In a previous post I discussed the need for cultural change as the necessary underpinning of any implementation of "best practise" and how I have tried thus far to overcome the resistance to change. Without some level of cultural change, the team or organisation becomes stuck in "current practise", not "best practise" and the implementation will not succeed.

In researching this area, I've come across Dr Leandro Herrero's Chalfont Project. Dr Herrero's perspectives on the area of cultural change are a contrast to other thinking, for example challenging the view that cultural change has to be slow and painful.

Dr Herrero's site has a video and a number of articles, but the highlights are:

• Cultural change programmes concentrate on creating new mindsets and attitudes. A lot of time and effort is spent in rolling out new processes and tools. There is also a lot of communication and training, rationalising the logical need for change. In all this, an assumption is made that the new behaviours will follow to support these changes.
• In reality, behavioural changes have to come before "cultural change". People need to be performing behaviours that are specifically "collaborating", for example, and this behaviour encouraged and spread. Once the behaviour becomes widespread, it can be considered that cultural change has taken place.
  
• In this form of change programme, it is necessary to identify the key behaviours that will produce the required change. These behaviours must be reinforced and encouraged.
• To make cultural change happen across an organisation, it is necessary to take advantage of the few people in the organisation who are connected to many people. These people need to be demonstrating and spreading the behavioural change. Dr Herrero compares this to the spread of an infectious disease, virally through a network.
• The best thing that can happen in this kind of programme is dropping the terms "culture" and "change". People have preconceptions about these labels. Instead, people's natural tendencies to copy well regarded behaviours is used.
  

The content of Dr Herrero's ideas, which he calls Viral Change, make more sense to me than anything else I have come across in the area of cultural change. Perhaps what is more impressive is that I have previously seen a team undergo dramatic changes in working practises and the observations from just seeing that at a distance fit quite well with Dr Herrero's thoughts.

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When I was a Support Engineer, my manager would make a point of visiting as many customers as possible to find out what they thought of the department's service. He would not just visit the senior managers at the customer, but more importantly he would want to talk to the people who used the service of the Support Department on an every day basis. At the time, when he would do all this, I would think to myself, "Are these visits necessary? Surely it is obvious whether you are providing a good service or not". Later on, when I managed the department, it became apparent that I sometimes did not have sufficient visibility of the pain experienced by the customers or even how and why they were using the service of the Support Department in a particular way.

I'm five months into my current role in a new company and I am realising that these kinds of "Service Reviews" are more important than ever. It is easy to drop into a false sense of security, because the "customers" for this Service Desk are internal. I speak to the managers and team leads of these "customers" regularly, but I am only now realising that I don't get from them the full detailed picture or understanding of the customer's requirements.

The elements I am covering in these reviews include:

• How the customers find dealing with the Service Desk. Some of the typical feedback I have got includes things like "not being given estimates of how long things will take;this means the customer is not sure whether to get on with other work"
• Frustrations the customers are finding with the applications/services supported by the Service Desk. Feedback in this area includes issues relating to the instability of the applications and certain reoccurring incidents in the infrastructure.

The feedback from these areas feeds into the continual improvement of the Service Desk. Ultimately, it does not matter how elegant the infrastructure is or how well things work - the real measure of your success is dependent entirely on what your customers think of you.

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It is one thing to talk about "best practises". It is quite another to have them implemented and working effectively within a team or organisation. Since the end of June, when I took a team on to shape and mould into an Operations team, perhaps the most striking problem has been some members' shear resistance to adopting new working practises. This has to be a problem in any organisation attempting to improve.

In particular, I want the team to make notes on their incident investigations. There are a multitude of reasons for this, such as allowing other engineers to review and continue the work if necessary and allowing the notes to be reviewed retrospectively if similar incidents occur in future.

My first and default method for getting the engineers to follow this practise was to tell the team quite simply what my expectations were and that we should be doing with respect to taking notes. This was enough for one of the team of 5 to take it all on board and start working as expected.

I then worked through some problems and showed how this could be of benefit. No further engineers were swayed to this new way of working.

The next step was to organise a "training". In this, I invited the users of the Operations teams - project manager, developers and others who would be using the services of the Operations team. I asked them to tell me what they thought would make a great Operations team. They came up with suggestions like "knowledge sharing in the team", "clear idea of where an investigation is and the process". I then went through how I would investigate a problem using this note taking working practise and how this satisfied their requirements. Almost all the users liked what they saw and approved.

The training had an interesting affect - one of the engineers requested to change teams soon afterwards, leaving a team of 4. The others became more convinced of the usefulness, but after an initial stab at trying the new method, soon reverted to their old ways.

After a major incident, a retrospective was held and some of the same themes re-emerged: the need to knowledge share, the need for more logging/notes on the investigation. These themes came from the team members themselves, yet still behaviours have not changed and the working practises have not been adopted.

During and after other incidents, users have sent emails relating to these same points and themes. The team members have seen these mails, yet still continue to work in the same way.

Changing working practises and creating a working environment where this is possible has now become the major and most fundamental issue. Everything else, such as what kind of things are "best practise" or IT Service processes, is a secondary issue.

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A week ago there was a massive outage at Skype - none of their 9 million users could use their service for 2+ days. You can imagine that if Skype is one of the central ways in which you speak with your friends, you would have been very frustrated - the frustration you would feel with an outage to your mobile phone network for a few days.

What is interesting is that they used their blog to keep their users updated on progress: http://heartbeat.skype.com/

If you look at the entries for the month at
http://heartbeat.skype.com/2007/08/
you can see the entries they made throughout the incident to keep their users posted on what was happening. I've copied edited down snippets here and I really recommend going through these updates pretending to be one of the frustrated Skype users wanting their service working. I have further comments below.

Now, as you were waiting for your Skype to start working again... How did that make you feel, reading those updates (compared to not having anywhere to look to see what was going on)? What if they were updating the blog every few minutes as they worked on the problem rather than every few hours and added technical detail which you may or may not understand - would that have made you feel more or less happy that the problem was being investigated and resolved? Then compare that with the service from, for example a bureaucratic government organisation or even your lawyer during the process of buying/selling a house. There is no place to go and see what is happening with your issue and you feeling you are banging our head against the wall - constantly chasing for updates through phone calls or other means.

This Skype example gives a glimpse of what is possible through using a ticketing/bug tracking system when engineers working on the problem update those tickets with notes. The dramatic increase in visibility of an issue being progressed gives greater confidence to customers, reducing their anxiety.

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In a world where content is given away for free, how do you make money? Newspapers are struggling in world where news is available for free online. The music industry, Hollywood and a number of other makers of content are feeling the pain of having their content freely distributed by 'fans'.

Mike Masnick has finished a his series of posts on the economics of Free. The central thesis is simple: In the past there was a cost associated with producing music tapes, videos or newspapers. The consumer paid for this cost. Digital distribution mean there is zero cost in producing new copies of the content. This means the 'thing' that people are willing to pay for has shifted. People will now pay £350 for an iPod and free music, whereas in the past it would be ridiculous to think you'd pay more than £40 for a Walkman. The key is in recognising which elements of the experience have scarcity, i.e. there is a limited supply of. Physical goods, such as iPods and CDs are scarce. Digital content is easily copied, so is not scarce.

The theory is compelling. Media companies across the world will need to face these challenges; I suspect the those that are most capable of creating scarcity in the way they distribute content will win big.

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Author of the Long Tail, Chris Anderson is proposing that everything that is free will become paid products, while everything that is paid for will become free.

While I don't quite agree with what he suggests, I can see his point: movies, music, newspapers - these are all becoming free content in the digital age.

However, I can't imagine that people will now start paying for free-to-air video and audio. Why would people move away from free to paid-for unless there is some compelling reason to start actually paying for these things?

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Harvard Business School has written a case study on Wikipedia. The article describes some of the social practices that take place in the Wikipedia community.

Research indicated that many people around the world contributed content to Wikipedia and that this initial content was then refined over time by a relatively small group of editors.

This seems to suggest that initial contributions are a stimulus around which a group of people form. The result of the collaboration of this group is to arrive at a new Wikipedia article.

in August of 2006 the Wikimedia Foundation had only five full-time employees

An amazing statistic that defies the substantial amounts of money that some companies can spend in moderating and maintaining forums. How is this achieved? Largely by the fact that anyone can edit the Wikipedia entries. Well understood processes, such as AfD (article for deletion) and RfA (request for adminship), are used to make decisions. Although these are lengthy and time consuming, these ultimately result in greater engagement of users to the Wikipedia site. In fact, the extent of this engagement is sometimes to the detriment of the original reason people join the site - to create articles:

Nicholas Carr: three high-ranking Wikipedians... describe Wikipedia's increasingly complex governance structure, from its proliferation of hierarchical roles to its "career paths" to its regulatory committees and processes to its arcane content templates. We learn that working the bureaucracy tends to become its own reward for the most dedicated Wikipedians: "Creating fewer articles as time goes on seems fairly common as people get caught up in the politics and discussion rather than the editing."

That contents of articles are debated has other negative consequences too - it deters real experts from contributing to the site:

Larry Sanger: nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they will—at least if they are editing articles on articles that are subject to any sort of controversy—be forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts.

Despite possibly deterring experts, Wikipedia does however seem to be sufficiently accurate as an Encyclopedia.

In late 2005, the scientific journal Nature, the top-ranked science journal, conducted a study comparing the accuracy of science entries in Wikipedia and the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica. The research involved examining the same set of 42 science articles from each reference work. It revealed that Encyclopedia Britannica had 123 errors while Wikipedia had 162 (for averages of 2.9 and 3.9 errors per article).... most readers simply want to know whether a source can generally be relied upon. What these results say to me is that Wikipedia isn't bad in this regard.

Wikipedia has defied critics and has worked as a concept: an Encyclopedia created through the collaboration of normal people. Part of the reason for its success is likely to be due to the way in which the site has maintained the interest and attention of it's contributors - through roles, processes and policies that engage users in discussion .

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