Another strategy which has proven useful in both the public and private sectors is creating overlaps between the status quo and the changed processes, approach, or technologies so their use and adoption can be phased in. Although not always possible, using this approach allows the changes to be introduced as a test or 'beta' concept which people can embrace if and when desired, followed by a change over at some point where changes become the default while access to the 'legacy' processes or systems is available. Eventually, the legacy environment or practices can be phased out. This allows people to migrate to a changed environment at different paces while lowering transition risk because the legacy capabilities are still available.
Minimizing the Scope and Scale of Decisions
Decisions, to a large extent, create natural risk for the individuals making them. A common strategy for many leaders is to minimize this risk and the need to personally extend themselves through explicit decision-making. Instead, these leaders seek to 'engineer' outcomes through a variety of mechanisms. In some cases, the engineered outcome is equivalent to an explicit decision by the leader. But in many cases, the ability to secure explicit decisions from formal leadership is an eventual requirement for true progress.
The Value of Good Facilitation
Many working groups leverage external facilitators to help move efforts forward. The use of external facilitation can be an important accelerator, helping facilitate a variety of activities, from brainstorming to achieving consensus around various concepts. Ideally the facilitators, whether it's one or multiple individuals, possess an appropriate level of depth in the subject matter, good change management skills, and a good understanding of the organization, its culture, and political environment.
Piloting Efforts
Moving forward using a pilot approach, a short duration, limited scope implementation regardless of whether multiple efforts are launched provides a number of benefits to public sector organizations. The combination of their limited impact along with the psychological benefit of being perceived as a smaller, potentially temporary change makes their use ideal in public sector organizations.
In many organizations, the lower resistance to pilots relative to changes perceived as more permanent or wide-scale is enormous. People simply tend to react better and accept the concept of pilots more readily; their inherently lower level of risk fits well with the risk averse culture that exists in many government organizations.
The reality is virtually anything can be introduced as a pilot, even large scale changes. Successful change agents in organizations have managed to push through enormous change by disarming the organization by simply labeling the effort a pilot. Certainly if the effort failed to succeed, something else would be done so in essence everything by definition fits in the category of a pilot to some degree.
Beyond a perception standpoint, pilots also often act as a mechanism for sparking innovation. By giving individuals something to react to, it fuels their creative juices and helps them envision even more ways to improve the pilot. They become embedded in the review process which in turn leads to a sense of ownership that occasionally translates into a role of champion of the changes the pilot is seeking to accomplish.
The flip side is that failure to embrace this feedback often leads to the opposite response where individuals reject the pilot because the improvements or changes they identify are never incorporated into the pilot. Incorporating the feedback from individuals represents a great mechanism for securing buy-in to a concept. One federal organization recently deployed a new knowledge management (KM) program to a skeptical workforce using a pilot approach. With little organizational KM capability and a lack of understanding of what to really focus on, the organization launched multiple pilots and solicited feedback. One pilot seemed to almost instantly institutionalize itself across the organization based on the fervor with which the pilot participants used and promoted it. The organization then put more investment into it and similar types of KM capabilities.
Diminishing Returns
Many change efforts reach a point where continued investment or effort simply exceeds the likely benefit. Whether its internal obstacles or simply unpredicted issues, the best course of action is often to conclude an effort and declare victory even if additional value is theoretically possible. Using an effort where consolidation of something is the goal for example, consolidating down to one of that something may be the ideal. However, fewer of that something may be all that is realistically possible. To continue to invest beyond ‘fewer’ to try to get to ‘one’ may simply not be worth the effort required in many cases.
Focusing on Direction Over Destination
When an initiative is broken into segments, the direction of those segments becomes more critical, often more important than the destination itself. A key benefit of segmentation is that even though a broad, large-scale objective may never be fully achieved, the successful execution of one or more smaller efforts typically results in real incremental value for the organization. From this perspective, success is measured not by the implementation of a 'thing' but by progress achieved towards a set of objectives.
Measuring Progress Over Longer Periods of Time
Given the realities of typical public sector environments and cultures, most efforts will simply take longer to complete. Even straightforward activities, such as the release and distribution of a short report can take weeks to complete as the report makes its way through various review cycles. When highly segmented efforts meet the environmental factors of the public sector, progress may be almost unnoticeable except over longer periods of time. Like watching trees grow, looking daily, weekly or even monthly may create the impression that nothing is happening. But from season to season, the progress is unmistakable.
Faster Does Not Always Equal Better
Ideally, the pace of any change would be limited only by logistics. In the private sector, opportunities are often taken advantage of as fast as the organization can acquire the right skills and execute. But in the public sector individuals need to balance the rate of change with the organization's ability to keep pace. If change exceeds the natural rate of the organization, its individuals will lack the ability to 'consume' the changes, resulting in increased apprehension and eventually revolt.
Business Intelligence (BI) is Not a Technology – Here’s 5 Reasons Why
Individuals and organizations have developed a perspective over time that BI, reporting, and dashboards are technologies provided by MicroStrategy™, Cognos™, and others. When searching for resource capabilities for example, recruiters or managers often head straight to dice.com or similar sites to find the right people to support the effort.
The reality is the technical skill sets required are probably the last, and lowest level skill needed in order to make BI/reporting efforts successful. The traditional tech-first approach ignores many ground truths of these types of efforts - which is why so many organizations derive little to no value from multi-year, multi-million dollar data warehouse and dashboard initiatives that when complete, only offer the foundational ability to start creating useful reporting. There are far more important ingredients organizations need to think about in order to drive real value from enterprise reporting. Here are 5:
Enabling Additional Inter-Agency IT Service and Solution Delivery
Driven by an increasing emphasis on efficiency and desire to improve mission effectiveness, federal organizations are looking to their information technology (IT) organizations to deliver greater value at lower investment levels. To accomplish this, many federal IT organizations are embracing cloud and other innovations in technology and delivery approaches which provide greater flexibility and scalability to a broader user base. This confluence of requirements and capabilities is accelerating the ability of federal IT organizations to extend solutions and services beyond the reach of their own agency.