Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Change in people (and what other type of change is interesting enough to consider?) takes time. Plan for it.

Change takes time as people just don’t change quickly. Sometimes in an emergency we change quickly, but who wants to face an emergency?

Here is a true story.

I was working on the east coast and had an association with a company on the west coast – let’s call them WestCo. WestCo wasn’t doing well with their software development. Their troubles were causing lots of budget problems, and many sponsors were doubting their ability to actually write software that worked.

The changes needed were somewhat obvious and elementary:

• write on paper the functions the software had to perform
• plan to have the people and other resources on hand
• write the software
• test the software
• integrate the software
• keep track of progress against the plan

Nothing incredible here, but nothing was happening at WestCo.

A colleague and I were to meet with WestCo and try to convince them to make necessary changes.

How could we use time to help convince them of change?

We left the east coast on the early morning flight, landed on the west coast, and arrived at WestCo right after lunch. We met for several hours as we proposed the changes that we believed would help them succeed and would sooth the worries of the sponsors.

The guys at WestCo didn’t like our suggestions – no surprise

We left the WestCo offices at about 3 PM. That gave them the rest of the afternoon to discuss our suggestions. It also gave them the night to sleep on the suggestions.

We returned to the WestCo offices mid-morning of the next day (a lot of boring motel hours for us, but thinking hours for WestCo). The WestCo folks had more time to discuss the suggested changes with their software developers.

WestCo agreed to our suggestions

Had we not allowed all the extra time for WestCo to absorb our suggestions, I doubt they would have agreed. With time, however, they decided that they could make the changes and the changes would probably help them.

Plan for time in change.