Having been a Change Practice Owner for a few years now, I’m finally at the stage where I’m confident in my ability to run a Change Management/Enablement practice within an organisation.

I’m also confident in calling out that the role unfortunately gives you very little in terms of validation of a job well done. You pretty much have to do that on your own (or have a very good manager like I do that calls it out).

Coming from specialising in Major Incident Management, the contrast of feedback for your work is drastic.

Changes are expected to go smoothly. The expectation is that the practice will minimise or eliminate the risk; so it’s generally easy to point the finger at the practice when things don’t go smoothly. So when things go well, you’re just doing what you were hired for. When things go bad, your work is questioned even if it may not be a procedural issue.

Contrast this with Major Incident Management; where a promptly resolved incident leads to almost immediate praise for everyone involved for helping address a critical impact to the organisation. Even in the scenario where a resolution takes significantly longer than hoped; the feedback is generally one of appreciation for the time and effort put into working towards a resolution rather than a critique of how you and the teams managed the incident.

At this point, I have to call out that I think this is more a natural human reaction rather than an organisational culture issue. I think it’s normal to respond positively on activities that help us in times of need; while almost ignoring activities that help to prevent such an impact in the first place.

As a result of all this, a Change Practice Manager will occasionally need to adjust the level of rigour in the Practice based on the organisational risk appetite at any given time.

If you have a period of successful changes, organisations generally lean towards working more fluidly and look to reduce the barriers to getting work done and the rigour goes down. Get a few unsuccessful changes that causes an impact to an organisation, and the level of rigour increases as Stakeholders demand stability.

This leaves Change Practice Managers in the unenviable position of occasionally being the bad one; who has to re-enforce the standards and effectively prevent work from occurring until the level of quality increases.

This is just a very long way of explaining why I have to be the bad guy this week. I’m annoying good at this now, but it is tiresome at times.

#ITSM #ServiceManagement #ChangeEnablement #ChangeManagement