what we're going to be talking about first of all there is a terminology change that I want to bring to everyone's attention that relates to our alignment with service now so I'll talk about that we'll talk about what is change enablement traditionally and how we've do it currently or how we've done it in the past how does agile change how we do things how does agile change change if you talk about it that way and how can change enablement occur better in an agile environment so in other words what needs to adapt and then of course the what's in it for us how does this impact us as service now Consultants you know we have a broad range of of folks on the call here so question might be well how does this how does this impact me first of all I just want to bring to bring to your attention uh service now has in terms of its artifacts and and on the now create site and so forth has changed its terminology to uh ref refer to what previously had been called organizational change management and is now being called change enablement in the service now World in Glide fast we're changing our terminology in order to in order to align with that you know obviously we have artifacts that we want a number of artifacts uh that uh we want to make sure align with service now artifacts and when we're offering sort of our value proposition and so on we want to make sure that people understand what sort of apples to apples with uh with service now offerings and that kind of thing you know how we sort of fit in so then uh Glide fast the key Point here to call out though is that we're aligning but we're not copying service now we have better artifacts we have more offerings we're able to offer more kind of handholding and more substantive change enablement services but we just want to make sure we're aligned with service now so that's just something I wanted to call out up front so I want to refer to change enablement this is what I'm referring to so what is change enablement first of all I know many of you may already be familiar with organizational change management or change enablement and so this slide may be a little redundant for some of you but for others maybe uh this this kind of helps us level set about what we're talking about so change enablement it is focused on people and how changes affect people it does include various tools methods best practices and such that help successful adop option of these changes with people so that you know and these changes are typically things like new processes or new tools or new interfaces and these types of things that impact people new ways of doing things in other words change enablement is definitely supported and informed by a solid understanding that has to be gained about who are the stakeholders who are affected by this change and how are each of these stakeholder groups specifically impacted by this change and how are they going to react to that change another one here that probably should have been almost number one or two here it needs to be guided by clear strategic objectives and the kpis that support those objectives this is very important to make sure that when people adopt they're adopting it in a the change in a way that's going to uh support the uh the overall objectives of uh of the initiative in the first place it needs to be uh supported with Communications that are you know as as I say here audience or stakeholder appropriate so different stakeholder groups may need to be communicated within a different in in terms of with differently because they uh they're impacted in different ways some of them may only have minimal impact some of them may uh the change May fundamentally change their job uh in other cases they may be more resistant or have certain cultural nuances within the organization that that we need to be aware of when we communicate and such so these types of things are very important for Change enablement and and this is by far not a not an exhaustive list it's just sort of an introductory list just to on what we're talking about here change enablement is not itsm change management and this is a perennial source of confusion when we talk about change management itsm change management as probably most of most or all of you are are more than familiar it's focused on changes to configuration items that have to be controlled that go into supporting uh services that are supported by various it configuration items so that's not referring to itsm change management in this presentation and also change enablement is not or perhaps should not be a Band-Aid that can be patched on as an afterthought on a on a project or implementation sometimes it is handled that way uh maybe all too often but it shouldn't be like that so that's essentially what what we're talking about when we refer to change enablement if you kind of look at the traditional world of change and and the uh the world in which many of the the current uh change enablement or ocm type tools have been designed it's from this waterfall World which you know of course we're probably were all familiar with a waterfall concept followed a fairly linear path requirements analysis design development testing implementation or common ones the bottom line is you got a big bundle of changes that you you know figure out you design them you build them test them and then you implement that big batch of changes and then everything gets changed at the same time and so uh for the end users and so common way of depicting this change behavior and how people react to it is using the the Kubler Ross curve which is uh based on the stages of grief however it it was adapted to change management to show on the vertical axis it's morale and competence so in other words how good are at you are you at your job and and how uh Happy are you and then the horizontal curve is just over time and so you can see here A Change might come in uh you might be you know suddenly get shocked you have this big change that's that's suddenly facing you you go through these stages denial anger bargaining depression acceptance and then maybe finally once you're accepting it productivity which might have taken a dive down here at during depression your morale and and competence might have taken that dive it might get back up to a certain level however it might not be any better if you're not using proper change enablement practices it might you might not end up any better off than you were originally If people really aren't adopting the tool properly if they're resisting the change if they're getting around it you know there there can be a lot of a lot of things that might affect that productivity if if change enablement isn't handled properly so uh so the idea here is that if you use things like understanding your stakeholders and how they're impacted and using proper Communications messaging and uh and change champion networks and proper good good training that's targeted and implemented uh effectively you can CH take that curve this other curve here that might end up where you might end up not really any better off than you were before and you can increase that morale andc competence to a much higher level this is sort of that at a very very high level this is that traditional view of change enablement that's just something to keep in mind so then when we talk about Glide fast approach and this is still very much most of this is still very much applicable it's more the way we handle it that that we need to adapt depending on the agile circumstances that we deal with but Glide fast traditional approach again is is you got the you know initiate plan execute deliver close you know you're defining the the journey you know starting to understand the impacts in the stakeholders treating communication Plan Building out the change champion Network executing on the communications and updating documents gaining new feedback dealing with resistance and uh you know while Gathering feedback and understanding how to handle that resistance and then at the end of it you implement of course there's training built into here as well at Glide fast we we sort of handle the training as a separate bucket per se but it's still very much integrated into into change enablement so um I just don't have it specifically called out here because of the way we do things here at the end of it we we measure adoption we get feedback maybe do some surveys maybe do some follow-up Communications to share quick wins and things of that nature so all of this is is still is great stuff but it's still built around this traditional approach that I was talking about what changes then well change enablement obviously is still every bit is critical for adoption in an agile and environment it is as it is anywhere else but some things can be different so first of all the pace and nature of the agile of agile changes mean that change enablement needs to be able to keep up with that that pace and so some of the uh sort of slow linear processes that we we tend to follow with change enablement may need to adapt and so also the volume of changes as it increases you'll also find that in many cases these changes will be more tactical in nature so every Sprint you'll uh you'll see some you know maybe some small incremental changes that may not be a big deal to some but they could still really throw people off or change how people have to do things so it's still something that we need to keep in mind and also because of the increased volume we always have to be cognizant of the fact that changes can collide with other changes going on in the organization So within the scope of our particular project we may think okay well this this is a small little change we're we're we're throwing into production we'll just put it in there for now because you know it's ready to go we'll roll it into this release but it actually may impact some other change that's coming through for some other initiative and we just have to be very aware about you know have kind of this holistic view across the organization and be able to have people who can help guide us to understand what other changes we might be uh be impacting or that might impact us for that matter we also need to focus on tradeoffs being able to be very precise about what what we're changing and of course early engagement is always extremely important but we need to be able to balance off the most effective and the most impactful change tools that that we can use because we may not always have time to do everything you know as as kind of a textbook change enablement organizational change management uh example we we we need to we need to be flexible so what does this look like well again at a very high level you might still have that traditional curve for your longer term strategic direction that you're following and so let's think of this say as a large implementation of service now that we're helping someone with uh we we might still have these this sort of curve in in moral incompetence and so on but for every time we Implement new changes for example if we're if we're putting changes into uh production um maybe every Sprint or every release uh maybe it's not every every Sprint but maybe we bundle them and and put them in more frequently you're going to have these little mini curves every time something goes into production and so what you want is to be able to understand how these little mini curves still take you back up to where you want to go in terms of competence and and morale and so again understanding each each of these understanding who's impacted here versus over here understanding you know how big these changes are and how are they taking us in this direction and being able to communicate even down here that hey this little change that that came out May not seem obvious why why we're doing this right now but ultimately it's to get us up here so what are some common obstacles to change enablement uh when you're when you're implementing agile well there is a tendency as as I kind of indicated for there's a tendency to be less strategic and we have to be careful about that because you know we know that many of the specific changes may be a little more tactical but they're there to support strategic objectives and we need to be able to keep that always in our Focus as we as we communicate we help people understand why we're doing why the change is being implemented where things are going from here we need to be able to you know obviously build that into uh you know any kind of training documentation and other supporting document a that people use there have been a number of studies on uh on agile and sorry change enablement in an agile environment and there were some some findings that there were five common obstacles uh first of all a lack of understanding and and appreciation for change enablement because people were focused on just getting stuff out the door there was some organizational resist resistance to Agile as well so agile in itself requires some change enablement when organizations are new to to Agile approaches there's obviously a high volume of incremental changes which which I've already been talking about there's an increased pace which means that instead of having several months or you know maybe a whole quarter to plan for change we might have just a couple weeks to uh plan for a change or you know a few weeks or a month maybe depending on how how much advanced notice we have and also because of the the rate of change you can get uh you can get I mean change exhaustion is always issue regardless of the environment but you can get into change exhaust exhaustion faster potentially if uh if you don't manage things properly in a in an agile environment and that can lead to things like middle manager resistance and the people who work under them may be resistant as well so these are just some findings that had sort of come to light in in some studies that were done there are some things that stay the same in uh change enablement regardless of whether you're in an agile environment or a waterfall or some hybrid in between by the way most of us one thing I probably should have called out many of us work in a hybrid environment in fact most of our implementations probably fit into this category where our implementation is kind of a waterfall except when we in the development and testing piece of it so you know as soon as we kick into development and testing maybe even you know only part of testing in some cases but this is where agile kicks in but the rest of our implementation is waterfall so we also have to be cognizant of that when we're talking about agile and how agile fits into this so anyway some things that that stay the same so it's very important to declare the vision you know understanding those strategic objectives and the vision of where you want to be where where do you want to be a year from now six months from now two years from now and so on what is that Vision because the changes that you implement if you can communicate how they fit into that vision and you can get people excited about that Vision that helps the uh that that definitely helps with your adoption creating a sense of urgency is always important but again of course you always have to be careful as as I was saying before change exhaustion can uh burn people out and so having such a a sense of urgency all the time can burn people out we do have to be careful about that but there is there does need to be some sense of urgency in order to be able to move things forward we need Communications that are adapted to the identified audiences and the ways that those audiences are impacted and the other other traits of that audience we need to be able to empower people who are in the best position to drive change and so that ties into the last bullet things like change champion Network and you can also build out things like super user networks which maybe part of the change champion Network they can go out and evangelize they can go out and Coach they can go out and uh and help people move the change forward and help people uh wrap their heads around the change and and uh and hopefully accept it and adapt to it there are some things that do need to adapt though in in an agile environment first of all moving quickly means that we won't be perfect and this is one thing that I know I know a lot of people in the change enablement ocm world who have you know a very specific set of steps and templates and things that need to be captured but in an agile environment sometimes we have to focus on what are the pieces that are most important and we have to to you know understand we may not be able to have everyone weigh in we we you know we we may not have everything perfect but obviously still having something there is is better than nothing at all having a a physical or virtual war room to drive collaboration can be very very powerful now we do tend to do this actually as part of our hyperare when we're implementing a change at Glide fast and so on a number of projects I've integrated with a hyperare piece to also integrate uh the post implementation adoption support as part of a part of that war room that open that open conference Bridge or whatever get set up to help as as uh as things go live and people are are adopting the new tool and processes encouraging self organizing teams so the thing about this is that we can actually use agile methods to manage change enablement as well so just like you might have a development team that's a self-organizing team that goes through Sprints and and uh you know has daily standups and things of that nature you can organize your change enablement folks as well uh in much the same way and so um following many of those agile practices can help you keep keep aligned to uh to the actual development work that's going on you also need to make use of less formal communication channels and formal Channel communication channels are still very important but you also need to be able to leverage things like social media channels and you know informal influencers who can go through the organization and talk to people on the fly or in in sort of quick meetups and that type of thing you can't be completely reliant on that formal announcement uh that goes out or you know maybe the quarterly newsletter or the things of that nature so we need to be cognizant of that we need to be again you know be able to kind of quickly find what what communication uh channels are going to be able to meet meet our needs in in a fast-paced environment change Champions well obviously I'd mentioned change Champions before they apply no matter what similar to that last bullet they need to be able to build around less formal channels they need to be able to you know leverage positive peer pressure and you know bringing people on board and talking you know bu building a virtual community around uh around the initiative so change change Champions need to be able to operate in this kind of environment as well it's very important and then a test and learn approach we we need to be not afraid to not be perfect and that kind of ties into that first bullet but we need to be able to say okay we'll we'll try this approach let's see how this works for this particular release to production and we'll see how it works and if we need to change it then we need to be be prepared to improve change figure out okay did it work what can we do better how can we uh you know better leverage the change enablement tools to make to make this more successful uccessful next time and so we can kind of build on this uh over time and it's important to be able to have that test and learn approach you do stuff there are outcomes and you learn from those outcomes you can't just beat yourself up because something didn't work you just have to improve on it so again some more things that uh that tie into this we need to be flexible because you know again and this this probably applies as much to actual change enablement folks as much as it does to any other stakeholders but but not panicking when we realize we have an uncertain environment where not all of the things have been defined yet we still have a lot of things that could change we need to keep to the basics you know we obviously understanding stakeholders and how they're impacted and you know being able to communicate with them the right way is critical but we may need to be able to be flexible and negotiate on other aspects of of the traditional change approach in order to be able to uh provide what we need in in a time that's going to work and in a manner that's going to be effective every day is different and that's okay some more information from some studies that have been done on this found that the change enablement also became more iterative just just like the agile process itself plans are designed to be modified as needed so when we build out a an ocm plan or sort I should say a change enablement plan we need to make sure that that we know that's going to be a living document that will change we and we need to be prepared for that we need to build it and manage it in a way that that will assume that yes changes will happen there may be more work required upfront in some cases obviously there needs to be more done and less time faster Pace that type of thing so these are just just some takeaways from from some studies that have been done what are the the biggest contributors to success being able to leverage success stories so when you have when you have short two weeks sprs a shorter turnaround time you can leverage uh success stories very quickly you may be able to say hey this change went in here just for this particular group they're now working with it but it'll be ruled out to a broader group of people later uh and hey what they love it it's really helped them you know shorten their uh you know their meantime to resolve or whatever types of uh objectives you have for the uh the implementation and and you can build excitement around that with that uh you want to make sure that the change enablement lead is probably a better term for that because I I just know that I look at that don't want to get that mixed up with the it M change manager role consistent communication and Senior leadership engagement is very very important and of course as i' mentioned earlier early wins and being able to communicate those early wins some key items that we want to make sure there we want to make sure that we have ongoing listening mechanisms listening posts if you want to call them that that allow your people in let's say your change champion Network and other key stakeholders people on your implementation to attract of the pulse of of the people who were affected by this change are they are they feeling anxious are they feeling resistant or are they very excited about this and and really looking to you know eager to get going with this being able to uh welcome changing requirements even late in the process so again this is very much an agile principle that uh you know not only happens on the development side but we need to be able to deal with this on the uh the change enablement side as well this is just a a quote that I I picked up but I I thought it might might be an interesting way of looking at lean more into the art of change enablement than the science Making determinations in the moment about which steps and tools are needed and which aren't likely to add value kind of you you will have to operate quickly in this type of environment you know I I don't I'm not certainly not suggesting we don't want to be scientific but sometimes we have to kind of go with what what we have and and be able to uh to move forward with that that's just is going to be the reality obviously and I kind of touched on this earlier change enablement can also adopt agile practices so you can have your change your change enablement lead and and uh stakeholders do daily standups perhaps or maybe maybe not maybe it's not necessary to have daily but uh you know regular standups and being able to uh continually coordinate activities and you can break those activities into something analogous to Sprints and that may even align with Sprints in terms of you know when you get Communications drafts out and when you build out your iterations of your your change enablement plan and your uh you know various other artifacts you can actually follow agile practice with with that and that can help you align with an agile approach you do have to uh you know use fast turn informal Communications channels again I touched on this earlier sometimes you may not be able to wait for that you know Town big town hall meeting or uh you know quarterly or monthly uh news newsletter you may have to uh have people culturally adapted to being able to follow those informal communication channels to get updates and and be able to understand what's going on and what the latest news is and I already said this leverage Sprints uh in terms of you know kind of building out minimally viable change enablement resources that can be uh tested and moved forward taking advantage of piloting change tools again you know you have opportunities here because the pace of change and the number of changes are are increasing but they may be more iterative and more incremental um I'm not going to read this I apologize this one's a little bit of an ey chart but just just just be aware that uh things like sponsorship is critical and the sponsor your sponsors need to adapt a agile mindset as well so that's very very important same with middle manager engagement they're super important being able to keep the middle managers on board communicated have them feel like you know you're they're being communic unated with and and uh kept up to date on what's Happening Employee Engagement again all within an agile culture you know being able to build that as I say those informal channels being able to build employee culture so that they know to look to informal channels for uh for information as well as waiting for you know that monthly newsletter or whatever obviously here Glide fast internally we we do have those channels and we're pretty good at that but not all organizations are good at that we have you know the various approach and resources that need to adapt to Agile we have uh integration with project management so it's very very important and again I I think I think overall in Glide fast uh at least on our our customer engagements we do a pretty good job of making sure that change enablement is integrated with the the overall project plan with the engagement manager and so on but it is very very important to make sure that it's not just some add-on change enablement is fundamentally built into your project plan and uh and worked with accordingly um communication training again they have to be very focused and concise resistance management can happen at different can happen at different levels again because you may have more incremental changes coming through the pipe you have to you know be able to deal with resistance on various levels and then being able to reinforce so being able to reinforce the changes early frequently and being able to again take advantage of those things like quick wins and and maybe if if an issue does come up then being able to quickly turn around some kind of improvement or fix for those issues um this type of thing those can very much play into reinforcement in a in an agile environment how does this affect us so we're service now consult I happen to be a change enablement consultant so you know this is a lot of my bread and butter as well as being a a bpc you know some of you may have no involvement with change enablement or little involvement so question is how fact you well in fact you should actually be very much aware of change enablement regardless of the rule whether you're a a technical resource or a you know engagement manager or bpc or anyone it's very important that you understand how what we're doing affects people and so even if you're not in that change enablement role you need to be constantly on the lookout for things that that might impact people and be able to sound the alarm if you say hey wait a minute you know what if we do this this is going to change a bunch of stuff for for people you know we need to look at that and that may be fine but we just need to be able to you know communicate that accordingly and incorporate that into the training so you know every Sprint or every release that goes into production could have impacts and you know I often see for example in implementations situations where changes get put into production with the intent that well we're not really going to use them right now but you know they're they're part of our our release cycle so they'll get put in production uh but you know you have to be careful with that because someone might see that change and get confused by it and then that could potentially lead to issues so you need to be able to make sure that uh whatever you whatever you put into production is managed properly not just you know from that traditional itsm change management perspective where you're releasing CIS but also from a people change perspective this change enablement perspective and so if you notice anything like this please bring it to the attention of the change enablement lead if there is one whoever the the contact might be for that or the engagement manager or whoever whoever you think might be in a position to address this and and uh uh you know float this up to uh to the right people to make sure it's addressed properly for the people who are in the uh change enablement role obviously a lot of the things that I just talked about things like Sprint Cadence timing of releases you know we need to make sure that that is a key component of our change enablement planning and that we're comfortable with that and that we can uh that we can build on that Al also just uh you know related to that understanding the volume of changes and as I said as I touched on earlier just understanding that the when you have this many changes going on you know there's all the more opportunities for changes to collide and for something that some other group is doing to affect us or for something we're doing to affect some other group that may seemingly have nothing to do with our initiative and so being able to engage the right people within our organization who can get that kind View and be able to understand what what kinds of impacts might be going in either direction I think that you know you touched points on several important items that it might not be as tangible as of when you know we're working in an specific implementation but you know considering these artifacts like for example the the states of change right uh most of the customers are not aware that you know that's that's going to be happening right and they're not aware that you know there are ways to make that change a little bit more smooth and so so this is great and I love the fact that you know we we do have you know several options it's not just one but bringing this into the whole picture and to sharing this knowledge I would say with customers I think it's super valuable and it will open you know just right away their minds and their willingness to try new stuff so yeah thank you I it's actually funny I actually have used the analogy that that change change enablement is something like something like eating healthy and exercising you know everybody knows you should do it but most people most people don't one degree or another and so organizations are are very similar to this I mean you won't hear any senior manager say we shouldn't do change enablement or organizational change management is it's still known in many places an awful lot of organizations still don't put the right resources into it or the right attention to it do you have any examples of how you know o ocm has actually uh helped or ocm Consultants have made a positive impact on the engagement as a whole yeah I can I can get examples for you you're looking for kind of like uh success stories and that type of thing exactly like what what types of um strategies have enable the organization to better manage the service now change and stuff like that yeah I think that would be helpful for us as consultants to to know exactly what situations you know a call for which strategies and how they might benefit a absolutely and and that that kind of touches on another point that that's probably good to bring out here the the way change enablement or organizational change management uh occurs in different engagements we have to be aware of things like uh you know what what the organization has already in terms of change enablement infrastructure if you want to call it that so you know I've worked in a wide range of environments where some implementations I go in and I'm basically just the service now change enablement guy they have a whole change enablement Department who have their own Communications and they have their own processes set up they have everything you know their own way that they like to handle uh change enablement or ocm and they so I have to operate within that that structure and I'm just kind of the person who fills in the gaps from a a service now perspective other clients we go in and you know I'm only half joking when I say that you know they o the only thing they know about ocm is how to spell it and and how they that they should be doing it and so I I kind of have to handhold everyone right from beginning to end on the sort of baby steps as to how how to do change enablement or ocm uh the right way and so I have various examples of that you know I have some where I'm somewhere in the middle essentially what what I did I I kind of kept them disciplined on me they they had the ability to create their own Communications artifacts they had the ability to do a lot of things themselves but what I did was kind of be the changeing ablan or ocm Taskmaster I guess you could say and I met with him constantly toh sort of say okay where are you with this communication you know plan would you please U share some example of tools that help us in this journey with the change enablement the Practical ones that anyone on a team can uh bring it up and leverage it for the benefit of change management what I'm going to show you here is an artifact that I put together and this this case help put together working with you this is a an example of what a change a change impact assessment might uh might look like and so you want to make sure you've identified you know you know who who is who is affected what kinds of roles are affected what are the details of that change so you know some people have to access a whole new system they'll need to have training on it you know other other people may just have to go into a different portal link and then click on a different icon in order to be able to submit something you know they there are all these different levels of change uh that can affect different people and so what I always try and do and there are various flavors of this this uh impact assessment this one I happened to be I was conforming to uh to the client's uh format I usually prefer to have the group and roll over on the left here but it still all says all of the same information so that's fine what everyone on a team can do you may not be filling in this document per se here but what you need to be aware of is that hey what we're building here affects this person who has this role and how will it affect them well they'll have to do this different differently but there might be some things that stay the same as well but the this is what they'll have to do differently and so being able to summarize that and those those sort of key pieces of information what's changing who does it impact and and how a nutshell a version of of what I think everyone on an engagement should be looking at it would be that now there are many other things for example Communications plans so here's where we have a communication plan where we uh now this is what not something that most people on an engagement to work on is typically me working with you know my my point of contact or or you know whoever the O the change enablement lead is but you have you know your different uh your different artifacts in terms of what's actually going to go out you know that it's going to be uh who's the audience for this you know is the whole company being informed is it just leadership is it just specific impacted groups um who's sending this uh will it come from the uh CIO or will it come from Individual managers you know what is the purpose of it what is the message that we're we're delivering what are the key message points that we're delivering you know are there other things certain branding or themes that we need to align with and that kind of thing and then we need to understand the timing of it you know so that's a Communications plan so that's another example of of an artifact that that we would build out now in an agile environment um this communication plan may need to may have more lines on it and it may or it may have more ongoing communication relating to less formal channels like maybe so internal social media channels and things of that nature so that's that's another another example of some things that we do we do uh a lot of uh you know work with things like uh building out supporting documentation one pagers you know to to help people understand what they're doing they working with the training team to you know build out quick reference guides and things of that nature so I know uh aam that that are those the types of things that uh that you had in mind yes yes that was really [Music] helpful