This page describes the Change Enabling Service we offer as part of the Government CloudStore catalogue of services.
What this service is
This is a service to enable change to culture, behaviour and ways of working that should contribute significantly to the success of the Government’s Cloud Strategy.
The service will provide experienced people to help at both tactical and strategic levels:
- To help people make effective business use of the new cloud services.
- To help evolve cloud services for the future.
- To support broader evolution across Government and particularly to enable a change to a more federated model of management.
The service will provide practical and effective help to support the Cloud Strategy specifically:
- to mitigate the Culture Change risk - p19.
- to bring real substance to change and communications plans - p11.
- to enable the sideways thinking needed to identify and exploit future opportunities for growth - p 13.
The service will help to:
- get change strategy right.
- promote collaborative and trusting behaviours.
- grow connection between technology and operational folk.
- develop capacity for genuine agile change.
- deal sensitively with the stickiest organisational problems that get in the way of doing these things.
- enable people, wherever they are in organisational hierarchies, to make the change to more-emergent, iterative working.
- support and encourage new leaders.
- grow strong, open communities across government that can share learning, generate enthusiasm and sustain the emergence of new ways of doing things.
Why this service is needed
We believe that the Government’s approach to changing ways of working related to IT implementations has historically been extremely weak: see our commentary - A View of the Public Accounts Committee report on ICT in Government. Further, we feel that the reasons are more to do with mindset than with execution, or even strategy. We are in a more complex world and if we are to prosper we must think differently: see our white paper - Cultures that cope with complexity. We believe that the traditional programmatic, centralised, design-led approach to change management, hitherto favoured in Government, is fundamentally flawed. We offer an alternative.
Who this service is for
This service is aimed at supporting:
- Those responsible for managing change related to specific services (perhaps the early adopters of G-Cloud services).
- Those responsible for guiding the emergence of longer-term changes to ways of working at the centre (perhaps in the G-Cloud Programme).
It may also be of value to cloud service providers in shaping their services.
How this service will work
This service is about people helping people. We do the usual consulting things like facilitating workshops, thinking things through, identifying opportunities, mentoring and coaching people, drawing pictures, writing stuff, spreading ideas and so on; but we think that what really makes the difference is how we do it. We have been told that we have some style and that we are inspiring; but whatever, we roll up our sleeves and we do make stuff happen.
What we have done
It's early days at the moment but one thing we have done for the G-Cloud programme is make this experimental video...
G-Cloud in 60 seconds
Why choose us
We really do have specific and relevant experience of enabling technology-related cultural change in complex government organisations. We have helped develop new working behaviours using cloud-style tools and have experience of the business challenges of making the cloud service stack work in high security government environments: There are some examples in these case studies (contact us if you would like to see more specific and detailed versions). We could put you in touch with dozens of government people we have worked with, across the entire grade structure, who would unequivocally endorse the value of what we do. We have no connection with those delivering technology, so we are impartial. And... we have have the scars of trying to do things differently when Government wasn’t thinking along the lines it is now: we have conviction.
It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it
It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it
It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it
And that's what gets results
Sy Oliver & Trummy Young
Play > Bananarama
