The human dimension in IS transition crises

Podcast with Franck Hernandez

Franck Hernandez has been Transition CIO since 2016. He has a triple experience as CIO, consultant and COO to support companies in their transformations. He is a member of the Infortive Community, the leading community of Transition CIOs in France.

He places listening to teams and businesses at the heart of his approach. To structure this listening, he uses the astonishment report as his main tool.

Listen to this podcast to better understand how important the human dimension is in organizations.

In his interview, he addresses 3 key points:

• The astonishment report as a fundamental tool
• Exchange at the heart of its approach
• Achieving a "faire ensemble

Enjoy!

‍

The astonishment report as a fundamental tool

After a month's assignment, Franck offers what he considers to be a fundamental tool in the work of an interim manager: an astonishment report. This report sets out the various areas of work he considers to be priorities, and often includes a revision of the initial roadmap on which he was commissioned. These adjustments are essential to the success of the assignment.

"A good general management team will assign me to get real results. So if the initial roadmap is to challenge the teams, and if it turns out that this isn't the highest priority, my role is to bring this up in my astonishment report and to be frank with management. I'd say that's the Transition Manager's privilege. We're not here to make a career in the company, so we have a freedom of speech that we obviously have to use."

For Franck, the astonishment report is a way of involving the teams. He asks for their opinion beforehand and takes it into account. In the event of disagreement, he knows how to change his position. This approach is based on respect, transparency and co-construction. Involving and empowering teams is essential, as they are the only ones who can achieve results. This is why he presents the report to the teams before submitting it to general management.

"This astonishment report, I validate it with them, amend it with their feedback and present it to senior management once validated with the team. This prioritized astonishment report becomes the action plan."

"If there's no team, there's no result, it's very simple. I think the right method is to involve the teams in place as much as possible."

Exchange at the heart of our approach

For Franck, the most important quality of a CIO in transition is listening. And listening means spending time with each individual to understand where problems are coming from.

He practices empathic listening.

He organizes individual interviews right from the start of the assignment, for teams of up to 50 people, whatever the hierarchical level. These can last from 1h30 to 2 hours for each person. This exchange is necessary to establish a situation of trust and bring out any blocking points.

"I'm going to be provocative: there are no real technical problems. In other words, the people in place know how to deal with technical issues. They need outside input to define their priorities and pass on solutions they already have. My role is to gather, set to music and prioritize the different information I can retrieve."

The interim manager's mission is to provide the binding force that will enable teams to work together.

Achieving a "faire ensemble

After the astonishment report, there's the action phase, the transition to "doing things together".

To illustrate this phase, he shares his experience in the public sector with teams who no longer spoke to each other, working behind closed doors. The whole IT department was at a standstill. Poor communication led to poor productivity. Internal customers suffered.

Franck listened empathetically, without judgment, using the art of reformulation, and then set up shared moments of work and relaxation.

"We make things very simple, we create a bond so that people can communicate with each other and get back to 'doing things together', to belonging to an IT department and no longer to a department."

Another example, this time in the agricultural world, within a cooperative. This organization had not completed its digital transformation. All the business units had been working on their own, developing applications without any coordination between the various projects. Here again, thanks to his understanding of the company's culture of internal promotion versus outsourcing and recruitment, he came up with a solution. He stopped the ongoing projects launched by the business departments and set up a training program. The challenge was to bring 10 developers from former client/server systems to expertise in web technologies, in 6 months. A double challenge! Vis-à-vis the teams who had to get involved in this change, and vis-à-vis the management to whom we had to explain that for 6 months nothing would be delivered.

In conclusion, After the discovery and action plan development phase, with the astonishment report, a key Transition Management tool, comes the action plan construction and follow-up phase.

Then there's the last one, which is always difficult because you've created strong bonds with your teams and the company: the one where you leave, but that's part of the game and you move on to new adventures.

"Transition CIO, it's an adventurous job, a human job in which technical understanding is important."