Changing Up Change
Management
NOT ALL RISKS ARE TECHNICAL.
IT-enabled business transformation
involves people, and working with
people involves risk — especially
when those people are notoriously
change-resistant IT professionals.
To address the issue, I T leaders are
tapping into some new ways to make
change easier on their teams.
Lenovo, for example, has adopted a
very structured and methodical way
of orienting new IT employees that
includes a process known as Fu Pan. In
Chinese, Fu Pan means “replaying the
chess game,” which teaches employees
to analyze their past performance
and identify ways to
improve in the future,
explains CIO Xiaoyan
Wang. “This works to
reduce risks because
the team is con-
tinually learning and
growing,” she says.
At State Street, IT
standardization is
turning out to be a
critical success factor
in easing the chal-
lenges associated with
change management,
says Kevin Sullivan,
chief architect.
“The adoption of a standard plat-
form and methods across the global
I T operation has allowed [us] to move
resources from one project to another
without the addition of risk because
[employees] do not need retraining,”
he explains.
“If a programmer is working on one
system and you need to change their
assignment to a di;erent system, they
can get up to speed much faster and
with a lot less risk of making mistakes
if they already know how the system is
built,” says Sullivan.
At Kraft Foods, CIO Mark Dajani is
emphatic that technology is not the
biggest risk factor the company faces
in huge integration projects related to
its acquisition of Cadbury. Instead, he
says, “the biggest risk I have is making
sure people are with us on this journey
and we get into productivity as soon
as possible. These big projects can be
expensive and delay will cost a lot of
money and business disruption.”
Dajani says the IT organization
needed to work in entirely new ways to
be successful. So it changed just about
everything, including its goals, how it
works and how employees are mea-
sured against the newly-set goals.
Standardization helps
reduce risk, says State
Street’s
Kevin Sullivan.
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