Sarika Kharbanda is the newest recipient of our Storyteller badge!
Learn how she applied ideas from Lean Change to break down silos between the business and IT departments where she found herself working as a program manager.
Watch Her Story on LCM TV
Highlights
New organization, new colleagues, new portfolio of products! I am all set to begin my work. I start to collect insights about the different products in my portfolio via one-to-one interviews, Force field analysis, Retrospectives and other informal cafe conversations.
Some Key Perspectives as insights that I gather from different personas separately.
IT Perspective
- Business never owns up to their mistakes
- We don’t feel trusted by business, no matter what we do
- Business shows no accountability towards deliveries
- Business is not available for key decisions
- Business never has the time to have a discussion and understand what challenges we face
- A voice or 2 shared “we would like to help make this collaborative, but we need to go with everyone else on this.”
Business Perspective
- IT always misses their deadlines
- IT never owns up to their mistakes
- We can never trust IT
- IT shows no accountability towards deliveries
- IT never wants to meet and have a conversation on why things are going wrong
- How would you understand our issues? You have no idea how things work around here!
- A voice or 2 shared “We would surely like to change the way it works today. Show us the magic wand and we will make the change happen on our side.”
More perspectives from external vendors involved
- Everyone is committed to move towards a common vision
- There’s always abusive language used between Business and IT. This does impact the overall environment of working.
- That too adds up to the reason of most delayed deliveries.
My Perspective
- Perhaps share those in another article – already so many perspectives coming up here for now!
No matter how much I try to set up meetings to bring everyone together via informal coffee meetings or formal meetings, not many (or I should say not any) show up from IT or Business.Finally, with some leadership intervention on the Business and IT side, I do bring everyone together in-person (mostly). What happens in that one meeting room includes a structured order to chaos.
- Facilitated time-boxed venting out of frustration and challenges
- Co-creation of the project goal
- Acknowledgement that we all want this to move in the positive direction and make this a success together
- Understanding each others perspectives with the why behind a perspective
- What could we do differently to align perspectives in the next months to successfully complete this project initiative
- What’s needed from each of us to make this a success?
- How would be keep each other accountable?
- How would we handle any conflict if that arose?
Open, honest and facilitated conversation, understanding each other’s perspectives patiently to then nudge change forward.So, you are thinking where is this team today? And are they back into older habits? Nah! Here’s a quick update on that
- They begin their initiatives with a common aligned vision co-created together will all in the team (they end up creating customised canvases)
- They do not use email communication for evidence or approvals. They now prefer face-to-face. Email is an exception only.
- They synch daily on short calls across 4 different countries ( they call these daily synch calls to align and remove impediments )
- They run monthly Reflect & Learn sessions
- They now hold each other accountable across Business / IT / Vendors as they don’t look at each other as 3 separate teams but as a single store delivering a single piece of value.
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