“How’s the change going?” I asked a postman as he sorted mail ready for delivery along his newly transformed delivery route. “Chaos,” he replied as he slid mail into a series of slots on his ‘sorting frame’. Each slot represented a different delivery address. The slot to the right of it represented the next delivery address to be visited. 
“What do you mean by chaos?” I asked. “Look at these slots here,” he said pointing at his frame, “This one’s labelled 17 Balfour Close, but it should be number 19 ‘cos when you walk along that street it goes 13, 15, 19, 17. That’s just how it is. And that’s not the way they’ve labelled it!”
“Have you told anyone?” I enquired. “I’ve told them, but what’s the point.? It’s them that got it wrong in the first place!”
Every major organisational change suffers ‘teething problems’ – it’s how you handle them that matters. Fortunately, the vast majority of Delivery Offices were yet to go live with the route changes, so we had time to handle glitches more effectively.
Going forward posties were each armed with a simple Issues Log on which to jot down details of teething problems they spotted each day. These were then transcribed onto a large dry wipe ‘Issues Poster’, hung up on a wall for everyone to see. As each issue was fixed it was ticked off, reassuring everyone that managers were ironing things out as quickly as possible.
On top of this, there was a move to include each postie in the process of re-planning their round so they could spot potential issues before they became problems.
To better understand the principles that underlie effective change see www.5forcesofchange.com
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