🎫 I want a golden ticket (for change!)
Delivery change in complex organisations can be really hard. Every few years a new approach comes along that promises to make it much easier — the golden ticket! Organisations invest in training and ways of working that will help unstick the big issues. In local government, this has often meant piggybacking onto approaches used in other sectors and seeing how these fit.
🌊 Don’t go chasing waterfalls
When I first joined the world of work, Prince 2 was all the rage. It was the waterfall era! Developed in 1989 in an old government agency (the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency). 10+ years later, it was an essential criteria in project management job applications across central government.
I worked for a local authority that wanted to follow this trend and sent a dozen project managers on Prince 2 training at great expense. They came back speaking a different language from everyone else in the organisation but it had little or no impact on how we worked. There is no point in just training your ‘change’ people in your new approach and then imposing it on people who don’t want it and don’t speak the language.
Waterfall project management is not cool anymore. Prince 2 (or bits of Prince 2) are still used a lot but it is done on the quiet, by project and programme managers who are mostly trying to keep track of stuff in the background.
🙋♂️ Get up, stand up — Agile is coming
Role on to the 2010s and it was all about Agile and a whole new language and approach to learn. Scrum masters, stand-ups and iteration were here to replace risk logs, PIDs and business cases (phew!) It was a slow burn with various iterations (of course) but the general philosophy was that our way of building or fixing things (complex services) was all wrong! There is a classic image of a minimum viable product with the ‘wrong’ waterfall way of building a car and the Agile ‘right’ way where you start with a skateboard and then a scooter. No more stuffy, suit-wearing Prince 2, we’re going for skateboards and hoodies (did they ever want a skateboard?)
A lot of time and money have been spent training people in Agile approaches but the underlying problems that stopped work getting done remain unchanged. The people in the change bit of the organisation love it but decisions are still made in hierarchical ways, budgets are still siloed and a lot of people are not part of this new cool way of working.
🔭 I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
We are still looking for golden tickets. Many organisations are shifting to service design as the new(ish) answer to old problems. Will service design be the golden ticket that delivers change? If it is then it will be because the lessons have been learnt from Prince 2 and Agile implementation.
New rhythms, rituals and language can’t bring about change. We have to invest time in the knotty system conditions that really get in the way. It’s not as cool but it’s really important.
