The year that was…

Dear Diary,

Let me start with a confession. I am not a natural writer. I am however a voracious reader, and admire people’s ability to pour their imagination onto paper and be creative and witty and keep the reader engaged. I sadly am not one of those people – but am going to try my utmost to keep you reading my “rounding out for the year” as it is worth a read – and I’ll try to make it as witty and funny as a kiwi can (no sheep jokes please).

 I came into 2017 with lots of optimism, a touch of cynicism, and then on 20th January 2017 a whole lot of “OMG what have you done America”ism”.   My son was starting prep and the world had said farewell to a large number of amazing musicians (Chris Cornell you broke my heart). No doubt about it, the start to 2017 was a tad rough.

The Melbourne market, however, was seeing 2017 off with a bang! 

Words such as “new ways of working”, “human design thinking”, “customer journey”, “customer centricity” were thrown around in every sentence and every job description. What would this mean for us? Are we now being replaced by robots?  Why were the large corporates never customer centric in the first place? So many questions! What this actually meant was progression, simplification and change. What this also meant was A LOT of work coming up for my Org Change candidates. Yes 2017 was shaping up to be disruptive, yet busy.

The Change market has turned “again” from permanent and fixed term contracting roles, which were prevalent in 2015/2016, and 2017 became the year that daily rate contracting returned with a vengeance!   With the amount of upheaval occurring within organisations, there was a ground swell of new projects starting and requiring the right skill sets, drive and energy to work on these. We saw our 80/20% perm turn into 80/20% contracting almost within a month. 

The other thing we saw in 2017 was clients wanting change practitioners that had lots of experience in agile. Now don’t start me on “little a, BIG A” differences, but thankfully the courses out there for Change Practitioners to further their learning is being led and produced by Change Managers with extensive experience in OCM. There are still Agile PMs running Agile courses promoting this to Change Managers, but there is now a choice. Lean Change Management Courses, Human Design Modules, all taught and led by change practitioners. Refreshing 🙂

Moving onto other areas of growth for OCM – the amount of Portfolio or Enterprise Change Tools being created by local Australian Practitioners is increasing. There is Ralleo* developed by Joe Hutton, Change Compass* developed by Euan Wu and soon to be launched Hinyango* by Sinead Vorrath. Other international firms such as Prosci* are still on offer but the above are definitely worth looking into if your organisation doesn’t have any enterprise change tools and you are still plugging away information into Excel Spreadsheets.

* I am always agnostic in what courses or tools I talk about! No monies have changed hands!

 Also in 2017, the Change & Project Practice were delighted to announce the arrival of a new little kiwi – Jamie Edmundson. She arrived in September and has been a welcome addition to our Ampersand Family. With her kiwi accent and knowledge of change, projects and technology, we could not be prouder to have her as our Talent Acquisition Manager.   We are expecting another arrival in 2018 but I’ll leave that to my next update – just like any good series, we will leave you hanging…..

2017, yes it has been a big year at work and in my private life, but we survived. Jacob is going into Grade 1 next year, I am slowly learning to master the guitar and read music, the weather in Melbourne has finally become summer and all my Christmas shopping is done and dusted! Life is good. 

So to sign off (if you are still awake reading this) be safe, enjoy your time off with your loved ones and lets rock and roll into 2018 with kindness, respectfulness and brightness.

XXX Tracey XXX

Tracey Petrie

Practice Director – Change & Project Services