Lightning Talk Stage Stop by during session breaks to hear lightning talk presentations or give one of your own. Talk to the lightning talk moderator to claim your 5 minute spot. And don’t miss Paul Kimmerly’s series on tools for organizational change, presented throughout the conference!
Chameleons, GOATS, Staples, Toys, and AA Paul Kimmerly
The presentations will present each of these tools and illustrate how they can be used to help change agents. It all starts with explaining that CMMI concepts are easy to sell. Selling and managing change are the biggest difficulties. Overcoming organizational and cultural barriers requires the most effort. Every change agent must find the barriers within their own organization and be creative in finding solutions. The title refers to some of the tools that have worked over time. • The chameleon: The chameleon represents the need for the change agent to present the face of change in different ways to different audiences. The chameleon understands the differences in the people and groups affected by improvement efforts and shows that the message is the same, but the appearance changes depending on the audience. • GOATs: GOATs refer to Getting Our Act Together meetings that the change group needs to hold. • Staples: Staples refer to an article called “”Staple Yourself to an Order”” that shows a method for following and documenting the flow of a process through an organization. • Toys: Toys provide great tools to break the ice and lighten the mood in meetings and process activities. • AA: AA refers to Audience Analysis. Audience analysis may be the most critical tool for a change agent to use. Before any meeting or interaction with people in an organization, a change agent must analyze the audience to determine the best approach to take. Each of these tools will assist a change agent in bringing change to the organization and overcoming the barriers of change agent credibility, uncertain senior management sponsorship, lack of cascading sponsorship, turf guarding, a lack of internal communication and resistance. These barriers exist from the beginning of an organization’s process improvement efforts and continue over time. Change agents must always be on the lookout for these and other barriers. Building a set of available tools will help address the barriers over time.
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