How the Incident Mgt changes were received by the teams...

Well, we had a mix of attitudes and reactions.

For most of them, it sounded all logical - some even questioned why we were not already doing it before.

Some were more reluctant, focusing more on the "why we need to do this" than on the "how can I make it happen".

Some were even clearly against the changes that they will need to go through. However, as they went through a process of analysing and accepting the move, they now seem to be the most supportive ones!

The most difficult will be handling the "silent majority". Those who do not have any comment , that seem to cope with the change, but actually themselves do not plan to change anything in their good old habits...

The roll-out of our first Incident Management initiatives is completed!

We got everyone trained to our new processes, and to the changes in the tool. This was not an easy task - when you get to the 20th training session you feel like you are repeating yourself a little! The good thing though, was that from session to session, we were able to improve the balance between

1. theory, ie "What is expected from all of us, why we need to change, what are the roles & responsibilities",,
2. fun, with a movie + exercise that demo the shortcomings of the "quick and dirty" old way of dealing with Incidents,
3. practice, with hands on exercises on the tool,

shifting from 60% theory, 15% fun, 25% exercises 3h sessions to 40% theory, 20% fun, 40% exercises 2h30 sessions. For the unlucky remote teams that received a remote training, we had to skip the fun part, and replace the exercises by a quick demo, to squeeze the whole session down 1h to 1h30!

After completing this roll-out, we decided to delay two of the other initiatives of 2 to 3 months, in order to secure the first wave of deployments. Teaching about change, and making sure habits change is not straightforward, and will require careful monitoring and tuning for a few months. If we don't want to waste what we have already done, we need to secure these changes!