“Every large-scale change requires both leadership at the top and the widening and deepening of connections through wooing — not coercing — an ecosystem of stakeholders.” – Greg Satell HBR “4 Tips for Managing Organizational Change”
Successful transformation needs people to be motivated and willing to make the change. It is not something that can be pushed from top, otherwise there will be resistances.
Company wants transformation mostly because there are new thoughts, ideas or processes that they want to adopt. A lot of the transformation do not just happen with one company, mostly it happens around the industry if it is some type of better ways to do business or work. So company leaders may not be the only ones that knows about these ideas. Employees that are keen into these better methodologies may also know about that and are eager to make the changes in their own departments.
To smooth out changes, the more people know about the ideas, the easier the change would be. For large scale broadcast of the ideas, there could be communication from the company, or even an internal conference, etc. But to have things thoroughly discussed and the ideas spread out with deeper thoughts, it is better to let clusters of small group of people to learn about these ideas and discuss about them together.
One thing that worked out for my department was book clubs. Copies of books were given to team members and they read them and meet each week to discuss about the chapters they read. That way even for people not having the time to read the book, they can still benefit from the book club discussions. The books that were read include Clean Code, Working Effectively with Legacy Codes, The Unix Project, Accelerate, etc.
Public channels on certain topics certainly help, but the small group discussions are more effective on discussing and socialize the ideas or some new technologies. Like technical leads meet regularly to discuss things.
Not all team members have the understanding at the same level. But as long as there are advocates of the changes and people with deep understanding of the vision and what needs to be done, they can talk within the team and help to drive the team to be on the right move and thinking.
The understanding of what we want to achieve is important, instead of just giving tasks to teams and let them accomplish those. Team need to fully understand the why and have clear vision. Otherwise it will turn to a cult culture that people seem to be doing the right things like automation, building pipelines, but not doing them the right way. I can give example, such as team put more efforts on building automated UI tests while not having enough unit tests and have a reversed test pyramid. Or team built a pipeline and claim that they are done, while it takes the pipeline more than half an hour to make a build, and another 40 minutes to make deployment. Or a team already have micro services and it takes only minutes to build and deploy. However team members do not merge codes once they are done but keep them in an integration branch. And only merge to main and deploy every one or two weeks.
Though these could all happen during the transition, and it is a continuous improving process and teams are getting better and better. We need more people to have the clear vision in mind and call things out when they see them instead of team being stuck with something seems like transformed process but far from getting to the goal yet.
Digital Transformation Journey 