7 ms·

There are actually several startups that are tackling the problem of organizational change management and communication. You may have heard of some of them, Se

There are actually several startups that are tackling the problem of organizational change management and communication. You may have heard of some of them, ServiceNow is one, SAP is another, some small companies like that. It turns out there is not a technological solution to a management problem.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
Are you sure there isn't even a partial solution? I can imagine the brute-force approach: Log every intra-company communication, and if some communication was meant to go to department X, Y, Z, and it only went to X, Y, then a flag would be immediately raised to department Z's attention and whoever sent it. Of course the personnel in department Z might review it but ignore it anyways, but at least now there's a paper trail of who's at fault. An Exchange system already gets you 80% of the way there if you force all on-the-record communications via email.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  > Of course the personnel in department Z might review it but ignore it That's the problem right there. One of my clients had a large IT organization of over 1000+ employees, with strict change control rules, and procedures that were tracked in SN. Every time there was a change management meeting everyone who could possibly be effected would get an email from Service Now notifying them of the upcoming changes. Pretty much engineer ignored those emails, because there was so much going on in the org you'd get dozens of emails in a week and most of them you'd only be tangentially effected by, meanwhile you had your work to do. So the problem isn't getting the notifications out it's getting people to pay attention to them.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    I don't see how that's a problem for the organization. Individual preferences do vary, one ignores 90%, another 95%, another 100%. And the one who's ignoring 100% of them will likely eventually make a mistake that otherwise wouldn't have happened. But it will be fairly straightforward to resolve, after all there's an extensive paper trail as the chain of custody seems clear. Assuming the "change management meeting" emails were the approved means of communication.
    - nordsieck 4y ago
      > I don't see how that's a problem for the organization. IMO, one of the lessons that came out of Chernobyl is that it absolutely is a problem for the organization. Exposing people to too many "alarms" that are constantly going off will cause people to start ignoring them. Part of good design is figuring out which things are truly important, and how to communicate that to the people who are supposed to be paying attention.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        The analogy seems not to apply? The emails mentioned by the parent don't sound like alarms. Because an alarm is usually for 'drop everything and focus on this' situations. The equivalent in email terms would be a receiving an email with a subject in ALL CAPS bolded and underlined. Or in general intra-company communication terms, a phone call from your boss without any pleasantries and a serious voice.
        Volundr 4y ago
        Alarm or not doesn't really matter. If a person is receiving a signal that does not affect them most of the time they WILL start to ignore that signal. Many will attempt to combat this with policies and consequences, "Make sure your reading these e-mails, or else!" but it's a fruitless endeavor. Humans will human. Better to recognize that and build your systems around it.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        So what? If someone makes the wrong decisions because they start ignoring signals then don't promote them or give them important coordinating responsibilities. Those who are capable of filtering out a larger fraction of noise do exist. Of course there will always be folks whose preference is to read near 0% of their emails, but that doesn't imply organizations must be designed around them.
        post-it 4y ago
  - fishpen0 4y ago
    It sounds like the actual problem is getting too many meaningless notifications, inadvertently training people to ignore everything
    - randomswede 4y ago
      In an ideal situation, you'd get all "planned maintenance" emails for things you care about and no emails for the rest of them. That (probably) means that the system for dealing with planning maintenances (well, usually, "approving them") needs to have a sufficiently good understanding of what humans care about what changes. At a previous job, the planned change tracking system was REALLY good at tracking what specific compute facility was going to be impacted by any specific change taking place in that facility. And had a really good way of allowing you to filter for "only places I have stuff running" (and I think, even some breakdown of general change types as well). It was, however, not easy to get notification of "there will be maintenance on submarine cable C, taking it off-line for 4 hours" or "there will be maintenance at cable station CS, taking cables C1, C2, and C3 down for 3h". And as one of the things "we" (the team i worked in then) was doing was world-wide low latency replication of data, we did actually care that cable C was going to be down. But, the only way we could find out was "read all upcoming changes" and stick them in the team calendar. Was it good? Eh, it worked. Was it the best process I've seen? Probably ,yes.
- mgsouth 4y ago
  Let's suppose there was a magic software app that had notified the Service Desk ahead of time. It's magic because only they only got the notifications that mattered. So what? How would that change anything? Service Desk would send strongly worded emails to... somebody? The Organizational Overmind was already getting warning messages. Daily. There's already a trail of emails and status reports. It wasn't a knowledge issue. It was a "there's no effective direction" problem.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    It does require some number of superiors who have substantive authority to act in response to positive or negative implications of the paper trail. Which is why I consider it a 'partial-solution' as technology cannot do everything by itself yet.
mschuster91 4y ago
Oh god. ServiceNow... I have yet to see an implementation that did not end up a shitshow.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  I know, the funny part is it is still leagues better than what the client had before it HP Service Manager. Imagine something so bad that SN makes you feel happy in contrast.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    I swear we could have worked for the same company lol. They migrated from HP to SNow... not much of an improvement.
  - jterrys 4y ago
    Hey cutie I got LotusNotes on the line
browningstreet 4y ago
I wonder what a good ServiceNow implementation looks like. I’ve been at a few enterprise orgs now and all their SNs are.. beyond terrible. The hosted SAAS performance is agonizingly slow. If this is ITIL personified… I’m aghast.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  ServiceNow: when filling in an incident ticket takes longer than resolving the incident.
  - d1sxeyes 4y ago
    ServiceLater
    - berniedurfee 4y ago
      ServiceMaybe
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- AndrewDucker 4y ago
  I've used one that was at least mediocre. Access requests were signed off (optionally) by your manager and then (optionally) by an authoriser of the service required, and then delivered automatically 99% of the time. So you'd select "System Z Update Access", write a one liner of "I need update system Z to do my job supporting The Alpha Process", your manager would approve it (providing they agreed that your role did involve supporting the Alpha Process) and then someone from the System Z team would also approve it (providing they agreed that you needed that access to support that process), and then a few minutes later you'd be automatically added to the right role. Traceable, secure, and fairly painless. Required a lot of setup for all of the roles and automation though, I believe.
  - browningstreet 4y ago
cbtacy 4y ago
Ironically, one of the first things I learned working in software businesses (a long, long time ago now) was the following: Human problems require human solutions. Tooling problems require tooling solutions.
- fragmede 4y ago
  More traditionally phrased as technology alone can't solve social problems.
- waste_monk 4y ago
  And if the humans you work with are tools, there's no good solution.
icelancer 4y ago
>> It turns out there is not a technological solution to a management problem. Been my favorite saying at my small business for years now when people propose technological solutions to HR issues. That isn't gonna cut it.
still_grokking 4y ago
SAP is considered a "start up", and a "small company" over here? Or did just some clueless start-up beg to get sued into oblivion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP

MichaelZuo 4y ago

Are you sure there isn't even a partial solution? I can imagine the brute-force approach: Log every intra-company communication, and if some communication was meant to go to department X, Y, Z, and it only went to X, Y, then a flag would be immediately raised to department Z's attention and whoever sent it. Of course the personnel in department Z might review it but ignore it anyways, but at least now there's a paper trail of who's at fault. An Exchange system already gets you 80% of the way there if you force all on-the-record communications via email.

kneebonian 4y ago
> Of course the personnel in department Z might review it but ignore it That's the problem right there. One of my clients had a large IT organization of over 1000+ employees, with strict change control rules, and procedures that were tracked in SN. Every time there was a change management meeting everyone who could possibly be effected would get an email from Service Now notifying them of the upcoming changes. Pretty much engineer ignored those emails, because there was so much going on in the org you'd get dozens of emails in a week and most of them you'd only be tangentially effected by, meanwhile you had your work to do. So the problem isn't getting the notifications out it's getting people to pay attention to them.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  I don't see how that's a problem for the organization. Individual preferences do vary, one ignores 90%, another 95%, another 100%. And the one who's ignoring 100% of them will likely eventually make a mistake that otherwise wouldn't have happened. But it will be fairly straightforward to resolve, after all there's an extensive paper trail as the chain of custody seems clear. Assuming the "change management meeting" emails were the approved means of communication.
  - nordsieck 4y ago
    > I don't see how that's a problem for the organization. IMO, one of the lessons that came out of Chernobyl is that it absolutely is a problem for the organization. Exposing people to too many "alarms" that are constantly going off will cause people to start ignoring them. Part of good design is figuring out which things are truly important, and how to communicate that to the people who are supposed to be paying attention.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      The analogy seems not to apply? The emails mentioned by the parent don't sound like alarms. Because an alarm is usually for 'drop everything and focus on this' situations. The equivalent in email terms would be a receiving an email with a subject in ALL CAPS bolded and underlined. Or in general intra-company communication terms, a phone call from your boss without any pleasantries and a serious voice.
      - Volundr 4y ago
        Alarm or not doesn't really matter. If a person is receiving a signal that does not affect them most of the time they WILL start to ignore that signal. Many will attempt to combat this with policies and consequences, "Make sure your reading these e-mails, or else!" but it's a fruitless endeavor. Humans will human. Better to recognize that and build your systems around it.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        So what? If someone makes the wrong decisions because they start ignoring signals then don't promote them or give them important coordinating responsibilities. Those who are capable of filtering out a larger fraction of noise do exist. Of course there will always be folks whose preference is to read near 0% of their emails, but that doesn't imply organizations must be designed around them.
        post-it 4y ago
- fishpen0 4y ago
  It sounds like the actual problem is getting too many meaningless notifications, inadvertently training people to ignore everything
  - randomswede 4y ago
    In an ideal situation, you'd get all "planned maintenance" emails for things you care about and no emails for the rest of them. That (probably) means that the system for dealing with planning maintenances (well, usually, "approving them") needs to have a sufficiently good understanding of what humans care about what changes. At a previous job, the planned change tracking system was REALLY good at tracking what specific compute facility was going to be impacted by any specific change taking place in that facility. And had a really good way of allowing you to filter for "only places I have stuff running" (and I think, even some breakdown of general change types as well). It was, however, not easy to get notification of "there will be maintenance on submarine cable C, taking it off-line for 4 hours" or "there will be maintenance at cable station CS, taking cables C1, C2, and C3 down for 3h". And as one of the things "we" (the team i worked in then) was doing was world-wide low latency replication of data, we did actually care that cable C was going to be down. But, the only way we could find out was "read all upcoming changes" and stick them in the team calendar. Was it good? Eh, it worked. Was it the best process I've seen? Probably ,yes.
mgsouth 4y ago
Let's suppose there was a magic software app that had notified the Service Desk ahead of time. It's magic because only they only got the notifications that mattered. So what? How would that change anything? Service Desk would send strongly worded emails to... somebody? The Organizational Overmind was already getting warning messages. Daily. There's already a trail of emails and status reports. It wasn't a knowledge issue. It was a "there's no effective direction" problem.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  It does require some number of superiors who have substantive authority to act in response to positive or negative implications of the paper trail. Which is why I consider it a 'partial-solution' as technology cannot do everything by itself yet.

mschuster91 4y ago

Oh god. ServiceNow... I have yet to see an implementation that did not end up a shitshow.

kneebonian 4y ago
I know, the funny part is it is still leagues better than what the client had before it HP Service Manager. Imagine something so bad that SN makes you feel happy in contrast.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  I swear we could have worked for the same company lol. They migrated from HP to SNow... not much of an improvement.
- jterrys 4y ago
  Hey cutie I got LotusNotes on the line

browningstreet 4y ago

I wonder what a good ServiceNow implementation looks like. I’ve been at a few enterprise orgs now and all their SNs are.. beyond terrible. The hosted SAAS performance is agonizingly slow. If this is ITIL personified… I’m aghast.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
ServiceNow: when filling in an incident ticket takes longer than resolving the incident.
- d1sxeyes 4y ago
  ServiceLater
  - berniedurfee 4y ago
    ServiceMaybe
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
AndrewDucker 4y ago
I've used one that was at least mediocre. Access requests were signed off (optionally) by your manager and then (optionally) by an authoriser of the service required, and then delivered automatically 99% of the time. So you'd select "System Z Update Access", write a one liner of "I need update system Z to do my job supporting The Alpha Process", your manager would approve it (providing they agreed that your role did involve supporting the Alpha Process) and then someone from the System Z team would also approve it (providing they agreed that you needed that access to support that process), and then a few minutes later you'd be automatically added to the right role. Traceable, secure, and fairly painless. Required a lot of setup for all of the roles and automation though, I believe.
- browningstreet 4y ago

cbtacy 4y ago

Ironically, one of the first things I learned working in software businesses (a long, long time ago now) was the following: Human problems require human solutions. Tooling problems require tooling solutions.

fragmede 4y ago
More traditionally phrased as technology alone can't solve social problems.
waste_monk 4y ago
And if the humans you work with are tools, there's no good solution.

icelancer 4y ago

>> It turns out there is not a technological solution to a management problem. Been my favorite saying at my small business for years now when people propose technological solutions to HR issues. That isn't gonna cut it.

still_grokking 4y ago

SAP is considered a "start up", and a "small company" over here? Or did just some clueless start-up beg to get sued into oblivion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP