Introduction to Prompt Engineering (Focusing on ChatGPT)
Lean Change at MYOB
1.
2. Lean Change
LAST Melbourne, June 2017
Mark Barber Simon Bristow
Agile coach and
delivery manager at
MYOB.
I’m passionate
about empowering
people and helping
to grow and
nurture a culture
where everyone
can bring their
whole selves to
work.
Transformation
Manager at MYOB.
I’m focused on
helping organisations
maximise the delivery
of value to customers.
@mark_barbs @simonbristow
3. Title
1 2 3
4 5 6
Today, for our talk on Lean Change, we will cover…
Background &
Context
Choosing the best
way to manage
change
Introduction to
Lean Change
Reflections and
Learnings of Lean
change in practice
Takeaway: A Lean
Change toolkit
8. 8
Key insights identified in Discovery
We needed to get closer to our
customers
Improve usable information
radiation and transparency
Clarify the product development
process and roles
Understand the capabilities and
maturity of teams and a strategy to
coach them
Find ways to better share
knowledge and amplify great
practices
Reduce dependencies and
complexity
Develop an intentional architecture
strategy
Improve flow of work
Make work visible
Understand and surface ‘hidden’
work
Limit work in progress
Consistent prioritisation
Relevant roadmaps
= 31 key recommendations for change
15. 15
The MYOB Way…
Is Is not
• A prescriptive process
• A set way of working in teams
• A document
• Top down
• Intended to tell people what to do
• About standardisation
• A project
• Always right
• For everyone
• A set of guiding values, principles and
practices
• Intended to trigger and encourage
ongoing conversations
• A set of assumptions to be tested
• A reflection of a future ideal
• A journey, not a destination
17. 17
There are perhaps only three
things we need to know with
certainty: where we are, where
we want to be, and by what
means we should manoeuvre
the unclear territory between
here and there
Mike Rother
Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement,
Adaptiveness and Superior Results
Jason Little
Lean Change Management:
Innovative Practices for
Managing Organizational
Change
“
”
23. 23
Insights
• What needs to change?
• What are the business drivers? What is creating urgency?
• Who will be impacted and how?
• Where do we want to get to? What’s our target vision?
33. 33
Values
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Validation before implementation
Transparency and feedback
Many models over a single approach
35. Title
1 2 3
4 5 6
A principles-driven approach to change
Safety Respect Continuous
Improvement
Autonomy &
Transparency
No silver bullet Focus on
customer
value
37. 37
Gathering insights
Retrospectives and futurespectives
Company-wide engagement surveys
Interviews with people and teams
Framed within our company values
Lean change canvases
43. 43
Change Working Groups
• Focused on a single insight but with broad knowledge
• Cross-functional from all areas of the organisation
• Fully distributed geographically
• Skype, stickies.io and slack
• Team practices (demos, retros, stand ups)
44. 44
Forming Aligning Learning Executing
Questions
Principles
Practices &
Tools
Outcomes
Who is in the working group?
What are our roles &
responsibilities?
How do we work together?
Self-selection
Self-organisation
Autonomy
Collaboration
Team self selection
Herculean Doughnut
Team working agreements
Agreed change champion
Coach and Facilitator
Working Agreement
Team Size
What problem are we
trying to solve?
Are we aligned?
Charter our work
Visualisation
Lean change canvases
Design sprints
Team walls
Hypotheses
Shared understanding
Clear hypothesis
What are our options?
How will we explore and
experiment these options?
How will we show progress?
Experimentation
Transparency
Lean change experiments
Showcases
Retrospectives
Standups
Surveys / Interviews
Minimum Viable Changes
How do we
amplify?
How do we coach
new practices?
Sustainable change
Feedback
Collaboration
Coaching
Training
Surveys / Interviews
The MYOB Principles &
Practices Guide
Amplified change
with feedback loops
Training workshops
46. 46
Hypotheses & Experiments
• A consistent way of sharing and communicating change experiments
In order to… <the purpose>
We believe that… <the change experiment>
Will result in… <the desired outcome>
We have succeeded if… <measurable success criteria>
(or We have failed if…)
We will end the experiment in… <time box>
56. 56
Change Management Practices
• External validation
• More art than science
• Executive sponsorship
• Focus on steering committee
over wider organisation
• Big Upfront Insights
• Transition from experiments to
operational change
57. 57
Principles and Purpose
• Agreed principles that
underpinned and informed
insights, options and
experiments
• Teams not always aligned on
purpose
• Reason for change not always
known (lack of vision and/or
objectives)
58. 58
People
• Experienced and passionate
practitioners in all groups
• Early involvement of people
resistant to change or those
heavily impacted
• Lack of explicit roles and
responsibilities in focus groups
• Missed stakeholders and focus
on wrong ones
• No dedicated enablement team
59. 59
Tools & Practices
• Kata
• Rapid prototypes
• Company value lens for
insights and options
• Not enough showcasing
• Inadequate coaching on
experiments and hypotheses
60. 60Results
• Growth of culture of experimentation
• Successful and sustainable change (but not always!)
• Recognition that change is ongoing
• Significant reorganisation around customer value
• Tightened Go To Market/Product/Engineering relationship
• Trust and transparency
• Celebration culture
62. 62
Disagree Somewhat
disagree
Neutral Somewhat
agree
Agree
-2 -1 0 1 2
The need for change is a clear business imperative
There is strong executive buy-in for the change
There are clear and agreed principles underpinning the change
There is a clear vision
We can verbalise a compelling vision focussed around people
We’ll be able to set clear objectives and success measures so we
know how we are progressing
We have a strong lean/agile mindset
Self-Assessment: How ready are you for a Lean Change approach?
Part 1 Principles and Purpose
63. 63
Disagree Somewhat
disagree
Neutral Somewhat
agree
Agree
-2 -1 0 1 2
We are empowered to create multiple small cross functional
groups to explore change
We have access to experienced and passionate practitioners to
participate in working groups
Our organisation has a network of pragmatic change agents
We can engage and align resistors to change early
There is clear network of stakeholders
We are able to create slack over and above the day job to allow
people to engage
Self-Assessment: How ready are you for a Lean Change approach?
Part 2 People
64. 64
Disagree Somewhat
disagree
Neutral Somewhat
agree
Agree
We have the capability to teach and coach the following: -2 -1 0 1 2
Experimental approaches
Kata
Developing learning backlogs
Rapid prototyping
Showcasing learnings
Self-Assessment: How ready are you for a Lean Change approach?
Part 3 Tools and Practices
65. 65
Disagree Somewhat
disagree
Neutral Somewhat
agree
Agree
-2 -1 0 1 2
We have strong marketing/PR capable of communicating internal
change
We will see change as evolution, not a project
We have a relationship with external experts for validation
There is ample budget for a dedicated change management team
There is a senior sponsor with the ear (and trust) of the Exec
Self-Assessment: How ready are you for a Lean Change approach?
Part 4 Managing the Change
66. 66
Disagree Somewhat
disagree
Neutral Somewhat
agree
Agree
-2 -1 0 1 2
We have a safe to fail culture
We live our values, always
It is accepted that any solution will be unknown, and that’s OK
Self-Assessment: How ready are you for a Lean Change approach?
Part 5 Culture
67. 67
What is the problem?
What do we want to achieve with this change? Why is this important to the organisation?
How will we measure success? How will we show progress to the goal?
Who is most affected? What parts of the business will be most
impacted?
Is there prior work that we can leverage?
What do we need to learn? What are the experiments likely
to run in the next 2 weeks?
What are the experiments likely
to run in the next 2 months?
Lean Change Canvas
68. 68
In order to... <why are you running this experiment?>
We believe that... <what is the experiment?>
Will result in... <the desired outcome of the experiment>
We will know we are successful when... <measurable success criteria>
We will end the experiment by... <time box>
Hypothesis Frame
69. 69
<Working group> | <Experiment title> | <date>
Hypothesis:
Rationale:
<The answer you think you will find by running this experiment>
<why do you think you will get to
your hypothesis>
Methodology:
<how will you execute your
experiment – what
practical things will you do?>
Time to run:
<how long will it run for, or when
you will stop it>
Audience:
<who is this experiment targeted
at? might be 1 or more>
Success metrics
Primary:
<measurable metric(s)>
Secondary:
<anything else that will
indicate success?>
Experiment Template
72. 72
Reading List
Snowden, D and Boone, M (2017, November) A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making, Harvard Business Review
https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making
Little, Jason (2014, October) Lean Change Management: Innovative Practices for Managing Organisational Change,
Happy Melly Express http://leanchange.org/lean-change-management/
Rother, Mike (2009, August) Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results,
McGraw-Hill Education http://www.booktopia.com.au/toyota-kata-mike-rother/prod9780071635233.html
Ries, Eric (2011, September) Lean Startup, Crown Business http://theleanstartup.com/book
Notas del editor
Don’t dwell on this, but say that it’s important to touch on
Key points
2010 Cloud and increase in competition = agile. 5 years of building agile practice in Product and engineering
Period of vertical growth through acquisition (eg into Enterprise business, payroll) supporting traditional SME customers. 800-1200 employees
Now: Need to take this to the organisation as a whole, making us an adaptive organisation and helping us as we scale, attracting talent etc. 1700 employees by end of 2017.
Over 40 PD crews (squads) across 5 locations
---
Notes below are from culture day – reference only.
1991: We launched with a breakthrough easy-to-use accounting product for non-accountants
Over the past few years we've been developing and enhancing a suite of cloud solutions. We can now help you manage your business anywhere, anytime – building smarter connections with your networks while working on and storing your business data securely in the cloud
MYOB invests more than $40 million annually in research and development so we can find better ways to help you do business. Here are some of our most recent innovations:
1993: Our professional partner program launched – accountants, bookkeepers, certified consultants, developers, retailers and more, all to support business owners
1997: We expanded to include specialist accountant solutions – complete management solutions for accounting practices
1999: We employed our 400th team member
2004: We became the market leader for businesses and accountants in Australia and New Zealand
2005: Our offering expanded to include enterprise solutions – business management products for larger, more complex businesses (often with 20-200 employees)
2007: We expanded to offer a range of website management solutions for small and medium sized businesses
2009: We employed our 800th team member
2010: The pace of innovation picked up further in our development of cloud-enabled business management solutions and we launched our first cloud product
2012: We won the coveted 'Transformation Award' from Human Synergistics, recognising the constructive work place culture we had worked hard to evolve over the previous two years
2013: We were listed on the annual BRW Most Innovative Companies list
2013: We united with BankLink to offer an even wider range of range of cloud accounting solutions, to for accountants, book keepers and their clients, powered by the most accurate and secure bank feeds system in the market
2013: We employed our 1000th team member2014: We acquired HR and payroll solutions company PayGlobal, won an award for MYOB PayDirect at the Australian Mobile and App Awards, and launched our latest online POS solution, MYOB Kounta. BRW also named us the 7th Most Innovative Company in 2014
2015: We listed on the ASX as a publically listed company
2015: We acquired two payroll solutions companies IMS and ACE
2015: BRW named us in the top 10 Most Innovative Companies for 2015, Job Advisor named us in the top 20 for the Coolest Companies in Tech 2015
2016: We continue our transformation from long-standing software provider to an innovative cloud accounting solutions platform for small to mid-tier businesses; We are currently building the MYOB Platform to power our vision of a connected practice; We acquired another payroll solutions company, GreenTree to strengthen our position in the Enterprise segment;
2016: We opened our new Richmond tech hub for our 200+ engineering and development teams. The location and fitout are attracting the best new tech talent, in a part of Melbourne that is fast becoming a technology and innovation hub; We won the HRD employer of choice award for 2016
Lack of time for change. Slack over and above the day job not good
Don’t know if this is necessary. The talk isn’t about how we worked out where we were going, but maybe adds weight to the size of what we undertook.
Walk through this and remind the audience that the talk is not about the nature of what we did, but it provides good background – it shows that holistic change was required. It shows the change was not trivial, and validates that lean change is applicable at an organistion level
Tell the story of how we developed these – over time and in what order. If we could do it again – would we start form the top and work down? Not being 100% sure of objectives meant it had to emerge. Not necessarily a bad thing, but not having the vision and objectives around what we needed to do to get there probably constrained us a bit
Comms and PR is an imperative
So we had started to think about how we would implement the change. We had what we thought were objectives and tasks and what we thought was a direction. We were advised to ‘choose/adopt’ a change management framework and find someone who had implemented change.
Kotter’s 8 step was an eye opener for us because while we felt we’d created urgency and a coalition, we were struggling with the vision and while we were desperate to create qiuck wins, we didn’t know what they should be. There was something missing.
When we looked at ADKAR, we thought that we had created a good AWARENESS, but DESIRE was problematic, because we couldn’t verbalise ‘why’ and and as a result, we couldn't pinpoint the knowledge people would need to help us with the change.
Both Kotter and ADKAR were great sensible framework that made a lot of sense, but for our situation they just didn’t feel quite right. Sometting was missing
We even tried to frame with through other paradigms such as The Heroes Journey, we were struggling to Test, Allies and Enemies, but we didn’t know where the ‘inmost cave was’
Our realisation was that in change, just like in software development, we were trying to map a one size fits all framework to our change. We would never do that with our software development so why would we do it with a change framework?
The reality is that just like any other framework/tool, we choose the bits that suit our situation. The need for formal CM is based on the prevailing view that the answer is simple, we know what it is so it is just a matter of execution
The clincher was when we thought about it from a Complexity theory perspective. Early discovery made us imagine that change was simple and the answer was known: the conversation was about ‘best practice’, process, documentation – it was even referred to as a project – indicating it had a finite end.
A mandated top down driven change
We realised we didn’t know what we needed to do; we needed a method to help us find out.
The right supports the original view of exec, we journeyed to the left.
When we showed people this slide, everyone started to feel better!
Talk about how this picture supports the Complex zone of Cynefin (Probe Sense Act) but that also reflects evolution, but also based on where we are, how we best navigate to the next step. It indicated that it is OK to not know, and to take different paths and experiment.
What is lean change? Where did it come from? What is the lean change cycle? What are change experiments? What are some lean change principles?
Lean change is organisational change with an agile mindset. Focus on people over process, employ short feedback cycles. Think about goals and target conditions, not about detailed change plans.
Don’t focus on changing a process, focus on the way people interact with one another. It’s one of the core agile values.
It’s also a build-measure-learn approach to organisational change. Work toward MVCs – minimum viable changes. Validate before you go all in on implementation. That is, experiment your way to real change. Break the problem down. Build a learning and experiment backlog. Seek feedback early and frequently.
We coach our teams to work this way all the time….so why do we treat organisational improvement any different?
Perhaps talk about the weight of the word “transformation” – the analogy of stirring milk into coffee, not a road/journey
Lean Change Management, a book by Jason Little, takes principles and theories from multiple disciplines and schools of thought
Toyota Kata, Lean Startup, Kotter and other traditional change management models, agile manifesto.
Can we follow it all the way back to Francis Bacon in the 1600s who is the philosopher to whom we attribute the scientific method and empiricism.
What needs to change?
What are the business drivers? What’s the urgency?
Who will be impacted?
Where do we want to get to? What’s our target state?
Examples – infrequent software releases. Product prioritisation is a mess. Too much WIP. Low engagement.
Many techniques for this – lean change canvas, interviews, surveys and retrospectives.
What needs to change?
What are the business drivers? What’s the urgency?
Who will be impacted?
Where do we want to get to? What’s our target state?
Examples – infrequent software releases. Product prioritisation is a mess. Too much WIP. Low engagement.
Many techniques for this – lean change canvas, interviews, surveys and retrospectives.
Now that we know what needs to change and why, what are our options?
Divergent thinking is key.
Create a learning backlog.
In his book, Jason Little frames option analysis with some key questions – are there low hanging fruit? Are there in flight changes already? Are we over saturating particular areas with changes?
Consider change burn out when looking at options.
Look at 3 options minimum. Some may be experiments, some may be more easily implemented quick wins (or Just Do Its)
Examples – Different prioritisation techniques (cost of delay, games)
Now that we know what needs to change and why, what are our options?
Divergent thinking is key.
Create a learning backlog.
In his book, Jason Little frames option analysis with some key questions – are there low hanging fruit? Are there in flight changes already? Are we over saturating particular areas with changes?
Consider change burn out when looking at options.
Look at 3 options minimum. Some may be experiments, some may be more easily implemented quick wins (or Just Do Its)
Examples – Different prioritisation techniques (cost of delay, games)
Our insights and options are assumptions that we need to test. They are hypotheses that we will prove or disprove using change experiments.
But change experiments aren’t an exact science. We’re not mixing two chemicals together for a predictable outcome or reaction. We’re introducing elements of change and don’t know what results we’ll get. We need to react to these results in the best way we can. Experiments can help us be more proactive than reactive.
Prepare – what needs to be in place for this experiment to run? Who do we need to involve? Who do we need to communicate with? Are we aligned on the purpose? What are our success measures?
Introduce – introduce the change, run the experiment. Be transparent and visualise progress.
Review – what did we learn from the experiment? Measure. Did we succeed? If we failed, what did learn?
Example – run an experiment on cost of delay on a single tribe’s backlog. Compare it to current prioritisation. Then experiment on different types of work within that tribe.
Even beyond implementation. Validate always!
Helps make change organic and less daunting. Helps to grow a culture of continuous improvement.
Just as agile isn’t scrum, lean change isn’t just a single framework or methodology
How did we use lean change at MYOB to help us address the business urgency outlined by Simon?
We are going to focus on the HOW, not the WHAT. We believe every organisation is fundamentally unique, and the actual insights we gained have a reduced relevence to your organisation.
Inputs into purpose -> insights
Amplify -> nemawashi
Self-selection is difficult
Talk about wall driving culture
You need to have a plan for how you take a successful change experiment and allow it to grow into something the org just does. How do you take something that, for example, a tribe is experimenting with and roll it out to every team in Engineering? This is something we aren’t doing well and we’ve reflected on some of the reasons why. Whilst you want your change experiments to have relatively small blast radius, but you need to share the outcomes as wide as possible.
More importantly, the key attributes of experimentation still apply to any operational process or practice. The only difference between an MVC and operational change is scale.
Use example of transparency – reports…constantly get feedback.
Focus. Autonomy. Trust and Transparency. Continuous improvement. Safety and Openness. No silver bullet.
Build product communities around initiatives including all stakeholders needed to bring a product to the market
Our primary measure of progress is products that are actively addressing our customer needs or problems
Safety is a prerequisite. We welcome diverse perspectives and sincerely respect that everyone has a voice
Focus! Maximise work not done through eliminating wasteful processes, activities and features (Don’t do shit we don’t need to do)
Empower product communities and teams to make decisions ensuring decision-making doesn’t become a bottleneck
Optimise for achieving customer outcomes not team utilisation
We believe that the best outcomes are achieved by people who love their work
This will make your working groups often more difficult, there will be a stronger need to coach
Not enough focus on communication channels beyond working groups
Lack of consistent messaging (“brand”)
End dates for working groups
Executive buy in
Business need for change
Embrace of the unknown
Executive-driven steering committee becoming the focus
Focusing on solution before exploring problem
Small focus groups to explore the problem
Healthy debate between philosophical points of view
Pragmatic change agents
Prescribed roles
Lack of facilitation in focus groups
Experiments
Visualisation
Change canvases
Learning (experiment) backlogs
Canvas as artefact over tool for alignment
Experiment culture - Exec level- Organic (eg dev lead CoP, demand driven training)- Talk about how experiment wall led to other groups running their own experiments
Success – celebration, transparency, organisational restructure
So how do you know if Lean Change is right for you?
Howe successful will you be?
We have produced a self-assessment survey that will help you understand, as well as areas to work on to improve your chances of success.
Some items are more important for different organizations, you might with them accordingly
There might be more
If Lean change is for you, We have included templates that you might want to use to get your own Lean change running