Book Notes: “Change Management that Sticks” (Takeaway #8)

Too often we push for perfection that we will never get to, when the user just needs something that they can use. Here's what you do!

Here is my takeaway #8?from a book that makes organizational project work worthwhile, “Change Management that Sticks: A Practical People-centered Approach, for High Buy-In and Meaningful Results”:

8) “Many a change manager and project have come to grief focusing too much effort on the right thing but at the wrong time. This chapter and many others all strongly emphasize that 'Done is better than perfect.' That's if your focus is truly on the people and their change adoption, and not on the method and the deliverables!”

Note: This comes from the Introduction (page xxiv).

I have worked a lot of years in knowledge databases. Truth is constant, but knowledge is continually improving. Databases are living documents. They will never be fully up to date. Focus on the necessities of today first!

Many of the best ways to do things are yet to be discovered and knowledge synthesized across multiple applications. Mostly the world around us changes so much that we have to adapt our understanding more than we are gaining new knowledge. In other words, we don't have to reinvent the wheel as they say. Meanwhile, people need the knowledge as we have it now, in order to advance their part in further refining knowledge and understanding. _____________

STORY TIME

Once upon a time, when I was an entry-level Copy Cataloger I added thousands of books to our College Library. These books usually had a record of the basic critical data already input in the National Database we harvested information from. I would just change a handful of fields to identify it in our library, for our purposes in how the information was organized on our shelves. If a record was less complete and needed more subject analysis, we had specialists who had Master of Library Science (MLS) degrees, who could add more in-depth details. We took pride in our records looking good for others to access in the National Database.

Depending on the rush for the materials would determine the timeline, but we wanted to have as robust records as possible. Sometimes books were needed quickly for new classes starting up at the beginning of a semester. If it didn't have basic copy data, I had the book in hand and I could add the data. Sometimes we would let a book go to the shelves with the most basic data. Sometimes we would pull ranges of books to add better data later. Sometimes those book records just needed an automated update to fit the latest Cataloging Standard. But most of the time we didn't worry about past books that passed procedures and standards of yesterday.

The main objective was to make the material searchable today so that our patrons could get the book in hand as soon as they needed it. I like the Agile approach of defining when "done" is "done". That may vary depending on the change, the project, the timing and most of all the people served.

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We all need to adjust our mindset. Focus on change adoption as a work-in-process. It's easier to proceed when we all know that any change brings unknowns. In other words, no one knows everything. We need not get paralyzed by the unknowns, but rather let it break things down to what we know and what we can control now.

We will discover tomorrow as it comes when we account for what we can do today. Focus on the people and what the critical needs are for them to make little changes today and all will be fine tomorrow. These changes add up and create a snowball effect. It won't be perfect, but you can expect that focusing on what the people need from the outcomes today is more perfect than the alternative.