Herding the Smart Cats: Successful IT Change Leadership
Technologists are notorious for having independent thoughts and ideas. Sometimes this is a help to organizations, such as they’re innovating a new process or technology. Other times, this is a challenge, like when trying to change behavior. Now imagine that those desired behaviors are perceived as limiting freedom and independence on projects. Change could be hard.
One organization, a former client, succeeded in herding a group of smart cats—technologists—to implement software engineering best practices by adopting the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). For those of you who live outside IT Land, CMM is a proven approach to process improvement implemented by many companies throughout the world.
