Paul Wilkinson Interview

• Články a rozhovory

Publikováno: 18. 2. 2019

• You have conducted large number of ABC workshops focused on attitude, behavior and culture using ABC of ICT playing cards. Can you explain this approach?
• The ABC was in response to an assessment of hundreds of failed and struggling ITSM improvement initiatives, analysis revealed that the most common problems were Attitude, Behavior and Culture. ABC is like an iceberg, much of it is hidden, we don’t see it and we hope it will go away. It doesn’t. We need to make the Iceberg visible so that we can talk about It and take measures to either prevent or respond to ABC issues. This is why we developed the ABC card set as an awareness and assessment instrument to make the iceberg visible.

• What led you to take this learning by doing approach to your workshops? We have other types of learning by doing workshops such as ‘business simulation games’ one of these being Grab@Pizza a simulation to explore business & It alignment and raising the maturity of ITSM organizations, which is needed as a response to growing business demands and business dependencies on IT, we played this simulation at the conference and produced a set of learning discoveries and takeaway actions to show the value of this type of learning intervention. Why simulations? What we noticed was that many people go onto ITIL training and end up getting a theoretical certificate, translating theory into practice takes place back at work, without guidance, coaching or feedback, and often leads to frustration, delays, wasted effort and poor results. This impact often takes weeks or months to materialize. A business simulation helps people translate theory into practice in one day, in 4 rounds delegates get to design, apply, measure results, make improvements – learning a core skills of Continual learning and improvement.
• How are these different from more traditional workshops? What are key benefits for participants? In a traditional workshop delegates are given a task, and often set time to work together to discuss and explore ideas or define and agree actions. The ideas and actions cannot be tested. In a simulation the ideas are tested in a simulated environment. The game facilitator often plays the customer and will bring in new work, ask questions, demand reports, change priorities. People are actually simulating daily work and testing their ways of working in reality.

• Can we stop at two most often chosen cards by the participants? Neither partner makes an effort to understand the other and blame culture.

• Why do you think this is so common? People display what we call ‘territorial imperative’ protecting and defending their area and group. The moment we split a single real team (from one department) into business and IT a simulation game simulation they automatically display a ‘them and us’ attitude. Just like reality, we create business and IT, each has their own terminology, each has their own goals, each has their own language and are often geographically separated as well. Many IT people never meet or talk with users of their services. This creates a large divide, lack of understanding, often frustration, assumptions and mistrust. Do other departments struggle also so much or is it just the IT?

 

• You have said that ITIL is not addressing these issues properly. Hence the need for ITIL Practitioner and subsequent changes in ITIL 4. How does ITIL Practitioner help to address these issues?
  • ITIL describes the processes and activities very well. It is not that ITIL is not addressing these issues properly. It is people not applying ITIL in the right way. One reason for this is that people learn ITIL theory, and not ‘How do you apply it successfully, what failure are you lily to encounter, how do you deal with failures and people not wanting to change’.
  • This is why ITIL practitioner was developed, to help people successfully adopt and adapt and it gave an answer to many of the top ABC issues chosen in workshops with more than 4000 organizations in the last 15 years
  • Why is organizational change management capability so important? Many of the issues relate to changing people´s behavior, learning new ways to behave, to work and to work together. People don’t always like to change. There is Fear, uncertainty, doubt. It is unclear why? What the benefits are? These are all ‘oganizational change management’ issues and the biggest reason for many failures.
  • Can you give some examples of OCM failure? People say yes they will follow procedures but do no. There is no buy-in to procedures, IT process managers are not given authority to deal with this, managers circumvent processes and procedures, employees then think ‘if the manager doesn’t do it I won’t either’. Here are some more examples.

 

• As per ITIL Practitioner Guidance the aim of OCM is to win the hearts and minds of each individual affected by the change in order to reduce or remove resistance. How do you do that?
  • One is to give a clear purpose, to answer the why question ’why are we doing ITIL’? many people want to know ‘what is in it for me’?, ‘what if we don’t’ , what is expected of me? Another way is to engage the people to design their own ITIL processes. Ask them ‘do you recognize these issues, e.g. too many incidents open and unclear priorities’, this is what the ITIL process says, what do you think we could do with ITIL to try to reduce incidents, or to get a better way of prioritizing incidents, how can we ensure everybody knows the priority? Asking questions and using their answers to design procedures ‘would this help solve the issues? shall we practice and try it and see if it makes a difference? Here is another set of tips.
  • Reading OCM chapter in ITIL Practitioner Guidance it feels like  IT mainly needs to revisit classic works on human behavior. Why do we tend to ignore the human aspect of changes so much?
  • It is a common failure in all walks of life, we leave school we go into work, we learn skills to do the work. In the past change was slow and happened once every few years so change skills are only needed once every so often – so why develop change skills? Many had not experienced change so did not know what to look for, they hit resistance and don’t know what to do about it except apply command and control management styles. I am the boss you do what I say. Today changes comes much faster, it feels like constant change. People no longer have jobs for life, if they don’t like the way they are managed they will leave. People also have a misconceived perception ‘they are adults’ they understand and will behave accordingly. We do not understand what drives behavior. Often we also have KPIs (key performance indicators) and KPI’s may drive the wrong behaviors. Unfortunately behavior management is seen as psycho mumbo jumbo and all that soft skills gooey stuff, technology managers don’t really understand it and are skeptical about it.

 

• What is an appropriate soft-skill training for people in IT who are in front lines of implementing organizational change?
• OBM – Organizational behavior management is a very good approach. It is scientifically based and works on a concept of ‘Antecedents, Behavior, Consequences’. 

• What are the biggest skill-gaps in IT departments?
• Two big skills gaps are ‘communication and collaboration’ skills. More and more we need to work end-to-end and with other teams, teams who we traditionally throw things over the wall to each other. Here is an example of the difficulties with realizing effective collaboration. Here is an example of communication. Another key skill gap is ‘Improve business understanding’. The top chosen ABC (attitude, behavior and culture card) for the last 15 years ‘It has too little understanding of business impact and priority.
• How to address these?
• One way is with simulations, bringing people together end-to-end including the business to learn to collaborate and gain a better understanding. Another way to gain business understanding is to send EVERYBODY from IT into the business for 1 day every so often and to have them observe how IT supports and enables the business, and what the frustrations and challenges are with IT. Then have them come back and present to their own teams to share, discuss and explore and use this knowledge in improvement initiatives.

 

• You were directly involved in creation of ITIL Practitioner and contributed to ITIL4 discussion. How does this change in focus translate to ITIL4?
  • (not involved in ITIL4) But I believe now that OCM (change management) and the guiding principles will be central and given at the foundation level. This is needed ass the ITIL practitioner book, although perceived as the best book, my studies at the last 6 itSMF events globally reveal less than 10% of ITIL practitioners have read the book or even know of its existence!
  • Your talk in itSMF annual conference in Prague this year was about digital transformation and the dark arts. What was the talk about? Do we need black magic in order to perform successful digital transformation?
    No the Dark Arts refers to all the frameworks and practices such as ITIL, COBIT, DevOps Agile, they become dark arts when the framework becomes the goal itself, i.e. we are going to ‘implement ITIL’ rather than we have a problem, how will ITIL help solve this. Also we seem to think we can wave a magic wand and suddenly we will be an ITIL organization and everybody will follow the procedures. There is always resistance. Again why OCM skills are needed.

 

• Did you enjoy the conference? (deadline for the issue is 31 Jan)
• It was a great conference, a half day workshop day to be able to discuss and explore, a good variety of speakers and topics, lots of networking moments including 2 evening meals for informal networking and discussions. For me also the addition of presenting to university students about the types of challenges (Attitude, behavior and Culture) they will face when they enter the industry. Watch out for the dark arts!

 

Jan Škrabánek – Autor rozhovoru je konzultantem společnosti ALVAO, www.alvao.cz
Patrik Šolc – Spoluautor článku je předsedou spolku itSMF Czech Republic, www.itsmf.cz

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Autor:: Kateřina Mrkvičková