Engineering leadership lessons from Dale Carnegie’s, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’.
Rolling out a new software platform means change, and no one likes change. Major change, especially to the way people do their job and earn their living, triggers everyone’s biggest fears. At the least, they’re afraid new systems will disrupt their established routines and workflows. At worst, they’re afraid new software means they’re becoming obsolete or redundant, or that their expertise and effort is less important to their company.
‘Digital transformation’ became a buzzword because successful software roll-outs bring fundamental changes to how work gets done. To users on the ground, the prospect of having to relearn newfangled ways of doing things when you’re perfectly comfortable with the status quo is daunting – even if that status quo involves working around a broken, outdated, legacy system.
