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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 🙂
* I am always agnostic in what courses or tools I talk about! No monies have changed hands!
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.
XXX Tracey XXX
Tracey Petrie
Practice Director – Change & Project Services