BR 2/52: How TPMs Can Implement Change Effectively
Have you been part of a hastily done organizational restructuring?
When your team finally found focus, leadership changed the goals on you and forgot to give you context?
Has it felt like every big change at your organization always ended in disaster?
Do you wish that leadership would stop falling in love and forcing every new tool under the sun on you?
Change can be transformative when done right.
Change can be devastating when done wrong.
Either way, change is hard.
At a startup, you see nails everywhere to hammer. For any change agent, the environment is rife with possibilities to experiment with processes and frameworks. We aren’t just talking changes at the team level but you can create change to impact the entire organization. Within days you can completely switch around how and what the team focuses on, new planning processes, new development workflows, action, action everywhere.
Being a Technical Program Manager (TPM) at an early stage startup is equivalent of being in a master class where the learning possibilities are endless. Past couple of weeks I have been thinking about the nature of change and how change can be done the right way.
In this post…
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Successful change requires two things:
Clarity & Impact — what and why we need change and how it will impact things.
Patience — time to ease in let change settle.
Technical Program Managers (TPM) are often seen or envisioned as catalysts or agents of change within technical organizations. The most successful and effective Technical Program Management Offices are the execution arm of senior leadership.
Every TPM must understand a few things about the nature of change to be successful at remaking “things”:
Foundations
The System
Time
Foundations
Change happens across 3 planes:
Organization
Team
Individual
TPMs must always assess the impact of every change on the entire system.
If we change something as simple as sprint planning, there will be consequences on how teams make decisions, address dependencies, and their velocity. Changes to team velocity means leadership gets what they want later than desired.
If leadership re-evaluates the priorities for the next 6 weeks, just telling teams new marching orders is not enough. Teams have to re-evaluate their backlogs and current commitments which must be weighed against the existing individual commitments and previous focus of teams.
Rarely has there been change in one plane that has not impacted the other two. All Systems must remain in equilibrium to operate at optimal levels.
When making change, think how this will impact the organization, the team, and the individual.
🏕️ Story Time — Every failed change I have seen has alway missed Team and Individual planes. Before joining Nike in 2019, a grand unification of the two tech teams at Nike had occurred. Global Technology group was born out of the merger of two departments, Nike Digital Tech and Nike Direct Engineering. On paper it made sense; when you have two competing technology teams, you merge them. Except, the merge happened without a proper plan for individual teams. Teams were merged without thought, people moved around hastily and previous leaders were given new titles that they weren’t happy with or didn’t align with their expertise. For the next two years, there were gaps in ownership, lack of clarity for which leader owned what, many heads of the two tech teams were pitched in game of thrones esque politics which had real world consequences. One example was the Enterprise Data Engineering team — responsible for maintaining every byte of data Nike collected, used, and utilized, in flight or at rest — was re-organized twice in under two years.
The System
For decades, effective digital transformation projects at organizations have leveraged The Golden Triangle, otherwise called the PPT (People, Process, Technology) framework, first introduced in the 1960s by Harold Leavitt as the guiding principle.
TPMs must always keep in mind that every change will either have an impact or require adjustments across these three pillars.
People — the most neglected resource especially when push comes to shove. Every process change, workflow adjustment or introduction of a new tool will fail without thinking through how the people who do the work will be impacted.
Process — process does two things: speed things up or slow things down. Whenever you are faced with a complicated process, ask what one of the best engineering managers I ever worked with at Apple did: what are you trying to do?
Tools — leadership loves trying new tools and tech. Sometimes it’s better to build, sometimes it’s better to buy. Sometimes even small changes in people and processes resolve issues with tools and vice versa. There is no such thing as the magic tool. When you think about people and processes, give thought to tools as well.
🏕️ Story Time — At the tail end of my stint at Nike, I heard the Global Technology leadership was pouring an insane amount of money and people into a new marketing analytics tool which will replace all the tools across Nike, creating synergy across global and geo marketing teams allowing Nike to unlock new digital opportunities to increase both membership numbers and sales. Great, this is precisely the music leadership loves to hear. We will have a single tool for everyone and make shit ton of money. Except, every single marketing department hated the tool and were suspect about its perceived vs actual usefulness. Technology teams were concerned the engineering lift was underestimated given the amount of customization that had taken place over two decades with the current tools. Plus, this would require complete new workflows for marketing teams to analyse, assess and draft new marketing strategies. Alas, leadership kept pushing and last I heard from old colleagues, the people and process aspects of the project continues to be ignored.
Time
I finally got around to James Clear’s Atomic Habits. I was struck by the very first thing Adam talks about - marginal gains.
It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.
Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.
— James Clear (jamesclear.com)
True transformation takes time. Leadership will always prefer to have their cake and eat it at the same time. The hallmark of great leaders and changemakers is knowing that true transformation comes through small, patient, incremental changes measured consistently to evaluate the right desired impact.
You will make grand plans of how this new system or workflow will completely transform the organization into the new era of productivity but here is a piece of advice:
Dream In Years
Plan In Batches
Change In Steps
If you deploy too hastily, big change can shock the system into paralysis. Treat every change like a project and deploy it in increments. Even when the world screams now, you reply one step at a time, patience. Give people time to adjust, measure the impact, then see if you are ready for the next step.
🏕️ Story Time — When I rejoined BlackBerry in 2010, a lot had changed. Biggest change was the acquisition of QNX. 1 year or so after I joined, leadership decided to go full in on QNX except the merge was very haphazard and drastic. The existing Operating System team that built the OS that powered your favourite BlackBerry devices — internal codename Nesus OS — was absorbed by the QNX Core Engineering team. Except there was no sunset plan for what will happen with the old BlackBerry phones. Suddenly you had two bifurcated teams - one to maintain the old BlackBerry and one to usher in the new era. Except the merges weren’t clean. There were shared resources because QNX had never built a phone. Their operating system was designed for automotive use cases and nuclear power plants. The BlackBerry Leadership under fire needed to make a big change now because Apple, Google, Samsung were dominating the smartphone market. Workflow incompatibility, cultural differences, leadership styles, so many issues suddenly ground everything to a proverbial halt - a shock to the system. Alas, you know the rest of the BlackBerry story.
Final Word — As Systems Integrators and Thinkers, change is something we TPMs must always be comfortable with. Often what is worse than ineffective change is the refusal for organizations to change. TPMs can are the signal, that pulse check leadership can leverage to assess if an organization needs change and whether it’s ready for it.
Until next time 👋!
-Aadil
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🔐 Inside Look: How Apple Successfully Merged iOS and MacOS Engineering And Completely Changed The Way Software Planning Happened
Scott Forstall’s departure was sudden and immediate. At the time of his departure, iOS and MacOS Engineering existed as separate orgs with separate Program Management Offices.
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