“Change Enterprise” Part 2 – Understand People

Following from my first post in this series introducing the model of Change Enterprise let’s focus on the second of the five key areas you need to work on in the framework; Understand People

Collaboration Vs Co-ordination

I’ve written previously about the evolution of Collaboration into Co-ordination; this is a process that I’ve seen best described by using a traffic control example which I saw in a Singularity University presentation by Peter Diamandis. Basically, if you consider that before city streets were as frantic as they are today, traffic (horses and a few cars) were easily managed with simple common courtesy. Good manners to allow right of way evolved into collaboration. We began working as a cohesive group to get where we needed to go. Eventually though the streets of New York, London or any major city became so busy that without controls, rules and co-ordination its just chaos. Traffic lights, crossings, laws on who goes where and when, enforced governance for everyone’s collective benefit.

The migration from collaboration to Co-ordination is seen in the business world too. The tools needed start to work together are made available with free form, chat and collective file sharing. Think Microsoft Teams – with in excess of 2Million Daily users collaborating very effectively.

Eventually the size of an organization dictates the necessity for Data Loss Prevention, Policy, naming conventions and limitations needed to be set – widely in IT we call this ‘governance’.

So, its fundamental to understand not only where you and your people are on this lifecycle but to see the changes you will need to make in the not so near future.

Enterprise culture varies enormously and while it sounds corny, I like the idea that every enterprise is like a unique snowflake. This variety has a direct correlation to the origin story and speed of growth of the enterprise.

In order to become a change enterprise, you need to take control of nurturing your culture. To help your teams to achieve more you need to provide the tools that correlate to your current point in this cultural evolution.

One of the biggest issues in the work environment is people being frustrated with poor automation, repetitive tasks and the lack of influence to improve business systems.

Modern workplace tools, internal communities and citizen developer programs are all designed to break this pattern, and they do it well. Investment in time, education and empowerment to generate a plan for how your people can evolve into their own communities and help drive business efficiency may be the most powerful approach to collaboration ever.

For the technology I love (Power Platform, Teams, SharePoint) there are frameworks and enterprise adoption plans – I’m happy to have this conversation over a coffee anytime 🙂

Business Process and Requirements

Understating what your teams need to be productive will always be the first part of any development, improvement and empowerment process for people. In my model below you can see that requirements and data are the beginning of a fundamental change process to empower the business with apps, business process automation and insight.

With the power platform we are well known to talk about citizen developers, democratizing the development of business process where IT skills are not needed. The tools available today allow teams to quickly organize themselves into communities and collectively make real change.

Using existing data access with email and excel, SharePoint and the power platform tools every user in the business can make a difference.

Communities, self-formed or encouraged need management and focus. Its excellent to develop new tools that help a business, it’s even better when they solve real problems and present real business value.

The Centre of Excellence provides a support layer to train encourage and highlight sills and achievements. With their guidance and support, governance is not policing and is more productive to protect achievements and develop ideas to their full potential.

So, this all started with understanding the requirements, knowing what you need is the only way to focus those willing to help towards the highest value results.

This leads nicely to focusing on to value – the next part of this series, “Focus on Value”.