Chapter 21—Managing Change
Rockley discusses change in organizations in this chapter. In all organizations people resist change unless they believe there is a reason for the change.
Promoting Change
One key to making change happen is to listen to comments about the change from the people who the change will affect. Rockley lists some things she considers essential to change management including:
§ Communication—communicate the reasons for change.
o Explain why change needs to occur
o Explain your plan for the change
o Keep people informed as change occurs
o Communicate achieved successes
o Inform people of problems that may occur
§ Use “change agents” to help assimilate the change. Change agents should be people who will be a user of the new technology and who embraces the change that will occur.
§ Have a champion who is high enough in the organization to make the change happen regardless of the endorsement or opposition of company personnel.
Challenges
Challenges to the changes will occur regardless of where the changes originate. Some of the common challenges include:
§ These ideas are from a different company. Content can sometimes be reused if writers use care to format it correctly.
§ We don’t do it that way here. Find the commonalities between all segments of the company and implement them.
§ Creativity issues. With unified content, content must use formatted and structured templates. Creativity might be the domain of the authors of the templates, with some creativity reserved for departments who need to modify templates (such as marketing).
§ Workload issues. While there will be more work at the beginning of the cycle, workloads may decrease after the unified content strategy is implemented.
§ Job obsolescence. Jobs may be reorganized, not lost.
Many of the challenges already mentioned can cause the project to fail. Resistance to change and lack of communication are probably the most common, but many others can also cause failure. Other challenges include trying to do more than your organization is capable of doing, economic factors, lack of core competencies necessary to complete the tasks, and various types of project mismanagement.
Role Creation/Modification
Many roles within the organization are subject to change as a result of the implementation of content management strategy. According to Rockley, two new roles will need to be created—an enterprise content coordinator and an informational technologist. The enterprise content coordinator will communicate the benefits of content reuse and will coordinate all different project managers’ reuse projects. The information technologist will handle all the technology tools and will supervise the implementation of those tools. Other roles with modified responsibilities include the business owner or analyst, the information architect, the content owners, the authors, sand the editors.
Rockley discusses change in organizations in this chapter. In all organizations people resist change unless they believe there is a reason for the change.
Promoting Change
One key to making change happen is to listen to comments about the change from the people who the change will affect. Rockley lists some things she considers essential to change management including:
§ Communication—communicate the reasons for change.
o Explain why change needs to occur
o Explain your plan for the change
o Keep people informed as change occurs
o Communicate achieved successes
o Inform people of problems that may occur
§ Use “change agents” to help assimilate the change. Change agents should be people who will be a user of the new technology and who embraces the change that will occur.
§ Have a champion who is high enough in the organization to make the change happen regardless of the endorsement or opposition of company personnel.
Challenges
Challenges to the changes will occur regardless of where the changes originate. Some of the common challenges include:
§ These ideas are from a different company. Content can sometimes be reused if writers use care to format it correctly.
§ We don’t do it that way here. Find the commonalities between all segments of the company and implement them.
§ Creativity issues. With unified content, content must use formatted and structured templates. Creativity might be the domain of the authors of the templates, with some creativity reserved for departments who need to modify templates (such as marketing).
§ Workload issues. While there will be more work at the beginning of the cycle, workloads may decrease after the unified content strategy is implemented.
§ Job obsolescence. Jobs may be reorganized, not lost.
Many of the challenges already mentioned can cause the project to fail. Resistance to change and lack of communication are probably the most common, but many others can also cause failure. Other challenges include trying to do more than your organization is capable of doing, economic factors, lack of core competencies necessary to complete the tasks, and various types of project mismanagement.
Role Creation/Modification
Many roles within the organization are subject to change as a result of the implementation of content management strategy. According to Rockley, two new roles will need to be created—an enterprise content coordinator and an informational technologist. The enterprise content coordinator will communicate the benefits of content reuse and will coordinate all different project managers’ reuse projects. The information technologist will handle all the technology tools and will supervise the implementation of those tools. Other roles with modified responsibilities include the business owner or analyst, the information architect, the content owners, the authors, sand the editors.
posted by Larry Hennis | 6:15 PM
8 Comments:
I like the overview of Change Agents. I've discovered in my career that I can either become an Agent of Change within my company or I can sit back and let change occur without my involvement. Having input into organizational change is much more preferable than just passivily accepting change dictated from above. I'd rather lead than follow!
Change is definitely a hard thing to accomplish in large organizations. I think that Rockley did a good job of advising us on how to promote change in the most effective ways. I think communication is the biggest key, as Rockley pointed out. People always want to know why and have reasons for change. I think if the employees realize why change is a positive thing, they will be more likely to go along with it and accept the changes.
I think the process of change in a large organization at times can seem impossible. There just seems to be so many different venues that need approve or amend any proposed changes. I like that Rockley identifies a strategy for getting change accomplished in an effective and efficient manner. Without this strategy it seems like by the time any change is made that there is now different changes that need to occur thus making the process a never ending cycle. I also like what Carl said about being an agent of change rather than just sitting back and letting change happen to you.
Directing change within an organization reminds me of the techinical writer's process of usability testing. By keeping the users involved throughout the entire process of development, you can assure that the users will be as satisfied as possible.
I really appretiate the fact that Rockley mentions that projects can fail because of overzealous content reuse. When implementing change, some people can get so excited to get on the bandwagon that they overkill the change and create more problems in the process. This could happen if the department developing the CMS tries to reuse content that doesn't need to be reused or archived. I've seen people get a little too excited over a new obsession, and the results are never good, for the people OR the obsession.
In my experience, I've found that most front-line employees are more flexible with changes, especially if they're given a credible reason, than some of the decision-makers are. Too often I hear, "we can't throw too much at them at one time," as if the users are...I can't think of a good term that wouldn't insult someone...stupid. Too often the users are ready for change to get their tasks done more efficiently, but they must wait around for an SPT (systems priority team) to make decision on what they need. Aargh.
I liked this chapter because I am currently trying to change from the part-time/student into the full-time career worker with an internship.
I think finding the Agent of Change can sometimes be hard for the company and for them depending on the resistance to the changes made. Also I feel it is very important to anticipate arguments to change and address them in a non confrontational way before they are made. I think it becomes more difficult when the change (even if its just one) effects numerous different aspects and it can be hard to explain to people why one difference is making 20 differences in the company and how it can be worth while to do so.
I agree, it's very hard to get people to change unless you can point out that it benefits them directly. Open communication will help make people more accepting of the change, even if they don't like it. I'm surprised Rockley didn't suggest making smaller changes over time as opposed to one big change if at all possible. Ideally this would cause everything to go much smoother, although I have to admit the ability to do this in a large business is practically nill.
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