(Originally posted on May 7, 2009)

(by Joe Little. Posted with permission). In the course of my work, I hear people talk about how hard is to get things done in organizations. (This happened again recently.)

And I know from personal experience too, it is hard.

But I wanted to emphasize that organizational politics is not as hard as we make it for ourselves (at least sometimes it is not).

Here are a few nuggets mined in the field of hard knocks.

A few suggestions re ACTION (perhaps you find one useful):

* When boxing, do not expect to have the first punch be a knock out.  Set ‘em up for the kill in the 4th round.  Lots of combination punches.

* The truth is hard to resist.  (Yes, I know people will deny the truth and will often kill the bearer.)  Keep finding ways for the truth to be repeated and dealt with.  Scrum throws up the truth.

* If a bunch of people go together to a manager’s office, it is much harder for the manager to resist.  (Make sure you have the truth on your side, and that your idea makes sense.)   Maybe even harder if the manager comes to the Team room.

* Justify your impediment removals.  Do much better cost-benefit analysis.  Do them as small experiments (eg, show the actual results later).

* Justifications include: higher NPV for the product, higher velocity for the team, faster delivery, etc, etc.  Make the link from your improvement back to these key things.

* Make the case.  Make it so obviously right that the only question is: “How do I know your numbers are right?”  Managers only like to approve obviously right things.

* Ask to do an experiment.  Make sure the test sample is big enough to draw conclusions from.

Go get ‘em.

Nothing I said guarantees success. Accept that the other person is free and you can’t make him change.  Give him some respect.