The Software Architect Elevator

Chapter 34. Leading Change

The Island of Sanity in the Sea of Desperation

Don’t get voted off the island!

Demonstrating positive results from a different way of doing things in a small team can help overcome complacency and the fear of uncertainty, and thus is a good way to start a transformation. We shouldn’t forget, though, that the “trailblazers” on such teams have a doubly tough job: they need to overcome the pain of change and do so in an environment that’s still at stage 1 of the transformation journey. This is comparable to eating healthy when everyone around you at the table is having tasty cake and the restaurant has nothing healthy on the menu at all.

To succeed, you need a firm belief and perseverance. The corporate IT equivalent of trying to eat healthy at the cake party is trying to be Agile when it takes four weeks to get a new server or when contemporary development tools and hardware aren’t allowed because they violate corporate security standards. You’ve got to be willing to swim upstream to effect change.

A Tractor Passing the Race Car

One particular danger of leading change with a different approach is that the existing, slow approaches are often more suitable for the current environment. This is a form of systems resisting change (Chapter 10) and can result in your fancy new software/hardware/development approach being pummeled by the old, existing ways. ...