Resources

The thinking behind the framework is grounded in a small number of texts that every serious change leader in infrastructure should engage with. These provide intellectual foundation for how to approach constraint identification, strategy, risk, and stakeholder alignment in complex programme environments.

Whilst few of the texts below deal directly with the specifics of designing and delivering physical infrastructure, each provides a core foundation for a different dimension thinking about introducing change into your organisation and projects.

I’m working with local independent bookshop the BookCellar to make these titles available for home delivery.

The Reading List

The Goal — Eli Goldratt

The Goal is a business novel introducing lean thinking in a manufacturing context, specifically the Theory of Constraints.

The key lesson from this book is that common practice in many enterprise settings (financial measures, utilisation targets, resource deployments) optimises for local gain but fail to deliver at the system-level.

The two stand out quotes that explain why you should read this are “Tell me how you’ll measure me, and I’ll tell you how I’ll behave”, and “Productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is.”

I love the narrative fiction format which encompasses the human impacts of ways of working, being driven by the wrong numbers and toll it can take on our personal lives as well as the impacts on the workplace and job security.

The Theory of Constraints is all about optimising for system-level throughput. In the change leadership framework this translates to addressing the Critical Path Benefit. Too many innovation initiatives aim to address local opimisation challenges, but unless it actually helps deliver the whole scheme faster or reduce the actual outturn cost of the project, we’re just fiddling with the dials.

The Goal is available to buy here

The Startup Way — Eric Ries

The Lean Startup has become the bible for high growth tech startups - popularising the phrase Minimum Viable Product, but it doesn’t translate to enterprise contexts which is where The Startup Way comes in.

Delivering innovation and transformation means dealing with uncertainty - traditional change management assumes we have a fixed start-state and a known end-state. Infrastructure projects and programmes aren’t like that. They’re constantly evolving as projects move through design, construction and handover, each project has a new set of suppliers and personalities to work with.

The Startup Way provides the basic enterprise mechanics for introducing new things when there are so many unknowns - raising assumptions, putting a value on validated learning and setting the expectation that we need to move fast, test things, and iterate based on what we learn.

In the Change Leadership Framework this translates to two major concepts. First is hold the vision, flex the implementation, the Startup Way describes how there are many ways to get to our goal, but usually it’s not the one we thought it was at the outset. We need to be prepared to adapt how we’re going to realise the benefits.

Which leads to the second concept - the Primary Transformation Objective - what’s the one, smallest thing we can do now that proves we’re on the right track by actually delivering value. Not a pilot or a workshop, but something that moves the dial towards achieving our critical path benefit demonstrates a real ROI in the business.

The Startup Way is available to buy here.

Inspired — Marty Cagan

Inspired is the handbook used by silicon valley tech companies to manage high-growth software products, and its the number one text I recommendend for anyone taking responsibility for agile software projects.

There are two key things that I value in this book. First is the personal accountability that sits on the responsibility of the product manager, to coordinate between all the internal stakeholders, listen to customers and distill what they say into a set of real actions and constantly sensitive to how things are changing in the “outside world” that we need to consider for our own solution.

Second is a preference for getting stuff done over following rigid delivery frameworks such as the scrum ceremonies. Cagan favours close collaboration and adapting ways of working for what actually works in terms of shipping product that users love as quickly as possible.

Cagan reframes “what should we do?” into the management of three risks - usability risk (can and will users use it?), feasibility risk (can we build it?) and viability risk (will we hit our business goals and get an ROI?).

I have adapted these three risk categories directly into the Change Leadership Framework into the Change as Risk Management:

• Adoption Risk - will people actually use the solution?
• Integration Risk - can we deliver the solution and integrate it with systems and process
• Value Risk - will we get the ROI we were expecting?

By flipping the project plan from a gantt chart, to a continuous process of surfacing and managing emerging risk across these three categories we can identify our key assumptions and address them quickly without blindly following a plan that was doomed to fail.

Inspired is available to buy here

Switch — Chip & Dan Heath

Switch reframes change management into a single question “what is the switch we’re asking people to make?”

This glaringly obvious framing was complete revelation to me when I first read this book. We focus so much energy on the new thing, that we often forget that change is actually two steps - stop doing that, start doing this. And once I started applying it to technology rollouts I’ve discovered that the switch is usually better framed as a process change, rather than simply swapping out a tool. We achieve the critical path benefit by changing what the overall process does, enabled by the technology - rather than making the technology the objective in its own right.

The book uses the metaphor of an elephant and its rider to represent how the brain responds when faced with change. The analytical rider will try to steer the elephant to where he wants to go (but be careful not to lose them in analysis paralysis!), but the instinctive elephant ultimately has control to go where it wants (running away in fright, or charging towards the treats). Ultimately, the easiest thing to do is to clear an obvious path that both the elephant and rider can follow the way with ease.

In the Change Leadership Framework, we have choices for how we frame transformation objectives, benefits and solutions. Switch provides a range of analogous case studies to help us clear the path for a changes that land with users and deliver the value we are aiming for.

Switch is available to buy here

To Sell is Human — Daniel Pink

Sales can be seen as a dirty word. We’re infrastructure professionals. We act with integrity and use logic to justify our decisions. But To Sell is Human argues that any time we ask someone to do something that they wouldn’t otherwise do, we are in-actuality doing sales.

People delivering infrastructure projects are extremely busy. They have reached senior roles because they have a track record of doing what they do, and they typically don’t have the time, headspace or risk appetite to adopt your new gizmo on their project (thank you all the same).

So how do we convince them? Well, Daniel Pink would say you need to sell it to them. Yes, there’s no payment or contract involved, but the basic mechanics of are the same as any other sales activity.

This is not a traditional sales book, nor is it necessarily about change management. It frames selling techniques as a means of personal effectiveness at work, and provides a set of simple approaches you can adopt which will increase your chances of reducing adoption risk.

To Sell is Human is available to buy here

The New Strategic Selling — Miller & Heiman

Now that we’ve accepted that Change Leadership involves selling, The New Stategic Selling is a real sales book for what they call “complex sales”.

These are situations where multiple people are involved in the decision to buy or, in our case, adopt a new solution. In even a simple infrastructure project context there will be a project manager, a design manager, an information management manager, IT, commercial and, oh yes, the actual engineers and operatives that will have to use the thing.

The New Strategic Selling gives us a framework categorise all the people involved in a decision, understand their real role in enabling the change and rank their influence and attitude to surface where the real power sits and identify adoption risks.

This framing has been translated into the Change Leadership Framework as our Change as Stakeholder Management concept - with stakeholder roles for sponsors, stewards, and the various user roles. Most delivery people are just trying to protect their work from external noise, by understanding their motivations we can adapt the solution to meet their needs and move them from being a blocker to a champion.

The New Strategic Selling is available to buy here

The Phoenix Project — Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford

The Phoenix Project is an unashamed retelling of The Goal, but translated for technology projects.

It follows our protagonist Brian who is at the helm of the IT Project From Hell. Everything is going wrong. Go live is late, systems aren’t talking to eachother, it takes an age for any individual request to get handled, and the CEO is breathing down his neck because the board aren’t happy.

Most of us will be familiar - at least in name and concept - with agile project management, with Scrum as the dominant framework. The term DevOps rightly hasn’t broken out of the technology world into infrastructure projects. It is the technology backbone that enables agile software teams to deliver and test changes at a sub-daily cadence.

The Phoenix Project is perhaps the nerdiest book on this list but it’s also the one that goes heavy on the importance of teamwork, expertise and inter-disciplinary collaboration in delivering solutions and making change happen.

This is an expert-level novel for an infrastructure professional, but if you are spinning the wheels on developing or integrating a solution, or struggling getting teams to work together, it will certainly contain some inspiration for a way forward.

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Writing

Thinking in practice. Case studies, observations, and working notes on technology change in infrastructure.

Most of the writing is published on LinkedIn — follow along there.

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