We invited experienced change management practitioner Suzanne Boyd to share a little about herself with our change management community.
Tell us about yourself.
I live and work in Vancouver. Love this city. Have a three year old who is the ultimate change management project :)
How did you get into Change Management?
Career wise I started in executive search and recruitment. My first change project was implementing a centralized recruitment function and applicant tracking system at Vancity back in 2004(!). Didn’t call it change management back then, it was just a project and I led the recruitment function so it was my job to make it happen.
From there, I worked as a Senior Business Analyst, an OD consultant and then started working independently on projects. My first project as an independent was putting in SAP eRecruiting at ICBC back in 2008. I really loved the combination of the process work and the change work and it has grown from there.
As time has gone by I have focused on change management and found a real groove on large scale IT driven transformation projects, and the business process pieces have always stuck with me… Right now I am updating a business process flow while figuring out the communication outcome we want from an executive team demo next week…
What are you working on?
I am the change and recruitment lead on a Workday implementation at STEMCELL Technologies. We are implementing recruiting and talent, and I really love the technology – we have come a long way with cloud based systems… They are a joy to implement as the end users actually like the technology. STEMCELL is also a lot of fun. The company is scientist driven and growing, and we are implementing technology and processes to drive growth – so the energy around change is different than in some environments I’ve worked in where we are implementing change largely driven by the need to rationalize/reduce costs.
Do you have any recommended change management books / resources to share?
I loved Tim Ferriss’ Tools of the Titans. I am reading How Google Works which is about Google’s people practices. And I just gave a project team the book Grit by Angela Duckworth when we got to the end of a long tough project. And I am a big believer in Prosci and ADKAR. I’ve worked with lots of different methodologies and change models, and ADKAR is the one that I have seen work the most effectively with very diverse audiences.
How do you like to spend your time outside of work?
Spending time with my family and friends, enjoying this amazing city. Reading all sorts of stuff. I am a total geek on human behaviour so I tend to nerd out on books about habit formation, willpower and things like grit, so on that, biographies of people that have achieved great things.
Right now I am reading Sherry Lansing’s biography – she broke all sorts of barriers in Hollywood by becoming the CEO of Paramount pictures and produced Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump etc. Fascinating. am also involved as a board member with the independent school and I am finding a passion for education and how we learn.