Creating Change

A while back, I was getting mentoring session with Mike Pegg and he helped me to understand how to create change. When we spoke I was in a situation where creating change was not necessarily so vital, but I kept the lesson with me for the futur.

Turns out, the futur is now! Here is the strategy I am applying right now.

1. Start with a principle
2. Create a success case
3. Global roll-out

At Eficode, we have a career pathing problem in our business unit. Common growing pain. I work on the Managed Service side. Since the company has a big consulting legacy, everyone is a Consultant.

That means providing clarity as to where to develop is not really natural and not supported by the organisation. We have a bunch of really senior guys who are saving the day, and a whole bunch of junior who are probably not developing as fast as they could. Very natural problem when career pathing has not been addressed yet.

So I went on to create a Levelling Framework for the most common jobs we have in the business unit. I wanted to create change but I didn’t want to start from scratch. I used some work done by my ex-colleague Kimberly Chen as a starting point and then created the Framework for DevOps Engineers. There I am describing what is expected from a Trainee, a Junior, a Specialist, a Senior, a Principal and a rare Fellow. The description follows a few rubrics like DevOps tools knowledge, Server and Cloud, Work Complexity, Teamwork/Leadership/Comms, Work Management.

So it’s something really valuable because we can write very clearly how to grow while fully aligning with the needs of the company. It helps for everyone to keep their Ikigai in check.

Step 1 – start with a principle

Our Product is our People. It’s a Managed Service. So we should be extremely good at taking them straight outta school and turning them into Seniors in no time.

How do we do that? With a framework, and by being intentional to create change.

Step 2 – Create a success case

After creating the framework for the DevOps engineer role, I went through my team with the framework. I realised quickly that we really needed a framework for another job. We have mainly two types of jobs: DevOps Engineers and ITSM Specialist. Going through the framework with DevOps Engineers and seeing the energy it unleashed was enough to convince the rest of the organisation that we had something good going one.

Step 3 – Global Roll-out

After presenting this and the success to the rest of the team, all other team leads and managers are now convinced that this is the way forward. We have a bunch of other levelling framework jobs we are creating and we now have volunteers to create them. Everyone is excited at the possibility this is going to unlock. And everyone is excited to get really really good at taking our team from zero to hero in no time.

Change

In just a few weeks, I managed to rally a whole business unit around an idea that was a bit daunting and where nobody really knew how to get started. This 3-step process is really simple and really powerful. Perhaps even a bit obvious when you think about it, but processes are made for that. They slice and dice difficult tasks so you don’t need to keep the whole thing in your brain. Creating change is good!