Building Momentum for change in Enterprise
Driving change in Enterprise requires relationship building and thoughtful communication.
Driving engineering change in enterprise organisations requires building relationships and thoughtful communication. Credibility matters too, but without these two it doesn't matter how talented you are; you will find it difficult to gather momentum and make the scaled-up changes unique to enterprise organisations.
Difference in Enterprise
When it comes to enterprise, it's all about size. Rather than driving change across fifteen teams, you are driving change across five hundred teams. With size comes silos, and with silos come formal, often rigid processes and empire building. And, of course, the human glue—masses of it. The good news is that building relationships and communicating across channels will help you in all of these.
Building Momentum
In an enterprise, you need to build momentum—a wave of change that gradually builds over time. If you're lucky, after some ebb and flow, you'll hit a tipping point and people will begin to support your idea. You will know this has happened because people will talk if your ideas are the norm and totally obvious. They may even begin to adopt your idea in the belief it's their own.
When you get this level of buy-in, doors will begin to open, budgets will appear, and people will invite you to meetings. That doesn't mean the work is done, but a lot of the mental battle has been won. The rest is mostly tactical, managing rollout and delivery.
Building Momentum
One thing you quickly realise when building momentum is that you can't do it alone. To build momentum, you need to build a network of allies and advocates. That's why relationships and communication matter so much.
When I talk of allies, I mean more than friends or like-minded people who agree with my vision or goal. My definition of an ally is a person who has a vested interest in my goal because it benefits them. I offer to co-create with these people.
I've learned that when people understand that you're not there to claim glory but are instead willing to share it, the conversation shifts. I've also learned that when you invite people to participate rather than try to own the work, goals become intertwined, and collaborations improve.
That means along with allyship comes recognition. Any wins are framed as shared wins and sometimes even as their wins.
Who is your Ally
You will need allies from executive to execution. The ability to communicate and frame your vision at multiple levels matters here. The why for an executive differs from the why for a test engineer. Become practised at framing value and benefits from their perspective and in their language.
Look for allies beyond the testing and quality domain. As quality is a shared responsibility, for any change to be truly successful, you will need buy-in from many other communities, such as product owners, software engineers, delivery leads, and, of course, SRES.
Find ways they can bring change into their space that will enable quality to run more smoothly. For example, better unit testing for software engineers, or story splitting for delivery leads.
Augmented Expertise
When you find allies in areas beyond your domain or field of expertise, your access to expertise expands. Instead of being only strong in quality, you can now lean on their expertise in their area. This is a huge boon, and you should absolutely seek their advice and listen to their perspective. I've gained a huge respect for other specialities and am consistently impressed with how they think about and address problems in their space.
Allow people to play to their strengths and ensure that you amplify that work. For example, I'm hopeless at Jira tickets, mostly because I loathe them with a passion. I know others who delight in them. I love working with these people; together, we make a real difference! One of the benefits of an enterprise is access to a diversity of skills and talent. Make the most of that pool.
Shared leadership
That's a lot of people to build relationships with and a lot of communication to do. This can be hard, gruelling work, especially at the beginning when you've yet to build credibility and people often treat you with a healthy dose of suspicion. I never said it was easy! The added bonus of sharing leadership is that there is an opportunity to step back and rebuild emotional and intellectual capacity. This is really important as you're playing the long game here.
A lot of this work is about offering and building trust. And that starts with trusting in you.
Have fun....
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