Positive changes

Change is best absorbed into the corporate culture when its impetus comes from field workers, not from senior management.

A few weeks ago, I was approached by a mid-level manager to help with quality control reports. She holds a monthly meeting in which cases of poor quality control are discussed; the basis for the meeting is a spreadsheet (to mangle a quote from the 60s, whenever I hear the word 'Excel', I reach for my pistol*) in which people have manually entered the order details, the problem and the solution. This spreadsheet is accessed by many people, which makes it an IT nightmare, as well as difficult for those people to access, update and retrieve.

My immediate solution was to create a sub-form (and an underlying table) connected to the lines in a customer order, where the various data could be added. We discussed which fields were needed - person name, department, problem and solution - and the actual implementation in the ERP program was finished within an hour. As a form on its own is normally of little use, I also wrote a report which would extract the data from the orders and display it in useful form.

As the Passover holiday intervened almost immediately after doing this, I forgot about it. When I returned to work after the holiday, I checked a table which I keep for my own benefit in which I list all the forms and reports which I have developed (this helps when someone phones and wants help with 'their' report - as if I remember what they're talking about), in order to see what I was working on prior to the holiday. Coming across this table and its report, I decided to check how much data had been added. I was pleasantly surprised to see that in the short time that the form had existed, it had been used by several people.

Of course, I wasn't too pleased that there were so many lines, because each line means a fault with a product, but from the IT point of view, more lines means more use, which means that the change has been absorbed.

I wasn't involved in disseminating the fact of this form's existence - the manager who asked for the development had seen to that - so I was pleasantly surprised on Thursday when someone called and asked how to use the form, someone whose need to use that form would not have immediately occurred to either me or the manager.

If people in the front lines need an improvement or addition to the ERP program, then that change will generally be embraced enthusiastically, because they can see the immediate value of the change. They also feel ownership of that change, a feeling which gives them a responsibility to make sure that other people utilise that change.

When announcements of change come from senior management, they tend to be perceived as yet another piece of interference from above, something designed to make our job harder, something irrelevant to our needs and something which is divorced from our experience. Part of my job is how to make such changes relevant to field workers, how to make them embrace these changes, help them identify with the change and take ownership. This is not an easy task.

Next episode: knowledge hoarding and the resistance to change.

* After writing this, I discovered that the original quote comes from a play written by Hanns Johst and is normally attributed to Nazi leader Hermann Goring ("when I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my gun"). Oh dear, I never thought that I would be quoting Nazis.