Change Management

Change is sometimes a hard thing. Professionally, I've tended to be an agent of change. Many people say this, perhaps. I don't know to what extent this is true for others, but I know that I have brought change into some people's work places.

Part of the difficulty is to realize that when you are introducing something new, something profound, change needs to occur. It's the needing that is the hard part. Something needs to go. This sounds like it is an OK thing. However, I have come to understand that part of my role as a computer person is to occasionally rewrite people's job description. If I understand that going into a project and if the other folks understand that going into it, then everyone is happier.

In fact, there are times that I have had conversations about how the job will be different before bringing the computer changes about. That may sound like the cart before the horse, but it isn't. In fact, it is generally the right order.

When the conversation is centered around questions like:

• What are you doing now?
• How do you do what you do?
• What does this office do well (that we need to continue to do well)?
• Can I see a sample of what you do and how you do it?
• What is the weirdest thing in the computer that you can think of?
• If you had two extra hours in the week, what would you do first?
• If you could cut two hours of work out of your week, what would eliminate? Why?
• What is the most tedious job you do?
• What is the hardest thing you do? Why?
• Where would you like to see your job improve?
• What paper runs through this office?
• Why are these papers important?
• What is the most important part of the week for you?
• What is the most important part of the year for your department?

These don't sound computer-ish, but I tended to want to understand the people that I was helping. Since I was a computer guy at a school, this meant that I was frequently working with (and for) secretaries. Secretaries are fairly important at schools, probably more important than the electricity. Of the three hundred desk tops at that particular school, seven of the most important dozen desktops were secretaries. The other five were running the cash registers in the lunch room (riot control is a big thing).

However, back to change management. Occasionally changing a process took years. Printing transcripts and printing report cards took years and years.

The first step was discovering that (once upon a time) the middle school secretaries hand wrote all the grades onto all of the the (hundreds) of student transcripts. When I discovered this I asked about how we could do the same process with a computer. Printing the transcripts (which is what the software wanted to do) wasn't really seen as a good option. However, I was able to print labels that would have the needed information. One label for the biographical data, and one for the year's worth of grades. This took a long time (for me). I also had to start it early in the year (relatively). It needed to be ready for the end of the year well before the end of the year. However, once that got going, it saved two people an entire week of work. That was a welcome change.

Moving from that to printed transcripts for the high school was levels more complicated. However, once it worked, I was pretty happy that it did.

The thing of it was that the printed transcripts could have been printed several years before the high school chose to do so. It didn't choose wrongly, it just took a while.

I suppose talking about change brings up the notion of progress. Change isn't always progress. However, if you set out to make progress steadily and not give up and ground, change happens.

-----

And, on that note here is a quip from Narnia (Voyage of the Dawn Treader) when King Caspian forbids the Governor of the Lone Lands to continue the slave trade:

"But that would be putting the clock back," gasped the Governor. "Have you no idea of progress, of development?"

"I have seen them both in an egg," said Caspian. "We call it Going bad in Narnia. This trade must stop." (47-48)