Achieving Real Transformative Change Through Incremental Strategies

In the world of management consultancy, defining a strategy for organizations whose clients are internal to the business can be quite challenging. Over the years, I've observed numerous senior leaders grapple with articulating their organization's goals in terms of business needs. Often, they envision a transformative strategy, one that promises to revolutionize the entire organization in a single, dramatic event. They hope for a moment they can point to and proudly claim as their influence on the company.

But what if I told you that real transformative change can be subtle and realized piece by piece? This approach may lack the short-term hyperbole, but it offers genuine, long-term improvements. Allow me to share my perspective on how focusing on organizational maturity and incremental changes can lead to substantial and sustainable improvements.

Starting with Organizational Maturity

Several years ago, while working in the defense industry in the early 2000s, I came across the concept of Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). Although I didn't adopt CMMI's precise framework, the underlying concept of maturity proved highly effective for me as a strategy.

To illustrate, let me share a personal experience from my time working in a tech support team within a large organization. At that point, I decided to take a step back and evaluate various aspects of the department's operations. This evaluation encompassed several areas, including the service desk, configuration management, training, project transitions, and resource distribution.

One of the key issues that emerged was a significant gap in technical skills distribution among the team members. Despite having mentoring programs in place, where less experienced team members were paired with technical experts on different shifts, progress was stagnant. This predicament adversely affected project transitions and created challenges in staffing evening and weekend shifts.

A Humble Start with a Service Catalogue

In my attempt to address this issue, I proposed focusing on configuration management as a starting point for an improvement program. However, my suggestion was met with resistance, as it was deemed to lack immediate customer-facing impact. Nevertheless, I decided to pursue this area independently.

While trying to establish a comprehensive asset register and associated procedures, I faced resistance from staff unwilling to comply, and the organization frequently went into crisis mode. Unfortunately, I did not succeed in that endeavor. However, among the activities initiated was the creation of a service catalogue.

I collaborated with technical experts across the team to define a simple two-layer service catalogue. This catalogue categorized services based on the area of the business they served and the technical service they managed on behalf of that area. Initially, it didn't feel like the transformative change we were seeking, but it was a crucial starting point.

We mandated that the service desk classify tickets using the service catalogue from the very beginning. This allowed us to gather metrics based on this data, and it soon became evident which services were causing the most issues in terms of call volume and resolution time. While this information was not groundbreaking, it provided much-needed perspective.

A Shift Towards Self-Improvement

As we continued to work on the service catalogue, a colleague introduced me to a simple yet elegant toolset they were using for training in other parts of the business. This tool allowed them to map expertise within the organization efficiently.

The system generated an intranet page for each area of the business, where senior users could create entries for work tasks categorized as beginner, intermediate, or expert. Each user saw a personalized version of the page based on their Active Directory ID, and they could self-certify their ability to perform specific tasks.

Recognizing the potential, I made arrangements to implement this training system within our team. It became clear that creating a training page for each item in the service catalogue was essential.

Continuous Improvement and Collaboration

Working closely with a technical lead for an area where cross-skilling had been challenging, we cataloged administrative tasks related to each system and added them to the training page. We also included disaster recovery activities and common tasks logged in tickets for each service on a weekly basis.

In the early stages, documentation of best practices was lacking. We took a two-stage approach: first, technical subject matter experts were asked to give regular demonstrations of the least certified tasks, and as technical staff started to self-certify, they were encouraged to contribute wiki articles to the knowledge management element of our Service Management toolset.

Embracing New Tools for Progress

While building our library of common tasks, our organization upgraded its Service Management toolset, introducing two critical features: ticket templates and knowledge matching. These additions streamlined service desk processes by using predefined common tasks and automated matching of knowledge articles to incident tickets.

The team had a pre-existing list of common tasks that served as the foundation for ticket templates, significantly expediting service desk operations. Moreover, knowledge articles had already been categorized based on service catalogue entries, with these articles containing textual descriptions derived from the training system. Likewise, the ticket templates incorporated this information. Consequently, as tickets were transferred, an automated process seamlessly matched knowledge articles, outlining the steps needed to achieve the necessary resolution.

Incremental Progress, Significant Results

In retrospect, our journey toward transformative change didn't involve a grand launch or receiving accolades for revolutionizing processes. Instead, it consisted of incremental steps. By initially focusing on operational maturity and making incremental changes, our team found opportunities for real change within the organization. The combination of preparedness and seizing these opportunities led to substantial operational improvements over time. It was a classic case of luck being the intersection of opportunity and preparedness.

I won't pretend that the journey was perfect, but we left the organization in a much better state than when we started. This case demonstrates that sometimes the most meaningful changes occur through small, continuous improvements, rather than flashy, one-time transformations. So, the next time you're tasked with defining a strategy for an organization, consider the power of incremental change and the impact it can have on the long-term success of your business.

-James