Chapter 3!?" - "The NGN Experience" - or "It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon him not understanding it..."

Introduction

Ok so if I were Charles Dickens I've completely failed in the idea of his "Penny Dreadful" - if I had any readers or colleagues following my writings about my enterprise agility journey in NGN then I suspect they've given up on the wait for "chapter 3"! or died of old age.

If you have come back then the only lame excuse I can offer for my tardiness is choosing to disrupt another bigger and more complex world has taken up more of my time than I'd realised it would.  I knew when I invested in the HiveMind Network I wanted to disrupt management consulting, recruitment and system integrator models...I mean...how broken are they?  However that's another story for another day!

So back to the present, if this is the first time you see one of my posts on Northern Gas Networks then these two proceed this one.

1. The Journey towards Enterprise Agility
   
2. Business Capabilities and Workstreams 

 If you've read these earlier thoughts, and come back for more then I'm not even going to apologise for the length of this post!   I've signposted roughly where we are on the story in the pic below!

Quick Disclaimer!!!!

My posts aren't management theory, or trying to be Mr SmartyPants, they're just a very personal perspective on an amazing chapter of my working life. Where in under 18 months some fantastic colleagues and I achieved Enterprise Scale Agility (not a perfect version but something that "made a difference").    I think at the end of these posts I'll bind them all together and self-publish two books, one for me and one for my mum.

Knowing the battles to fight?

So starting with my headline to this article which is  Upton Sinclair's quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it..."  I'd suggest you keep this in mind when embarking on your agility journey (!)

I was fortunate in so many ways when I joined the NGN family.  The then IT function was a very small group and almost everything was outsourced to 3rd party companies, when I say everything - I mean everything, including our ability to think.  Our suppliers were household names; if you're  a boring household that talks about large system integrators a lot, that is.  They weren't bad people, they were just operating within a bad system(s) and as the saying goes - "a bad system beats good people"

So there was an advantage in the fact that starting change within the IT function initially meant there was only a handful of people to upset, and in reality it was pretty easy to see those people who aspired to make things better and those that were hoping things would stay the same (but declaring they were right behind everything - watch out for those - they're corrosive). If I had my time again I'd spend less time trying to convert those people and probably have made changes faster and sooner than I did.

In my view it's quite useful at this early stage to know which battles are worth fighting if you want to win the war. Looking back, I think in my head the sequence was

• IT department,
• IT suppliers,
• Key Business functions/departments,
• and even procurement (but recognising that at the (then) age of 52 and with perhaps only six to eight working years left, assuming I choose to retire, that changing a utility procurement function towards an agile model was probably a bit of an ambitious pipe dream - although to be fair we did make progress!!!) - I think procurement in many companies still remains a blocker on agile and adaptive thinking (probably another post in its own right!)
• I'd still stick by this sequence more or less.

Where were we heading and why?

I also had a very clear picture in my mind that NGN should aspire to be every bit as fast moving and as agile (in the non software sense) as a tip-top on-line company.  

Now I appreciate that many readers could ask why try and be this adaptive and flexible....you just flow gas through a pipe?

At the end of the day, our customers can't really leave us,  our performance and profit is pretty consistent and guaranteed (providing you meet OfGem targets which aren't outrageously stretching) and increasing efficiency is semi "hard-wired".  

By this I mean as a gas distributor as you replace the old gas pipes with nice new plastic ones your maintenance costs come down fairly substantially and therefore the workforce size can also reduce pretty drastically (especially if they become multi-skilled), when you combine this with a gradual and continuous drop in demand for gas in the UK then reducing colleague head-count and increasing efficiency is already a given...so....

Thinking further ahead and aspiring to something greater!

All of which made it seem obvious that when NGN (or any other company in this type of market) looked further out than perhaps 8 to 10 years and wanted to be of relevance in its contribution to the bigger CKI family it's part of,(btw it's a very large family!) then it had to think of itself NOT as a gas distribution firm, but more as a world class asset management company that just happens to flow gas through pipes. There's all sorts of things associated with gas quality and pressure which I'll avoid talking about here, but have to confess that I learnt during my time at NGN that there's a bit more to gas distribution than a pipe, some gas and a hole in the ground.

I'll also try and avoid spinning into IoT, BI, AI and the algorithmic economy at this point, as much as I want to - however,  a shed load of  readers will undoubtedly recognise that these technologies/approaches will further change the entire dynamics of the asset management world and many others.

Indeed, I suspect one day, possibly in my lifetime,  a handful of data driven technicians will be capable of running entire companies of this nature with a a few guys out in the field - probably using an uber style work allocation system across a trusted contractor community?  The information about pipes, holes, gas etc will all flow in via a myriad of smart sensors be they in pipes or on the ends of shovels. This is either a Dystopian nightmare or Utopian dream depending on your view of the world and employment (I fluctuate on this monthly).

I often wax lyrical about NGN's CEO Mark Horsley - and again at this point, looking back it's easy for me to see why.  Mark was already thinking way further than managing the decline of an ageing industry, and every conversation about the future of utilities, networked organisations, agility and customer experience were a joy to have - the picture he had in his head was light years ahead (and I'm not sharing it because I think it's a competitive advantage for NGN).  So when I started talking about why NGN should aspire to be every bit as smart and adaptive as an on-line retailer I wasn't met by the blank stares of a dyed in the wool utility CEO marking his time till retirement (lots of these folks still around and not just in utilities!), I and the whole 3iG team were given support and backing to make this a reality.

The Gateshead Engineer "Scenario?"

I started to talk about the "Gateshead Engineer" to try and paint a picture of what we should aspire to achieve.  Which basically went...

"If one of our Engineers in Gateshead (replace name with any provincial town) has a good idea for improving or innovating a way of working, why shouldn't we aspire to make it a reality 48 hrs later. (assuming its not bonkers)"

In other words why should it takes months and cost hundreds of thousands to make a change to a process, some tech and some KPI's.  It SHOULDN'T - but it did for us, and still does for many other larger organisations - why?  well one big reason (and there are others) is...?

Traditional enterprise IT is broken/dead.

 Yes - this is a generalisation and I'm sure that there are many lucky people out there who've never experienced this (call me, it would cheer me up) but for many others the facts are;

• It takes way to long to build or even buy something so the user community find ways around it (and who the hell can blame them, oh yes that's right IT people do)
• We've built and continue to build and buy systems with a UX that could be designed by the devil himself (this side is getting better to be fair!)
• We then wonder why it takes man months to train people and get frustrated at the lousy quality date our poor battered user community enter (roll on IoT)
• Deployment is more often than not an arcane process involving the gravitational pull of the moon and the alignment of the planets, a process which if adopted by the on-line companies would drop their much vaunted 1000 releases a day stats to 1 a quarter! (and no, devops won't cure it overnight, in fact devops...now there's another cultural explosion)
• We've let technical debt and a desire to please, create monstrous piles of interwoven spaghetti nonsense...which somehow though, keeps the business going!
• Traditional EA thinking still applying 1990's thinking to a new world order isn't helping anyone - it just creates false hope and lots of diagrams and radar charts (I think old school EA is almost on the verge of extinction?)

So did we "transform" or evolve IT to something different

I've written other posts about my dislike (and the CEO's)  of "transformation programmes" so I think it's fair to say we chose to "rapidly evolve IT into a business change function".  We also tried not to get caught into the shiny new city syndrome much loved by the traditional (old style) consulting community.

Many of you will recognise it, or more shamefully - sold it (I did several times in my earlier consulting career, great for career progression, less great for clients).  You know how it goes..

• Your existing city is shabby and broken it can't be adapted any more 
• Your citizens are unhappy with this city (despite it working and keeping them alive)
• We need to build a shiny new city on the hill nearby and all your people will migrate to this new wonderful land and live in happiness with milk and honey
• We will help you design and build this new shiny city, can we have ￡6.8m please.

It never works in reality, you end up with a half built shiny city and a partially empty shanty town in all of my personal experiences.  I therefore truly embraced the iterate philosophy of morphing shanty town.  (I think I overdo analogies at times).

So what was the other things we learn't/did

• Think about stuff like it's your own business and money

Ok lots of people say this but it's just lip-service a lot of the time,  people say they do but they don't really!  When it's your own money and your own business you find a way to make things happen as fast as you can (I've never felt this more than now as an investor/owner in an almost start up).  If you don't you're not in business long.  So as we created our Delivery Workstreams (think value streams in SAFe) we really tried hard to get the idea that continuous delivery, value for money and minimal viable products meant something real.  That the workstream had a sense of drive, urgency and commitment to deliver...ie how would achieve this if it was your own money.

This also meant recognising that we could achieve many top results without root canal work and that even old systems (part of that spaghetti) could still yield benefits if looked at in a different light.

• Work streams are NOT about IT

Covered in more detail in last post - we used business capabilities for the work streams.  It helps create a holistic stream which then includes, people, process, technology, premises etc.

Next and final chapter - what exactly does agile architecture really mean, and why in one way or another you've got to get your exec to understand why you're doing it.....and why and how it connects to experiences....

Ok I agree it needs a shorter and more pithy title....