Change management
I have been thinking to start sharing my experience as an entrepreneur through blog posts.
As someone wise once said, you can’t make everyone happy or completely happy. It’s so true, we all realize sooner or later in our personal and professional life.
The context of this blog post is, how some of changes in an organisation can upset some people, even though changes were done with good intention and bring good results after some time.
It’s just little more than an year, since I moved back to rejoin this company, where I am also co-founder.
First couple of months, I was just focused on doing some projects (as solo contributor), talking to team, helping them, sharing and observing various things around here. In little over three months time, I figured out, all aspects of this organization needed some sort of change.
Team, culture and process were three top most important things, we wanted to start fixing. When I say “fixing”, it means to make things great when things were just good enough. I wanted to have culture, I have experienced in some of the best companies like Macromedia, Yahoo!, etc.
We made a decision to move into a better facility, which is lot better than earlier one. It was critical to do it for all good reasons we know – comfort, productivity, pride, etc.
While in parallel, we were fixing thing other areas – HR, Accounting, Administration, etc.
We started to spend most of our energy on our team and clients. I wanted to have a team of individuals who are smart and passionate, better than me. I wanted a process, which is simple and solid enough to handle complex projects as well as our future products.
Internally, we were trying to help our team to get more organised and focus on right things i.e. the approach instead of just getting things done in any manner. In long term, our success comes from our learning, experience and a great team. If we don’t focus on doing things in right way, we would never learn, hence never achieve one of our visions – a great team together, a great company.
When I look back, I see we are different company now, but there is a long way to go. It’s all getting better with each passing day, however, while “fixing” – people, operating-systems, tools, development-methodology, philosophy, vision and many other things changed – we couldn’t make some people happy.
Had I bootstrapped a company from scratch last year, I would have spent half of my energy which I did “fixing” things in this company. But I learnt a lot of things, which I could have never learnt in total new company. Managing change is tough job, we did in good way, it would be better next time.
I couldn’t keep this post as short as I wanted to, in fact, I had to delete some paragraphs to keep it to this length. I would keep sharing my experiences, perhaps you can relate to some of those.
