Change acceleration

Accelerate adoption to the new ways of working by applying a programmatic change acceleration framework that identifies and minimizes impacts to people, culture, roles, and organization structure when moving from current to future state.

Cloud transformation creates widespread changes across business and technology functions. As enterprises embark on cloud transformation, there is a temptation to focus first on the technology without planning for the organizational impacts that transformation has on culture, roles, skills, and leadership. Yet, again and again, we find that proactive focus on organization alignment, leadership, people ability, and culture is the key to realizing the transformational value of cloud adoption. 

Organizations that apply a programmatic end-to-end change process that is structured, integrated, and transparent achieve higher rates of success with value realization and adoption to the new ways of working. By applying a change acceleration framework such as the AWS Change Acceleration 6-Point Framework, from project onset, organizations more readily achieve alignment, a shared vision, and reduced waste. The AWS Change Acceleration approach has been designed with a mindset for Return on Investment (ROI) at the forefront, to accelerate organizational adoption of cloud services and solutions, minimize the degree of business performance dip, and shorten project completion times. Building your organization’s change muscle is key to transformational levels of success.

As AWS continues to innovate at a rapid pace each year, and as your organization quickly adopts those solutions and innovates, business value is enhanced. These initial cloud successes lead to faster, quicker, and more cost-effective adoptions, and the cycle of migration and modernization repeats itself. By focusing on the human elements of cloud transformation using a structured yet flexible Change Acceleration framework, you will see spillover outcomes in the form of culture evolution, transformation leadership, and talent capabilities. It also breaths energy into structural areas of change, such as advancing the purpose and maturity of your CCoE and Cloud Operating Model (COM).

Start

Start with data about the current state of your organization regarding change. Conduct a stakeholder assessment by interviewing cross-functional IT, finance, HR, and line of business leaders about your cloud strategy and transformation efforts. By asking different leaders the same set of questions separately, a clear picture of awareness, understanding, and buy-in will begin to crystallize. If there are areas of strong organizational support, reluctance, resistance, or constraint, these also become evident in the interviews. When interviewing leaders, only listen, and probe for clarification or deeper understanding. It is important not to correct or argue, and realize that it is common to hear differing views of the vision, inconsistent answers on timeline, and worry about the organization’s prioritization or capacity for change at a given point in time.

Here are some questions to consider asking:

• What is your sense of the reason or rationale for this cloud transformation? How well is this understood in your group?

• What outcomes are you expecting?

• What changes of this magnitude have you experienced before? How have they gone?

• How does the culture here encourage involvement with this kind of initiative?

• What effect will this cloud transformation have on your team’s daily processes and responsibilities?

• What skills will need to change? What skills are missing?

• What barriers or risks do you perceive with the cloud transformation?

• Related to communications and training within your organization, what channels do you prefer or recommend?

Next, articulate a vision for what the future looks like. If this has not been done to date, take some time to meet with the executive sponsor of the program, and any trusted team members to discuss the future state vision. Consider writing a press release and frequently asked questions (PRFAQ) to define, invent, refine, test, and iterate the future state vision. Articulate the customer and internal benefits from your cloud transformation, and work backwards from those. Then, think through a list of questions customers would likely have about cloud transformation, and develop the FAQ list. For more information, refer to Working Backwards.

Align and mobilize cross-functional cloud leadership. One way to do this is to bring back the leaders that were initially interviewed and share a report of findings. Anonymize the feedback to earn trust, and point out areas of agreement and disagreement to build alignment. By seeing how others reply to the same questions, leaders can acknowledge the similarities and differences in how they are prioritizing the cloud transformation with their teams, where there are pinch points in capacity, knowledge, and skills, and how metrics and shared OKRs will play a role in the path forward.

Develop a change acceleration strategy and roadmap that addresses risks and uses strengths. It can be comprised of leadership action plans, talent engagement, communications, training, and risk mitigation strategies. To keep executive engagement strong and cross-functional, try to give each leader a task to own on a quarterly basis. This gives each leader accountability for the success of cloud transformation, as well as interesting and timely topics to speak about that may be beyond their typical scope of control. This technique helps to spread the word across the organization horizontally and will nicely complement communications that are happening vertically throughout the IT function. For the change acceleration roadmap, create a view of the time horizon of the transformation and include any key milestones such as migrations, data center exit, and modernization efforts.

From there, consider the following questions:

• What do people need to know?

• When do they need to know it?

• What do managers need to know?

• What big events and training will need to take place?

• Who is the audience impacted?

• How will hiring plans be impacted?

• What can we highlight about cloud at recruiting events?

• What approvals or involvement may we need from a finance or HR perspective to meet our milestones?

By working backwards from key objectives and creating people-related milestones between them, you will start to form a robust change acceleration roadmap. The roadmap can then be broken down into specific phases, releases, epics, sprints, and user stories for project management purposes. For more information, refer to the re:Invent video “Working backwards: Amazon’s approach to innovation”.

Advance

Envision the future by assessing your organization’s readiness for cloud through impact assessments. Identify key stakeholder groups, cross-organizational dependencies, key risks, and barriers to transformation. Empathize with their day in the life as much as possible to see the world of impacts from where they sit. Consider the changes to processes, people, organization, technology, applications, metrics, data, and reports. Also consider timing for key milestones (such as training events, migrations, and data center exits) in the context of other changes impacting that stakeholder group, and modify to relieve pinch points and avoid unnecessary stress.

Plotting each stakeholder group methodically in a change impact map will help you identify patterns. Some groups will be more positively impacted than others. Some groups may not have capacity for yet another enterprise-wide initiative and will require careful sequencing within the roadmap. Change impacts also formulate a logical basis for determining communication messaging and training plans in a role-based holistic manner.

Change readiness is another factor. When there is an impending change, such as a big migration, a data center exit, or modernization milestone on the roadmap, it helps to send a survey to impacted cloud users to gauge readiness for change. This will help shore up any additional needs for communication or user support ahead of time, or at least provide advance notice for what frequently asked questions and trouble tickets are bound to appear after the change takes place.

Here are some statements that you may wish to consider evaluating on a Likert scale to provide a health check on organizational readiness:

• I believe a clear vision for cloud transformation has been communicated.

• I support the business rationale for cloud transformation.

• I understand how we will measure the success of cloud transformation.

• I understand the priority of this change in relation to other initiatives in this organization.

• I feel sufficiently informed about cloud transformation plans.

• I have received consistent communication about cloud transformation.

• I have the skills necessary to effectively work in the cloud.

• I am motivated to learn new processes and skills associated with cloud.

• I have sufficient time to learn cloud skills and/or attend training.

• I believe the right level of skill development is available to support cloud transformation.

• I know where to go to acquire new skills needed for cloud transformation.

• My manager/leader effectively communicates what is expected of me related to cloud transformation.

• My manager takes an active interest in this cloud transformation.

• Senior management (higher than my manager/leader) supports cloud transformation.

• The people leading cloud transformation “walk the talk”.

• Mistakes will be treated as opportunities to learn rather than punished as failures.

Define what success looks like early in the journey by creating key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that are specific, measurable, action oriented, relevant, and timebound (SMART). Beyond quantifiable metrics, use anecdotes, which are a form of observable data that should not be ignored just because they cannot be measured. If you are using an organizational readiness survey like described above, this can be used as a mechanism to gather metrics for your scorecard. Consider metrics that evaluate various aspects of the change acceleration strategy.

For example:

• The number of applications you are migrating/modernizing.

• Governance and participation metrics of your CCoE and other cloud leaders.

• Outcomes of migration or modernization events.

• Cloud certifications achieved.

• Cloud usage and cost data.

• Documentation of repeatable processes and patterns.

Consider shared outcomes for leaders in the form of shared OKRs. Shared OKRs give cross-functional leaders a common goal, and work as a forcing function to establish collaboration, versus siloed ways of working. When measuring and sharing progress, remember to show heart and soul. The goal should be progress, not perfection. Build positive momentum and encouragement, and point out sparks of inspiration versus adopting a format of sterile status tracking. Be sure to recognize early wins and celebrate them in visible communications. Hearing about good work, and even hearing about missed objectives that are still progressing in the right direction, give the organization hope. It also sets the stage that cloud change is important, and failing fast or failing forward is both tolerated and encouraged.

Excel

Beyond implementing a programmatic framework for change acceleration, applying behavioral science enables you to more rapidly achieve desired results. The fundamental principle of behavior science is that behavior is a function of the events that precede (antecedents) and follow it (consequences). Effective application of this principle, which comes from decades of research in behavioral science, gets many leaders aligned on a critical few “desired behaviors” and collectively applies antecedents and positive consequences.

The behavior of managers and leaders directly impacts the behavior of everyone in the organization. Therefore, changing the behavior of mangers and leaders will impact/change the behavior of everyone in the organization.

If this behavior change is aligned around strategic priorities, then an organization can quickly and profoundly impact results. For example, if the desired behavior is to fail fast, then, when an employee does run an experiment that fails, they should not be criticized for that failure, but rather complemented on the agility to quickly recover and share lessons learned.

Make changes stick by reinforcing, recognizing, and rewarding desired behaviors that drive the cloud strategy and transformation effort forward. Be sure to also delicately point out when behavior needs to change. Keep in mind some best practices around rewards and recognition. For a rewards and recognition program to be effective, it should be sufficiently funded, aligned with goals and values, appropriate, timely, artfully carried out, administratively uncomplicated, and regularly evaluated.

When considering the behavioral changes that are beginning to take place, do not be afraid to test and refine. Despite the best of leader intentions, sometimes the behavioral science works against you, and the consequences you thought would drive positive momentum may actually backfire. For example, if the desired behavior is to submit innovative ideas to a central repository, and then, when employees do that, they may get invited to subsequent meetings, leading to additional work on top of their day jobs, they may quickly stop sharing their innovative ideas. Instead, acknowledge that the mechanism did not work as intended, and employees who are selected for the top innovative ideas will get relief in other areas of responsibility, or win a coveted prize.

If it seems warranted, acknowledge those mistakes and give yourself permission to fail fast and fail forward too. Refine by adjusting the consequence. See if the new consequence with the same antecedent drives a different behavior. If so, great. If not, keep testing and refining, and adjusting organizational algorithms accordingly to nudge the workforce in the right direction.

Recognize that change acceleration is never complete. The journey is more important than any milestone or destination, and it may take you on tangential journeys to places you never imagined. As the speed of cloud continues to advance, the speed at which your organization can absorb, adopt, anticipate, and respond to change will be a differentiator between your organization and that of your competitors. In a competitive talent market, it will be the gamechanger for you as an employer. Ideally, your organization builds a strong muscle for change, until it becomes business as usual, or until you can level up your scale and impact.