I figured I would provide a concrete example of what Guerilla Change Management looks like in action.
Basically – giving away all of my state secrets 🙂
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This project has the following problems / issues that need to be solved.
1) This is a major assumption shift. We are asking people to think about how they communicate with others at work. THIS IS NOT A PHONE REPLACEMENT!
2) The entire project team needs to be on-board with that assumption shift.
3) The solution has a LOT of pieces. We’re not just messing with one workflow (picking up the phone and calling someone), we are messing with a bunch of them (chat, voice, person to person video teleconferencing, one-to-many video teleconferencing, desktop share….)
4) It will be very difficult to cover all of the details of those pieces in one training event.
5) And even if we were able to do that – no one would remember how to do anything.
6) The system will also be “unstable” during this section of the project. The pilot is to help identify better configurations. We are asking a lot of the pilot participants – who I am fondly referring to as “the 300.”
7) We won’t have much documentation until after the pilot.
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Activity 1: Go talk to people.
I went around to my team-mates, the experienced sub-contract trainer that has been assigned to us for the project, the pilot coordinators and members of the 300 and kicked around some possible solutions.
I mentioned the Subscription-based Learning model and my experiments with it for our telecommuters. The folks I talked to were open to using this for the project.
I also had a number of conversations around materials that were available from the vendor and others “right now” and decided that curated link lists would be useful for this section of the project. At least until we had enough of a system to start testing and developing more specific content. The folks I talked to liked that idea.
Activity 2: Scavenge for materials
I talked around the IT department to see what else was available. We
have a SharePoint implementation underway. I knew that SharePoint had
all of the features that I wanted for this project. Unfortunately – I
also discovered that the team would not be ready for me and for this
project.
I thanked them profusely and looked elsewhere.
No one has a monopoly on tools.
A positive takeaway from this conversation, I am now involved in this project – so I’ll be looking at this solution more closely for future efforts.
Sometimes no = not yet.
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For the curated link lists – I just dumped them into our Google Docs installation. This way, I could give people permission to add and I knew that everyone at the University could access the materials.
Besides – I really didn’t want to spend a ton of time and effort over-engineering a web site that was only going to be used for a few months.
And the sites were way too complicated to just point users to.
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For Subscription-based learning – I switched up some of the tools and processes based on what I learned the first time around.
Activity 3: Figure out how to use the materials you scavenged
I knew how to use most of the materials I scavenged.
IdeaScale is pretty straightforward. The big trick with that solution is the human process. How do I get people engaged? Since this is free and low-profile, I have room and space to experiment with some things.
Activity 4: Take what you have found and go solve the problem
(see above)
Activity 5: Repeat Activity 1 (Go talk to people) with the thing you created to solve the problem. Get feedback.
The link list has already gotten positive feedback from the project team and pilot coordinators.
I am still in the process of putting together the rest of the solution.
Activity 6: Repeat activities 4 and 5 until either
– the problem is solved (often the jury-rigged solution you just created is good enough)
– you got the information you needed from your proof-of-concept and now have leverage to go ask for money / resources / people
– you realize you have completely mis-identified the problem and need to
chuck everything and start over (this is not a bad thing – just a
learning thing)
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