One reasons that Valence consistently is awarded Best Place to Work by the Business Journal is because we are all about a Learning Culture. A Learning Culture is rooted in a growth mindset where people want to learn and to apply what they have learned to help their organization.

Our team weaves together consulting, design, and engineering practices while staying alert to new technologies and innovations, while also becoming experts in our clients’ industries, business units, and market trends.

That’s a lot to learn.

And rather than being intimidated by all the things we have yet to learn, we encourage our people to stay open and curious. Learning is a core value here, and it’s a key to our company’s success.

“One thing I love about this company is that it’s a learning place. I always feel comfortable calling our designers, architects, and engineers so I can tap their expertise and better understand what matters most. They always make the time and encourage me to ask questions, and it helps me feel confident in my role,” Angela Kaiser, senior project manager.

We leverage each other’s knowledge, and as part of MajorKey, we are exploring exciting ways to broaden our educational platform, especially since we are now a global business with learners and teachers in the US, India, and Argentina.

“I love being a part of the learning culture and I love that I have the freedom to learn, admit what I don’t know, and dig into what I want to know. Valence is a great place for that,” says Renee Christenson, senior project manager at Valence.  Renee also leads up the Valence Lunch and Learn program!

Learning happens formally and informally here, whether it comes through moments in spontaneous conversations, as part of a scheduled deep dive with a colleague, at one of our monthly lunch and learn meetings, at a conference, or through collaboration with clients and partners.

Senior Content Writer, Malia Jacobson says, “I have a quote by author Annie Dillard framed in my office. The final lines are ‘Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.’ It reminds me that it’s not enough to continually develop new knowledge in our fields—we also need to share what we’re learning. I’ve learned so much from my Valence team members and colleagues, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to share, engage, and pay it forward.”  

Here are three tips to bring a learning culture into your company:

1. A flat structure will encourage people to ask questions and show their curiosity.

We need each other’s knowledge, and with a flat organizational structure, anyone can share what they’ve learned and what they are passionate about with confidence.

Lunch and learn sessions offer a formalized process with an informal interaction, which helps people to feel comfortable presenting and attending. People respect each other and lead with kindness and respect, so whether you are a presenter with a bit of stage fright, or an attendee nervous to ask a question, everyone is welcome and respected.  

2. Invest resources into your Learning Culture and put someone in charge of it.

Valence runs a monthly Lunch and Learn program, which is managed a senior project manager who collaborates with our People team. The Lunch and Learn program typically requires about 4 hours of management time each month.

When a team member delivers a Lunch and Learn presentation, they typically spend up to 40 hours putting the content together, rehearsing, and preparing to present it over several weeks.

The ad hoc requests for education and cross-team sharing are harder to measure, but it’s safe to say that subject matter experts share and seek expertise as part of their work.

We should mention a secondary culture benefit when your company prioritizes learning and teaching, which is that it creates new avenues for employees to know each other and build meaningful relationships, which are crucial for mental health and workplace satisfaction (and harder to come by in remote work situations.)

3. Teach and learn about more than technical topics.

Naturally our monthly Lunch and Learn program covers topics like Artificial Intelligence, 5G, and data governance; but it has also covers topics like Crossfit, perfecting your LinkedIn profile, and making the most of video conferencing. Our upcoming lunch and learn schedule covers topics as varying as DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and the evolution of digital content?

Showcase your Learning Culture by creating a platform for employees to share their passions.

By operating like a campus-less campus, everyone is a student, and everyone is a teacher so we can all come together around learning.

“People are encouraged to share their knowledge and be an educator for the company, which is why you never know what you can learn here,” said Valence President, Jim Darrin.

If you are a knowledge seeker, you’ve got a growth mindset, and you love a learning culture, check out our careers page! At Valence, you might find a career where you can tackle challenges, learn, grow, and develop professionally!

Additional Resources:

Kopius Careers Page

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By Glen Lewis

When businesses embark on a digital transformation, they often need to bring in technology consultants. Choosing the right technology consultant is the first and potentially most important step in the journey.

In the March 13th Harvard Business Review article “Digital Transformation Is Not About Technology,” the authors outlined “Five Key Lessons” that helped them lead their organizations through successful digital transformations. Lesson #2 stated:

Smart businesswoman sharing her ideas with her team during a meeting. Group of creative design professionals having a discussion while working on a new project.

I would offer that using technology consultants is not a poor idea — using the WRONG consultants is. In fact, using a technology consultant has distinct benefits.

After 12 years of working with change management consultants partnering with domestic and international clients, the good consultants that I have seen hold one truth sacred in their engagements — their clients have unique cultures, with unique issues, and require solutions tailored to their unique needs. While these consultants will reference analogous past experiences, it is to help encourage clients to share details (Harvey, 2018) by reassuring them that they are not the only ones suffering from similar issues (Adamson, 2011). That is about as far as the “one-size” mentality goes with good consultants. The good consultants, through consistent engagement of “insiders,” subsequently updates those initial analogies as they come to understand and appreciate their client’s culture, governance, change readiness, etc. This produces a new unique view of the client, their gaps, and potential solutions. Finally, if good consultants do recommend that their clients consider a best practice, it should service only as a starting point, because those practices should evolve into a solution meeting the client’s unique needs.

Technology consultants also bring important benefits often overlooked in change management such as enabling clients to continue to run/operate their businesses unencumbered by having to manage an enterprise change initiative. For example; a regional dialysis provider recently switched their electronic health record (EHRs) systems. While the CIO highlighted how he had participated in EHR transitions before, he, along with his PMO or IT, did not have the expertise to manage such a daunting endeavor. As a solution, they brought in a consultancy who partnered with the organization’s key “insiders” to build and manage the following: (1) the layers of schedules, (2) the change communication plans, (3) the EHR transition training plan for almost 1000 staff members who were scattered over 2000 square miles.

This allowed the dialysis provider’s staff to remain focused on operating their 15+ clinics. Their training department could continue to focus on serving current and new employees, meeting federal regulations and their PMO could continue implementing the HR and logistics projects already in motion. Finally, the public affairs department could continue focusing on community outreach communications.

The issue is not the use of technology consultants to facilitate digital transformation, it is about using the WRONG technology consultants to facilitate digital transformation. Good consultants establish partnerships with their clients, working with them to craft and implement solutions, while absorbing burdens that allow “insiders” to continue focusing on the daily run/operate of their businesses.

Additional Resources:

• Kopius Services – Experience Strategy and Design

by Glen Lewis

What is the best methodology for successful change management? Organizations need the right partner to achieve competitive advantage.

Scientists are searching for a theory of everything — a framework linking together all physical aspects of the universe. There is a similar quest among Project and Change Management practitioners, the search for a framework linking together all the methodologies and supporting tools out there: Lean Six Sigma’s (LSS) DMAIC, Prosci’s ADKAR, International Institute of Business Analysis’s (IIBA) and Project Management Institute (PMI) methodologies, etc. Unfortunately, proliferation of these methodologies and their supporting tools often leads to confused practitioners who choose to follow a single methodology, ignoring other tools that may enhance their approach.

The key to a “theory of everything” linking these methodologies together lies in how you define: (1) what a project is and (2) what these methodologies are. My experience has shown that projects are more often efforts to correct a problem. Whether building an overpass to relieve congestion or implementing new processes to improve compliance, projects tend to revolve around problem solving.

Training and experience have also shown that the numerous methodologies — ADKAR, DMAIC, PMBOK, etc.- are essentially a set of tools linked together in a prescribed fashion.

Using these general views, we can see how the various tools underlying the methodologies can be mixed, matched, and linked together across a single project.

Most of my clients view their projects as 2-part: (1) defining the problem and solution, and (2) implementing that solution. I usually follow IIBA’s business analysis methodology during part 1; however, this is also an ideal time to leverage LSS’s tools associated with DMAIC’s Define, Measure, and Analyze phases — such as value stream mapping or design of experiment. If LSS tools don’t fit, one can then fall back to such tools as the IIBA’s functional decomposition, to provide that complete picture of the problem.

During part 1, one can also break apart another popular methodology — Procsi’s ADKAR — layering their “build awareness and desire” tools upon those mentioned above, building a comprehensive enterprise understanding of the problem.

For the second part — implementing a solution — I prefer a hybrid process of agile principles supported by traditional project management planning tools — WBS, resource calendars, etc. Again, weaving in Procsi’s coaching and training tools as applicable, one can provide a holistic enterprise wide solution.

Finally, after delivering the solution, Prosci’s and LSS DMAIC’s “Control” offers tools ensuring change will be sustained. Another example is where it’s the tools and not the methodology leading to success.

In the end, these project management methodologies are a series of tools contained within prescribed frameworks that — if teased apart and recombined — provide unprecedented views of problems, solutions, and next steps. Ultimately organizations are not interested in a methodology. They want a practitioner who can understand and appreciate their unique problems, then drawing from a plethora of tools deliver the solution that will allow them to maintain their competitive advantage.

Who should lead digital transformation in large enterprises?

For simplicity I’ll limit the possible solutions to who should lead digital transformation in large enterprises to either the CIO or someone else. The two most important factors in making the right selection are your current state of technology adoption and your culture. Are you moving materials manually or is your operation automated? Are all parts of your organization connected (IoT) from sales to manufacturing? Are you already using AI? Are you still managing large waterfall style projects mapped start to finish with Gantt charts? Do you evaluate and deploy technology initiatives differently than other business initiatives? The answers to these questions can indicate where you are in your digital transformation process and the leadership required to move your organization forward.

Here are the two examples of situations where the CIO may be just the leader you need:

Situation 1 — Your enterprise is behind on technology adoption and you don’t even have a CIO. IT rolls-up to finance, HR, or other functional or operational leader. In this case, the CEO can set the tone for transformation by creating the role of CIO. She can define the CIO as the change agent and transform the culture around this role and the journey to an agile future state of the business.

Situation 2 — Your enterprise is technology-forward. Your data is already in the cloud and employees consume it real-time on mobile, desktop and operational devices alike. You include IT initiatives in core business decisions like other capital investments. In this case, your digital transformation culture is established and your focus is on implementing the latest emerging technologies.

Here is a situation where the CIO may not be the right leader:

Your company has intermittently adopted technology to supplement your ERP on an ad hoc basis, but the architecture was created before cloud and mobile fundamentals were even contemplated. Changing one application within your system risks breaking another, but you can’t predict which one. Culturally, your technology exploration and implementation cycles are bogged-down in IT backlog and your leaders see IT as a cost center. In this situation, the CEO will enable success by assigning a leader from outside the technology realm — a ‘digital transformation officer’ or project leader — to build and lead a cultural case for change from the ground up. Then the CIO can help deliver technology into the new culture.

Don’t blame the CIO too quickly for the current state of your enterprise. The explosion of technology and the economy in the early 2000’s collided to create expanding IT teams deploying new ERPs and adopting new technologies. Then the recession of the late 2000’s undermined the business assumptions upon which these investments were based. In my industry, building products, the result was devastating. No matter how good an IT team or leader may have been, IT was a less-understood cost-center. Considering that ten years ago any 40+ year-old CEO or senior executive had formed their business paradigm in a pre-mobile, pre-email and pre-PC world, any failed IT investments due to economic collapse were likely admonished more than non-IT investments that failed for the same underlying reason.

To establish a new digital path for your enterprise, a collaborative leader who has delivered results across multiple functions can deliver digital transformation. IT teams and consultants can help guide the technology deployment. After all, digital transformation is a culture change initiative to leverage technology, not a technology initiative to change culture. A successful digital transformation leader endorsed by the CEO and respected by peers builds a successful case for change from the ground up. The technologies he chooses to implement become decisions just like other investment decisions in equipment or teams and are weighed at the same time, by the same leaders, on the same basis of relative return on investment.