7 Questions with Higher Digital's Joe Gottlieb and Joe Moreau
Gottlieb: I would add that change management is not project management. Project management is all about managing a particular project: It gets into the details of one project, what needs to be done, etc. That can be Waterfall project management or Agile project management, but the fact is project management is really focused on the details. Change management has to look across the portfolio of projects, because that's the only way you can prioritize.
Another misconception is that lots and lots and lots of detail will help predict the future. We're not magical. We don't have crystal balls. We have information, and it's useful to use your information to make decisions around what you're going to do in shorter timeframes — and then you keep looking at new information as it comes. If you can switch to that mentality, if you keep it more lightweight, and you do it more frequently, now you have what I like to call "rudder control" over your organization. Rudder control is a concept in sailing, where if you're not at a certain velocity, you don't have enough resistance on the rudder to steer the boat. As soon as you have just enough forward motion, you suddenly can steer — you have rudder control over the boat. And when you're rudderless — either there's no rudder or you have no motion — you can't steer.
CT: Could share an anecdote from your experience working with higher ed institutions that has informed your thinking about change management?
Gottlieb: One CIO who I catch up with from time to time spent five years building relationships to establish trust with leadership — to really start to be trusted to make choices and make changes. Part of that was getting the basic stuff right: E-mail works, the networks work, and we don't have a security crisis on our hands right now. They don't have to start the meeting with, "Can you get my e-mail to work, please?" Instead, they're up to the business value conversation. That trust allows you to start delivering things that are more strategic, that start to produce the sort of leverage that a CIO needs to start delivering with higher velocity. That CIO is now enjoying a wonderful rhythm, being at the table and helping his institution to see change as an enabler — not a fearful experience, but an exhilarating experience.
Moreau: I'll share one example of where I did change management very poorly. Almost 25 years ago, the institution where I worked was implementing a new ERP. Their previous ERP was heavily customized; they'd had it for 20-some years, and so moving from that calcified system to adopting a new system, with as little customization as possible, was very painful.
We were in the process of eliminating student registration by telephone — you know, 25 years ago, telephone registration was the thing — and moving straight to the web. And one of the colleagues I worked with in Student Services had enormous fear that students wouldn't figure this out — that we'd lose enrollment, there'd be gigantic lines outside the registrar's office, and all kinds of catastrophes were going to happen. That fear was based on no data: We never asked students what they wanted. We never observed their behavior in our current web-based resources, in order to speculate on how they might receive it. I stood fast and said, "Well, look, we're not doing phone registration — that's so last century. We're going to do web, because if we don't, we're going to have to turn around and do it in two years anyway."
We spent all kinds of time and effort preparing for this web registration to be unsuccessful, and for all the fallout that would happen from that. And of course, when we implemented it, none of that came true. The sky didn't fall, the earth didn't stop turning, enrollment didn't go down. Students figured out how to use it. They liked it. They preferred it. It was an overwhelming success. Ultimately, my colleague in Student Services, and myself as the CIO, neither of us was doing change management at all. We were just acting from emotion, and we wasted a lot of time and effort and money by not using a change management methodology that could have helped us through that conversation more effectively. And our relationship was really forever damaged by the anxiety and the disagreement, essentially over nothing because neither of us had data to back up our position.