CM Journal - October

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Written by CMC Media Staff

Tuesday, 20 October 2009 14:07

Each month the CM Journal provides original content articles and regular columns from industry thought leaders and software providers on a wide variety of configuration management and application lifecycle management topics.
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Overcoming Resistance to Change
Volume 7 - Number 10 - October 2009

Configuration Management experts often need to be the catalyst responsible for bringing about change. In the real world, this is often very difficult and CMers can find themselves meeting with much resistance. Overcoming resistance to change can be very difficult and is one of my favorite topics to write (and speak) about. There is a lot of change in the air as CM Crossroads becomes the "Facebook" for Configuration Management. We hope that you are enjoying these changes and make sure that you click on my name as one of your friends. You should also feel free to start writing your own blog and posting your views in the new CM Crossroads groups (in addition to our regular forums).

For this months issue, Chayim Kirshen teaches us that no one likes change while Leslie Sachs explains the personality factors behind people who resist change and how to deal with their resistance. Ben Weatherall discusses the forces that powered change in the CM world and Matthew Johnson gives us his own experience on the "slippery devil" we call change. Of course, I weigh in with my own views on overcoming resistance to change and we look back at Ryan Lloyd's article on the ever changing world of IT. And if you didn't have enough change already, make sure you checkout our new blogs, podcasts including CA's 2 part series on implementing a CMDB, and our upcoming CM Today news podcasts. It may be tough to get some people to budge, but you came to the right place to learn how to bring about lasting and positive change.

Bob Aiello
Editor in Chief
CM Crossroads
raiello@acm.org

Featured articles...

Experience Report: Engineering Change in a Large Organization
by Chayim Kirshen
No one likes change. Regardless of what development organization I've been a part of, that statement continues to be true – no one likes change. Revision control systems were created for just this reason: users were clamouring, “if we need change, let's at least track it”. Entire frameworks like CMMI have been designed expressly to encourage systems administrators to track change. But how can we encourage change, knowing the resistance we'll start off with?
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Personality Matters - Overcoming Resistance to Change
by Leslie Sachs
When it comes to CM plans, each project has to clearly identify its own strategies for branching, and subsequently for labeling and merging. There are many different practices for branching, and many different philosophies. Each CM group will vigorously defend its practices and document them in a "Branching Strategy" document for use by the development team.
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Overcoming Resistance to Change by SCM
by Ben Weatherall
As an industry, SCM is conservative – we hold the corporate jewels in our hands and we are reluctant to let processes, procedures or personnel have a chance to mess them up. In fact, when they do get messed up we tend to lose our jobs. Then along came Agile and the need to support it while maintaining both technical and professional integrity.
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More articles...

Overcoming Resistance to Change
by Matthew K. Johnson
Ah, change, the one consistent force in the Universe that you can always count on to sneak up and whack you on the head. Dealing with change is a major theme of configuration management, but getting others to go along with change is about as easy as shaving a gorilla's armpit. Why are people so resistant to change and how can you overcome it? It is possible, if you understand a few simple facts of human nature (or if you carry a loaded firearm - that works too). Read on, quickly now, before the layout of this web site changes and you can no longer find this article.
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Behaviorally Speaking – Overcoming Resistance to Change
by Bob Aiello
Overcoming Resistance to Change is a topic that I have written about many times. It is one of the main reasons that I began studying Industrial Psychology after completing my Computer Science degree. I wanted to understand how to create robust processes to support technology development. Back then, we studied visionaries such as Deming, Crosby and Juran among others. We struggled to implement studies to track project related metrics and felt that all we needed to do was design a perfect process and the rest would follow. Soon I personally discovered that the culture of an organization and many other soft "people" issues had a huge impact upon whether or not you could successfully implement process improvement. I also learned that sometimes you just wouldn’t succeed.
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Managing Change Churn and Complexity
by Ryan Lloyd

Reducing Risk and Driving Efficiency With Release Management

Managing Releases in a High Volume Change Environment
Change is a reality in every organization and life continues to get more complicated through trends such as the adoption of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and the rationalization or modernization of legacy applications. This article will take a look at these two trends and how they complicate life for application development teams by increasing both the volume and complexity of change. I will then discuss the ways effective release management can help organizations deal with the constant change churn, complexity and change volume. Though release management isn't a silver bullet, it is a tangible way to make a difference.
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