Change Is Hard...But Worth It
Change Is Hard...But Worth It
A callback to an earlier blog with a fresh insight
Hey, my name is Tristan Hood and I love helping leaders and teams find new and better ways of managing work. I believe continual, organic change is far superior to large transformation, unless absolutely necessary of course. As such, I created this blog with the intent to share my experiences, wins, and losses. I’ve been in a bit of an intense season of change myself so I am excited to touch base with you again!
New Seasons
It’s been a few weeks since my last tidbit. Six weeks to be exact. The main reason for the delay was that I went through a bit of a change of my own. I joined a new team and got started on a new set of challenges. While those changes have been time consuming and difficult, they also bring new opportunities and experiences for me to share with you as helpful Tidbits. I’ll add in more details on the new coaching and consulting gigs in future Tidbits but ,for now, I want to leave you with a short story about an experience I had as part of the new engagement.
What Gets Measured…
I’ve written before, in one of my Tidbits, about how simply tracking and measuring things will allow you to gain insights and start to improve things. There is something oddly satisfying about having it happen again in a totally new space that proves there really is some validity to the idea.
One of the first assignments I gravitated towards in my new role was to create content that “humanized” tracking the metrics around the way teams worked. Shocker, I know. Ooh, since I have your attention, here’s a quick visual from the work. It’s super simple, but clearly articulates the process of simply measuring what you’re doing.
Back to the story…
Within the first day or so of working on the assignment, we had a conversation with a team to show them the metrics dashboard we created for them. One of the visuals was a Cycle Time Scatter plot.
Now, I’m pretty sure half of you just closed your browser or blog reader of choice. The mere thought of some type of chart with numbers and plots sends most people scampering.
Don’t worry. I am not going to explain the Cycle Time Scatter Plot in detail here. Suffice it to say, it’s just a cool, geeky chart that plots all the work your team finished in a specified date range. There, that wasn’t so bad now was it?
Well, this lady, let’s call her Eve, (since she’s my first Tidbit story, haha) that we worked with looked at this visualization of the metrics of the work and what do you think happened? If you guessed, “She immediately noticed a piece of work that was driving up their Cycle Time (time it takes work to move, start to finish, through your process) but had long ago been forgotten,” you would be exactly right! The team had an item that was sitting in their flow, lost to time, yet was already done. Simply visualizing the metrics uncovered this, placed it front and center, and allowed them to make some clear decisions that immediately improved their workflow!
That, My Friend, Is the Point
That’s my Tidbit for this glorious week of September, 2022. Change is hard. Coming face to face with the data behind your performance can be a difficult thing, but it is a gold mine for improvement. I’ve been guilty of taking more time to try and clean things up before I start to measure instead of simply letting the measures show me where the best place to start is. I’ve also had the mere idea of change paralyze me.
But, change is also a beautiful thing. My new role brings me all kinds of new challenges and opportunities. Those things also afford me an opportunity to send Tidbits your way. And that’s a good thing.
Until Next Week,
Keep on learning. Keep on growing.