The switch to the IT service management is inextricably connected with a number of organizational problems. Understanding the problems caused by the organizational changes helps to choose the most efficient solution.
There are a number of methods and approaches to change management that has proved their effectiveness. Their implementation contributes to the work organization improvement and increases the quality of changes.
In the article, we are going to review how the change curve can help to control the changes at different hierarchical levels of organizational changes.

Curves of change
The organizational structure of any company can be divided into three hierarchical levels: personal (certain employees), team (departments) and organizational (the company in general). Below you will find the change curves for each of them. They reflect the stages of perception and response to organizational changes and show the employee, team or organization productivity fluctuations during these periods.

The personal level is characterized by the following stages:
Rejection. “Why to change anything if all is well? How to respond?” — questions asked by employees at the beginning of the changes implementation, especially when the motives and goals are not clear and often are considered as a threat.
Resistance. “Everything was much better before!”. In search of certainty and stability, employees negatively look at the changes, not understanding what they will eventually result in, and fearing that they will lead them out of the comfort zone. Therefore, employees try to prove that the old working methods were much more effective and there is no sense in making changes.
Analysis. “How to live with this and what to do next?” When the employees are in a low mood, but at the same time there comes an understanding of the inevitability of change, they thoughtfully analyze the situation. Employees understand what is required of them now and how to achieve it.
Interest. “Perhaps it will be useful.” Once employees understand the inevitability of change, as well as their place and responsibilities in the new environment, they begin to look for ways to benefit themselves.
Adoption. “All the changes for the better!”. The workers understand that the current situation is not worse than the previous one, it is possible to work and develop further, the given changes let be successful and more efficiently to solve working tasks.

The team level is divided into the following stages:
Questions. While employees are trying to determine how to understand the change, the team actively discuss the situation. There are a number of questions: what to strive for, whom to obey, what to do, how to work?
Answers. The team tries to answer the questions. Gradually, the discussion may cause the controversy and disagreement. There may be conflicts associated with the redistribution of roles and responsibilities.
Analysis. Having formed the team structure, and when the team members solve all the controversies, each member deeply analyzes his role. This phase alternates with the previous one until the team accepts the new position.
Interaction. Formed teams recognize themselves as part of the large organization. They are not limited to internal interaction. Gradually, they build a cooperation, understand the common goals and the role of each group of employees on the way to their success.

The change curve at the organizational level can be represented in the form of three main stages. They are the following:
Defrosting. The need for change is thought over and planned.
Change. The changes implementation. It may cause a loss of efficiency due to the potential difficulties.
Freezing. The third stage is the most difficult, laborious and painful for the company — a rejection of the previous work process, fighting the habits, developing and freezing new practices.

Thus, understanding the nature and phases of organizational changes minimize the loss of efficiency.

— Slimane Zouggari

Meaning Of The Expression:

The expression bang for the buck is actually an idiom that simply means the value for one’s money. It connotes the worth of an individual’s money in relation to a service rendered to him/her or any item purchased. It refers to the value in return on the money you spent on something.

Bang for the buck includes the maximum cooperation and partnership between the product manager and development team for the prioritization of backlog items. Instead of just carrying out your conceived plans and agenda ignorantly and in a clueless manner, this game helps you in so many ways. One of the important things it does is to enable you effectively analyze the costs and benefits of each laid down task. Another advantage is that this game helps to organize your tasks in a proper way and manner that indicates where you can begin and in what order to go in also. In order to start prioritizing your to-do list and start checking items off, plot a graph of each of the items against their cost and value.

RULES OF THE GAME
In this game, a graph should be plotted with the y-axis containing the value of the items. While the x-axis should contain the cost of the items with each of the axis been arranged as a Fibonacci number. The backlog items can be written on sticky notes and placed on the chart along with any other important task. Each item should be carefully and appropriately placed on the graph after much deliberation from the team members.

While the product manager should be concerned with the y-axis which focuses on the value position of the task, the development team should take note of the x-axis which contains the cost. Having several players, gives you an opportunity to get different views on each item. By the time all the items have been posted on the chart, you can now get started on your plans using the chart as guide. For optimum value delivery over time, work across the chart in a clockwise direction. If there is a need to accomplish a particular item immediately but it’s too expensive to start off, the best option is to work together to look for a means to move it to the left on the graph.

HOW TO PRIORITIZE
One of the major importance of bang for the bucks is that it helps to prioritize items. Both short and long term tasks can be easily prioritized with this game. By comparing the value and cost of each item, you can be able to rank each of the items in order of priority. At the end of the day, with cooperation from your team, it is possible to change or tweak approaches for the tasks based on the most important.

This means that any task that has been prioritized will be given the most consideration. Therefore any operation or activity will be carried out to suit that particular task. If you are able to know how to prioritize properly, it will help to decide where to begin working. Apart from the fact that this increases efficiency and productivity, it also allows you to see the impact and benefits faster. In order to properly prioritize, work on the graph or chart in a clockwise direction because you’re prioritizing by bang for the buck.

Agile Product Managers make it a point of duty to prioritize backlog items in order to drive profitable growth. This natural ability of theirs is greatly increased as a result of making the link between the product backlog and their ability to drive profit clear and plain.

— Slimane Zouggari

Radical management is the idea of Steve Denning, the author of many books on leadership and management. Radial management is one of the creation that used in the industry to give agile and favourable response aftermath.

What is Radical Management?

Radical management is a process of managing the firm or organization and a the same time increasing the value of production and other positive factors such as sales that give delight and satisfaction for both the customer and the company. It is one way to achieve the success with many completions in the market.

How Radical Management works

Steve Denning do a good thing in applying the fundamental approach to management that helps any business and firm for better administration. Here is the core principle that he applies in his radical management:

• Continues innovation from shifting goals to meet the need of providing revenue for the stakeholders to giving delight to the customers in services that the company made.
• Changing the focus on management by one or few personnel to a sole organized team that will do the individual task and not waits to instruct by the manager.
• Shift to dynamic linking from the bureaucracy in coordination is prove to do in success result for the company and firm.
• A shift from the preoccupation with a proven efficiency that will contribute to the continued innovation of the company and firm.
• Shifting to horizontal communication from the top down commanding style.

Radical management approach is not a new thing to have an agile success in the industry, while it is not new for others, the combination of all the principle will help for agile development.

Practical examples of Radical Management

Say for instance, the company apply radical management to their company. One of the companies that use radical management is the Procter&Gamble. They use the social media and focus on the interest of the customer in a single period. Another, when Ford launches the new car product, they do not use the traditional way. They use stories and other things that focus on the need and interest of the people that is why they got agile development with the sales.

Common pitfalls of Radical Management

No matter how great is the implementation of radical management, there will always a thing that we called on as risk in radical management. One of this aspect is too much self—confidence of the leader or the implementer in the company or firm.  Leader that have too much confidence leave other things unattended. They are the one more likely to bring daring acquisition and shift strategies from time to time.

Criticisms about Radical Management

To meet success and agile result aftermath, there is a need for a leader that will serve as a servant. Some say that radical management is the same with the principle of serval leader; they just wish that the effect were not the same. A servant leader is hard to find these days.

Radical management does shift in serving the investor to serving the customers. The approach does generate an agile increase in the sales result; it does not focus on the tradition that is why it attracts success.

— Slimane Zouggari

A holacracy is the kind of governance structure characterized by the distribution of a power among self-organization groups, instead of the top-down authority in the standard hierarchical corporation culture model. This offers a flat management structure, which distributes authority. The main goal of a holacracy is to guarantee that those accountable for completing work are provided the authority to decide how that work must be carried out. In accordance to the proponents, holocracies result to greater innovation, employee engagement, accountability, transparency, agility, and efficiency.

However, some critics argued that the model does not enable for enough lateral communication. To be efficient, the role, expectations, and responsibilities for group members in a holacracy are defined, but flexible. Link roles, lie in several groups and guarantee that such groups are working in congruence along with the overall objectives and mission of the organization.

How does it work?

In holacracy, rather than hiring an individual to have a defined role, people choose to fill one or more roles at any given period and have the flexibility to move between roles and teams if they have insights and skills, which would prove advantageous to the organization.

Within the holacracy, people perform in single or more roles on behalf of the organization. Further, roles are part of the self-organizing circles in the bigger circle of the overall organization. Every person in a role is the leader for that area of authority, at the same time the follower of these roles is responsible for their areas in the organization.

The term Holacracy is a certified trademark of HolacracyOne that prohibits unauthorized entities from utilizing the word for services and products. Nevertheless, there are no restrictions on the model itself. The model is identified in the Holacracy Constitution that is made accessible under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 license.

The author of book “The Ghost in the Machine” Arthur Koestler coined the term holarchy as the organization links between holons – Greek term for whole – that describes units, which perform independently; however, wouldn’t exist without the organization they’re part.

For instance, when a farm was to accept a holacratic structure, it might look something like one team might be accountable for the land management. In that team, there might be individual roles for land management, irrigation, soil composition and more. Another team might be allocated to vehicles and tools, along with individual roles for choosing and buying new equipment, operation machinery, conducting regular maintenance checks and a lot more. Workers might play several roles.

On the other hand, Brian Robertson created the concept and dynamics of holacracy while working a software development company called Ternary Software in the beginning of 2000s. in 2007, he and his friend Tom Thomison established HolacracyOne and released Holacracy Constitution three years later. Companies, which have publicly adopted holacracy in some form are Medium and Zappos.com.

Critics have also pointed out that this holacracy as a corporate management doctrine doesn’t denote the end of the corporate hierarchy. It is still a crucial part of holacracy; in fact, the rigidity and hierarchies it makes in the different roles of the actors might be more noticeable in holacracy.

— Slimane Zouggari

Developed by John Seddon, Vanguard is one of the service organization development methods based on systems thinking. The method has been utilized for many years to enhance the service quality of organizations and lessen costs.

What is the Vanguard Method?

The Vanguard Method combines system thinking and inventory theory. The method was been influenced by Taiichi Ohno, William E. Deming, and Chris Argyris, among others. The method highlights that the way of thinking of top management determines the qualities and structure of the system that then identify the capability of the system.

Further, the Vanguard Method makes use of iterative Check-Plan-Do model to enhance organizational competence. Change is initiated through observing the current organization from systems thinking perspective.

• Identify the purpose of the system from the customer perspective
• Study the nature of demand coming to the system
• Understand how the system reacts to the demands
• Learn why this happens
• Determine what measures or policies cause issues in the flow of work
• Acknowledge the thinking behind the management and design of the system

When the knowledge of the existing organization grows and the reasons why the organization operates in a particular way are understood, it’s simple to change one’s own way of management and thinking practices.

Better Information Systems Investment

Also, the Vanguard Method is also utilized to enhance investment benefits of the organization in information systems. In case you didn’t know yet, information system investments are sometimes made with local needs in mind, or to improve inefficiently or from the perspective useless business processes of the customer. Through this, organizations could end up with lots of separate information systems, which are costly and complicated to integrate.

In such cases, the scenario is often made worse through trying to find a technological solution, for instance, by defining enterprise architectures or developing integration strategies. The result is that the organization is constrained by the information systems. Further, this influences the ability of the organization as well as the quality of the services it offers.

Steers Towards Rational Process Development

On the other hand, systems thinking has proved to be helpful in the process development, for instance in the implementation of the agile methods. As an alternative of doing stuff the right way in particular parts of the system, it steers towards doing the proper things within the entire system.

Theory of Variation is one of the main tools for the process development in systems thinking that aids understanding the natural variation in capability across the organization. The theory of variation includes the following:

• We must expect things to differ, they always do
• Understanding variation will tell you what to expect
• Understand the variation results to improvement, it results to work on the causes of the variation that are found within the system
• Understanding variation tells you if something has occurred.

The main message in systems thinking is that the system isn’t changed until there’s enough knowledge regarding the qualities of the system, and how it works.

— Slimane Zouggari

Are you one of those people who are able to approach each situation you face in the same way? Of course not. Few issues need complicated solutions, while some can be dealt with the most basic of steps. Sometimes, the concerns, which you encounter in business, will fall between those two extremes. Whatever the issues look like, which you’re experiencing in your organization today, Cynefin Framework could help you work towards a reasonable conclusion.

How does it work?

Instead of providing you with a problem-solving plan as is the case along with other tools, this framework helps you discover how you must be thinking about the issue in the first place. In most ways, this framework can be used to figure out how you must be dealing with an issue, and you could move into another problem-solving strategy if you want to get down to the business of searching a solution.

The core is divided into five contexts. The concept is to place the problem, which you’re experiencing into one of such specific contexts that will help you decide how that concern should be approached.

1. Obvious Context

This is the content, which the majority of business managers and owners would want to see their issues fall into, as it going to take the least number of work to fix problems in this part of the framework.

2. Complicated Context

Complicated issues are no stranger to organizations of all sizes and shapes, and such are problems, which are normally fixed by professionals in the particular field in question. For example, if you have a technical concern with your site, it’s more likely that the solution will come from someone in your IT Team. Even if you have enough decision makers and experienced managers outside of IT, these people will not normally have the expertise of the subject at hand, which is essential to make a smart move.

3. Complex Context

Complex may seem like the same thing as complicated; however, these are two different areas. If you move into the Complex Context of the Cynefin framework, you’re dealing with issues, which might not have a clear solution. You don’t need an expert to solve this – you might only need more information and time. For instance, assembling a team will work to your advantage. With a team of skilled people working on the problem, you must be able to deal with the problem right away.

4. Chaotic Context

It’s normally confusion, which reigns if you’re dealing with the Chaotic Context. Problems, which find themselves in this area of the framework have no certain link between cause and effect, and you might not have enough time to work through the information to find a good solution.

5. Disorder

This is the last ground in the Cynefin Framework. One of the challenges, which is linked with this part is the fact that you might not know when you’re at this point. Thus, it’s the gathering of information, which must be prioritized once the disorder is taking hold.

To sum up, utilizing Cynefin framework is an excellent way to get started on the procedure of problem-solving. This process is not going to solve all your concerns from beginning to end – but it’s going to help you get moving in the right way.

— Slimane Zouggari

What is the Walking Skeleton?

The first pattern of walking skeleton was first described around 1994. The name walking skeleton was applied between the years of 1994 to 1997. During 1999, the correlation to the Increment Rearchitecture has been found out. It is in this year that the walking skeleton was implemented in the system. The walking skeleton idea evolved from the conversation of Alistair and the project’s lead designer. The designer converted and explained to him about the project.

He said that they should have a system that would keep them on track of conversation with the other technical lead. The connection in the system should be applied for them to be able to transmit a single message that will go around the ring to each of the members. Because of this, a sudden idea came into his mind. The process of making the functionality of walking skeleton took so slow. It takes more than 3 months before it actually employed to the end users. They were just fascinated to discover the functionality of the system. However, it’s still incomplete, limited agile and still missing flesh of the functional application.

How Walking Skeleton Function?

Walking Skeleton refers to the tiny implementation in the system that is programmed to perform a real end to end test that need not use the final architecture in the production. On the other hand, it must be linked to the major architectural components involved in the project. This prototype of walking skeletons typically works in order to maintain the development of possible risks encountered in the project.

This also triggers the identification of every possible risk as much as possible. This is why implementing the use of walking skeleton decreases the compensation in case a certain circumstance of problems take place. In addition, if ever your system need requires a talk in any of the data stores, then it is a reliable option to use walking skeleton in that matter. They can perform the simple query in any of the data stores and even conduct simple request in any of the internal and external services. It is the only skeleton application present in the system that can function in many different ways.

Even though their agile is limited only in a certain specific task, they could do well. The parts of the walking skeleton are connected and it could actually walk in a manner of like exercising the system parts. Because of their limited agile, they walk in a minimal condition. The walking skeleton is not a prototype of a sort and of course, not a type of concept. In order for them to function, you should definitely write a test in a form of production codes. It will assert them to accept a request, pushes an empty message to the queue or pushes some content to S3.

Criticisms

This prototype of walking skeleton has no functional capacity to work fast, it requires time to wait for them to function accordingly. This usually leads to consumption of time just waiting for their action. Furthermore, it requires time also in exercising the deployment of the walking skeleton in the system. It requires time in looking for the many possible potential problems. Even though they are just good looking, an instant result is not guaranteed.

— Slimane Zouggari