of hearing the word “or.” Would you like quality or would you like a price you can afford?  Innovation gives you the ability to give customers “and.” Toyota did this in the 50’s, providing the quality of a Mercedes for the cost of a Ford, gaining a decade of competitive advantage.

As a team – we talked about a key part of successful teams is meaning and impact. There is a joy of going home (or logging off our computer in our home office) at the end of the day knowing that, as a team, you did the impossible and the world is better because of it. Innovation makes the impossible possible, and it’s fun getting to do it.

You don’t have to be Agile to improve what your teams are doing today.  Look at the Google Aristotle aspects of a team and think about how you make groups more like teams.  Wherever you are today, leveraging the genius of the entire organization will help you be far more effective, with a side effect of much happier employees.

In the last part of our Agile Series, we’ll take a look at Continual Learning.

Connecting with Customers

I had this epiphany when I came to Agile. As a solution architect I had been spending a lot of time getting sign-offs from customers to make sure we had the right solution before we started the project.

The problem is solutions are like art. Often customers don’t know what they want till they see it. Further, they may not even know what the underlying problem is. What they do know, is what is they don’t like what they have today.

While customers are not experts at understanding how to take a problem apart and find an answer, your solution team is, but, your solution team may not know what is most important to the customer. Worse, they often think they know and move forward to test that theory by delivering a finished product – that’s an expensive experiment!

The epiphany I had was: Take the customers who understand where their pain points are and know a good solution when they see it; put them together with teams who are experts at root cause analysis and developing innovative ideas and you create the perfect environment for innovative solutions that meet customer needs.

How to Connect with Customers

Whether you are developing software solutions, creating marketing campaigns, developing education curriculums, or changing a business process, chances are you are trying to think of the right solution for your customers. However, if you have ever delivered a finished project and the customer says “Oh, now I know what I want,” – this is the strong an indication that there’s an opportunity to improve.

Here are some steps to make this actionable:

Continual Learning

It’s cliché that the world is moving quickly. A key element of this change is companies, many whom are your competitors, continually looking for better ways to serve customers. Just ask Sears, Kmart, or Toys R Us and they’ll tell you – If you’re not finding a better way, someone will.

The problem is our current structures are not built for learning – they are built for control. Hierarchies are built to increase efficiency and stability in the organization, not leverage great ideas. We need to change this. We need to build companies of entrepreneurs, where experimentation and innovation are an integral part of what we do. We want good ideas to get the same attention, no matter where they originate.

How to do we foster continual learning into our organizations

Before you even start, one of the first things to consider is understanding what is the clear goal of what you want when you are finished. Do you want more efficiency, do you want more customer value, do you want more sales, do you want more revenue, more profits? As we discussed in Part 3 – Teams are amazing idea engines – set them loose on a problem and they will come up with incredible results, but you have to start with pointing them towards the right problem. As a leadership team – it’s your responsibility to understand where you want innovation in your organization and what is going to make a difference, so your teams can focus on how to get you there.

The next thing you need is the right environment. Looking back again at Part 3 the Power of Teams, we mentioned psychological safety is important. But, that isn’t just safety within the team. Ironically, for the team to succeed they also need to be able to fail. With innovation, people need to feel safe in the organization as a whole, knowing that ideas may not work every time, but when they do, it will be worth it.

You also need an idea meritocracy. Often when you start a new team, members come in wanting to know what their tasks are and when they are due. They know they are usually asked to leave their brain at the door and just do the tasks as asked. What a waste of good people! Teams need to know that great ideas can come from anywhere or anyone. It shouldn’t matter if you are in accounting, you might have a great idea for operations. Operations might have a great idea for sales. You may see great ideas come from facilities, customer service, or accounting. We need to be able to judge ideas on merit, not rank or role.

This next part is a little more controversial since it has to do with money. To entice entrepreneurs, you need to be able to share rewards for great ideas. To find the best way to serve customers, you need to measure the value the team is delivering to them. Taking that one step further – as teams deliver great value, there should be some direct rewards, sharing the value of those ideas that made it possible.

It’s rewarding to see the value customers are getting but if organizations don’t share a portion of the benefits, team members may end up feeling cynical that they’re doing a great job, but the owners are the only ones seeing rewards. Nucor Steal pays employees 75% of market wages, but with bonuses they can make 125%.  At Google, employees can make as much as 300% more than someone in the same role, based on the value of their contributions.  Haier, a Chinese appliance company, has broken departments into small mini companies where employees are encouraged to think of new revenue streams and there can be significant rewards when those ideas payoff.

Beyond the right environment, the last element is room to process and digest thoughts. Agile is the only methodology I’ve seen that does continual improvement effectively. The reason is that there is time built into every iteration to take a step back, discuss where to improve, and build those tasks into the next iteration.  We all know that improvement is important, but we’re not scheduling time to do it.

In one of the departments I managed, I thought I was doing a great job delegating and communicating with my team till we had our first retro. I was surprised to learn that wasn’t the case. Over the course of a year, we were able to eliminate, automate, and delegate my administrative overhead from 20 hours a week to 4. It left me a lot more time to focus on strategic value and the team was much happier with the growth they were seeing. You have opportunities, but you won’t know where those opportunities to grow are, or what is possible, until you take time to ask.

Benefits of Continual Learning

People talk about an Agile transformation like it is a destination that you get to.  However, Agile is a journey. It’s about building an organization that is continually changing and adapting to better fit the world around it. Continual learning is really one of the key principles to Agile because it builds a truly flexible organization.  That means:

As an organization – you don’t have to worry about driving results. A key job today for leadership is to drive the organization to be more effective. Agile puts in a structure where everyone is focused on being more effective. That means leadership has more time to focus on strategic direction.

As a customer – the company is always growing and adjusting to better fit your needs. Every iteration, they are asking how they can serve you better.

As a team – you get growth. Too many times we think people aren’t satisfied because of money or benefits. But a key reason employees leave a job is because they don’t have an opportunity to grow. Continual learning gives you the opportunity to not just do more, but to be more, increasing the value you add. If you’re with a good company, it also means you get to take the results of some of those ideas home as a well-deserved thank you.

The idea of continual improvement isn’t new. Toyota started quality circles after WWII leading to its popularity in the 1950’s. But, 70 years later, it seems we’re still not doing it well. Most teams meet regularly to discuss status. It’s not hard to add some reflection time to those meetings. You can google fun retrospectives to get some ideas of how to get people thinking more creatively. Whether you borrow the approach from Lean or Agile, building continual improvement will help your company grow.

As we have gone through the four key Agile principles, you’re probably thinking they aren’t new. You’re right, they’re not. Agile is really just a collection of good business practices, and rather than a detailed practice, it’s a combination of good principles that companies should leverage to improve what they do.

As you look at Agile, rather than thinking that’s not for me, or that would never work here, do what Agile did —  Take a bunch of great ideas and make them your own.

Salvador Marin is a US Army veteran whose plan initially led him to information technology so he could learn how to create video games, his beginning passion. The demands of his military job, a signal satellite technician who ran equipment forged a different path. Salvador was not trained for it; he went to his unit and the needed role had to be self-taught. It started a lifelong education journey where he became the go to guy. The task uncovered his hidden skills and strengths. Salvador discovered that he was analytical and curious. Creating games led to building his own computer, learning about the circuits and how the electrical components connect. Basically, what makes the game work and why does it work?

Salvador’s employment path began in the private sector began by putting his lessons learned into a college degree which he obtained while working. If you ask Sal who he is, “it's a puzzle solver, he now leads others to the solution.” Salvador is a nerd at heart. His nickname is Data. Star Track followers will remember the character who tends to interpret things literally, the black and white, what is said, rather than what is meant, gray. Today he has learned to ask a series of questions to lead others to solutions instead of providing the answer to help perpetuate learning.

His interest in project management, planning his life rather than stumbling into it, led to an interest in finance. Salvador Marin loves to manage costs and schedules, key in the construction industry. This attention to detail enabled his success. “Who doesn’t know the numbers?”

Salvador’s strong sense of family, raising his children, giving back with the Knights of Columbus and his motto, truth is the truth, he feels will keep him on the correct path. His words resonated with me, “if something is hard, remember someone is always looking up to you and you want them to improve their own situation, so no handups, you can do it if you work to the bone.”

Work serves a purpose; it is all about supporting the family His work ethic has set an example to his siblings as a role model. Sal’s love of video games is still alive, he has turned his passion into quality time with his son.

Salvador Marins next career goal is executive leadership, somehow, I envision his winding road taking him there.

Here is a quick recap of what ADKAR stands for:

·                  AWARENESS

·                  DESIRE

·                  KNOWLEDGE

·                  ABILITY

·                  REINFORCEMENT

Knowledge

Knowledge is about each person understanding how to change. This would be the education and training on the new tool, their processes, and them understanding any new expectations – whether it be a new role or new responsibility. Depending on your change initiative this could be as simple as providing a new URL link or as complex as an entirely new office location, reporting structure, and office procedures. But, even with the range of complexity, this ADKAR milestone is where I think, as Project Managers, we are the most familiar and comfortable with as we typically cover aspects of this during our UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and Training sessions.

I have seen some really cool examples when it comes to how to deliver knowledge. Gamification techniques can be used to tap into the reward center of our brains and provide positive reinforcement as a fun and interactive way to help people gain the new knowledge.

I’ve written a blog about using game theory for time-tracking that goes into detail about each game mechanic if you want to learn more about gamification.

There are a lot of additional resources available to help deliver knowledge including creating interactive quizzes, live train-the-trainer sessions, on-demand training videos, and even using a pilot group to help create early adopters or help discover power-users and champions.

Keep in mind, we do not want to take any previous knowledge for granted or make assumptions on their current knowledge level. Sometimes offering a “foundation” class to make sure everyone is on the same baseline of understanding can help before delivering new information.

Ability

Ability is the fourth ADKAR milestone. This is the person’s skills as they relate to the future state. They may have the awareness, they are on board about the change, they have been trained – but do they have the ability? Meaning, do they have the intellectual capability, the physical ability, an SME (Subject Matter Experts) or mentor support, and the time to learn what is needed for the successful change?

One example that helps describe this ADKAR milestone is if there was a change for a company to shift from an hour lunch to a half hour lunch. This may seem like a simple change, but what if the person takes public transport or drops their kids off at school — getting off a half hour earlier or coming in a half hour later is not an option for them.

I think we have all had some personal experience with this when it comes to COVID and having to work remotely. I may be on board to work remote because I understand why (we have a pandemic) I have the desire (I don’t want to get COVID or infect others), I have the knowledge (I have been trained on how to login remote) but do I have good internet and a place to set up my workstation at home?

Also, sometimes it may take people different amounts of time to learn something new. We all know the type of person (I’m one of them) that needs a little bit of time to process and try it on their own to help settle their new understanding of the process. They have gone through training, so they have the knowledge of how to do it, but they may need a few weeks of using the new tool in order to develop their competency and ability to actually use it.

Projects that have a quick go-live and do not account for this may can put a person’s Ability milestone at risk so it’s something to keep an eye on while building out your project plans and working with managers.

Today, our focus is on the second milestone – Desire in the ADKAR acronym. As you just read in our last blog ADKAR stands for

·                  AWARENESS

·                  DESIRE

·                  KNOWLEDGE

·                  ABILITY

·                  REINFORCEMENT

Desire

A person needs to have the desire to participate and support the change. This is a biggie. Without this you may have delays, productivity may decline, and people may even leave the organization. It is also a very personal thing, (as much as we wish we could!) we do not control other people’s choices.

Hiatt mentions there are Four Factors that contribute to an individual’s desire to change:

• The Nature of the Change

Is this change an opportunity or threat and what is their WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?)

• The organizational or environmental context

The Success (or non-successes) of past changes, other changes that may be also occurring in the organization, and the organization’s culture of change.

• An Individual’s Personal Situation

Our career aspirations, financial security, age/healthy, personal relationships in and out of work

• Intrinsic Motivation

What we value, our internal voice or internal compass.

We talked about Awareness in our last post and desire tends to immediately follow that. We’ve all been there – your sponsor announces, “A Change is Coming!!” and as soon as we log-off the meeting invite, most of us are sending a ping to our manager, “Hey, just heard the news does this mean I have to (insert how I perceived the change will affect me here).”

Because of this common reflex Prosci recommends that the desire messaging is best communicated by the Direct Manager. They are closer to their staff and their everyday duties, so they can help them understand the specific WIIFM.

“As you have heard, we are getting a new PPM tool, this is really going to help you save time when you submit your project status reports because it has a one-click button that aggregates all the data. No more late Friday emails asking where your status reports are! We’ll all be able to log-off in time to attend the company Happy Hour.”

Of course, it is worth noting that the manager needs to have gone through their own ADKAR journey before they can properly help their staff consume the information. If they are just finding out about the change at the same time as their staff, then this is a recipe for disaster.

As change practitioners, we need to help the manager by first getting them through their own ADKAR journey and then preparing them, and giving room for them, to lead their staff through the change. They will need our support to identify and manage resistance and how to provide clear communications on the benefits of the change initiative.

Here is a quick recap of what ADKAR stands for:

·                  AWARENESS

·                  DESIRE

·                  KNOWLEDGE

·                  ABILITY

·                  REINFORCEMENT

Reinforcement

Reinforcement is the person continuing and sustaining the change. During this phase you continue to manage resistance, implement corrective actions, and celebrate success.

It is also important to collect and analyze feedback because creating a good feedback loop, where people have a voice on what is working well and can provide areas of improvement, will help them feel empowered to continue to support the change.

I’ve seen some great success with this when companies have communication channels where employees can recognize other team members that are doing well with the change. Managers have different options to honor them with some type of formal reward including becoming certified or even gaining a promotion. At one company I was at, they called this acknowledgement “Find the Good and Praise It” (FTFAPI) and at another it was known as giving someone a “High-Five.” Both were easy actions for a person to submit a praise and that praise to be shared company-wide.

Unfortunately, try as we might to get people through their ADKAR journeys, some changes may result in employee turnover. Monitoring this effectively can help shape how the organization approaches change and strengthen the culture (or weaken if it is not properly dealt with). This goes back to the Desire blog where we mentioned the organizational or environmental context factors can affect the desire ADKAR milestone based on the success (or non-successes) of past changes, other changes that may be also occurring in the organization, and the organization’s culture of change.

Yes, change is a cyclical journey, and everyone will go through each milestone with each change they encounter. It’s up to us as change practitioners (or project managers with our change management hat on) to help educate our Sponsors, Mid-Line managers, and Team Members on how to effectively manage through each milestone by educating them that this is a process, but we have the resources available to help them through it.

Awareness

In order to get people’s buy-in on the change they must first understand the why. Awareness is all about helping people understanding the “Why” of the change.

It's all about the why

Simon Sinek has a book and TED Talk called “Start with the Why” – How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. He bolds the fact that when you communicate the why (the purpose, the  reason) rather than starting with the what (benefits/features) then we are focusing on the part of the brain that controls decision making. Nearing in on the “gut-feeling” part that we tend to draw on when we are making a decision, and our emotional reaction to it.

According to Prosci, this message is best communicated by a trusted, visible, and active Sponsor within the organization and this makes perfect sense. As Project Managers, we are often leading the team on some pretty cool initiatives, but it’s when the CEO takes center stage at a town-hall and speaks to the heart about Why they are going in that direction, that people take notice and listen.

I’ve seen some great examples of how to generate buzz around a new application that was being rolled out. It started with a very friendly message “have you heard the word” that started to gain everyone’s interest and excitement for what may be coming. One company I worked with, had a great idea for a Sponsor Roadshow where the team got a little cart and went around the office handing out ice-cream as the Project Sponsor walked around and started planting the seed about a new department the organization was developing and the benefits it could offer to the organization.

When we do not communicate the why, people will fill in the knowledge gaps themselves. The rumor-mill can be strong, so we want to own the message from the beginning by communicating the Why early on.

Subway station in New York, New York, USA

United States

The Outlook: The United States logged the worst economic contraction in its history during the second quarter of 2020, as non-farm payrolls—which account for 80 percent of workers in the economy—dropped by nearly 21 million in April. But by the end of the year, the data was hinting at hope: Hiring during October outpaced September by 15.5 percent, according to LinkedIn’s November Workforce Report. That’s still 5.8 percent lower than October 2019 but reason to celebrate for those on the job market.

But the road ahead for the U.S. job market is murky. “Without adequate fiscal stimulus and safety from the virus, employers and consumers will be unable to move forward, and so the recession will deepen,” says Erica Groshen, PhD, senior economic adviser, Cornell University, New York, New York, USA.

—Erica Groshen, PhD, Cornell University, New York, New York, USA

Job opportunities are hardest to find in industries such as recreation and travel (down 41 percent in October compared with the year prior, according to LinkedIn), the arts (down 32 percent), energy and mining (down 32 percent), legal (down 18 percent), hardware and networking (down 14 percent) and entertainment (down 13 percent).

“But as the pandemic persists, we’re beginning to see layoffs occur outside these industries,” says John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Expansion plans have widely been abandoned until companies can emerge from the fog of uncertainty and more clearly define the long-term structural changes that will occur as a result of the pandemic, Groshen says. Companies will hoard cash and delay investment in R&D and capital improvement projects until they can regain certainty around the competitive landscape and consumer behavior.

The Opportunity: Manufacturing, transportation and logistics, construction, retail and real estate have seen the biggest recovery in open positions since hitting lows in April 2020, according to LinkedIn. And while brick-and-mortar retail may be floundering, companies that sell goods and services are strengthening their online infrastructure and offerings in response to the mass shift in consumer behavior, says Challenger. Those organizations will need digital-savvy project talent to push forward.

Project activity—and a need for project managers—extends beyond those fields. When the pandemic first hit, industries that could transition to remote work—largely white-collar professional jobs—immediately implemented work-from-home policies that became long-term for many. By midyear, three-fourths of professional workers, including project managers, were still working remotely, says Challenger.

While CEOs in North America are the least likely to view low-density workplaces as a lasting change (as much as 20 percentage points less than CEOs in Latin America, for instance), nearly half believe the trend will be permanent, according to PwC. For this year, the abrupt but enduring acceptance of digital collaboration tools and remote work will continue, predicts McKinsey, which means a serious appetite for project leaders to effectively steer everything from the development of analytical tools to change initiatives around dispersed teams.

PHOTO BY ERGIN YALCIN/E+/GETTY IMAGES. OPPOSITE PAGE, PHOTO BY LIANG SEN/XINHUA VIA GETTY IMAGES

United States:
Geotargeting

Location matters—not only in how many positions are available, but also what sectors they’re in. Of the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, Rochester, New York won the top slot for job outlook, according to ManpowerGroup, with 29 percent of organizations signaling they intended to expand headcount in the last three months of 2020. At the other end of the list, Los Angeles, California; New Haven, Connecticut; and Miami, Florida all fell below zero for overall hiring intention. Here are the sectors with the sharpest seasonally adjusted uptick in hiring intention by U.S. region.

Wanted creative writers willing to share their expertise.