Leigh’s extensive experience in managing complex organisational change makes him a highly qualified and sought after learning facilitator with EA Learning. With over 25 years of experience in the industry, he has developed a deep understanding of the various challenges involved in implementing change initiatives from both the customer and business perspectives.
In this time, he has been involved in leading change from the customer and business perspective, within customer service and call centre operations, through business resilience and contingency development, and on to the creation of programme and project management capabilities. In doing so, this has given him the ability to develop effective strategies for managing large-scale change initiatives. Leigh has gained a unique perspective on the challenges facing organisations of all sizes and types, including local, state, and federal government, leading commercial enterprises, and multinational not for profits.
Leigh’s aim during courses is to provide attendees with practical insights for managing change and delivering results. His experience has helped to reinforce a simple truth, that engaged staff and customers with basic solutions always do better than disengaged people with leading, complicated ones. Having seen business change hurt where it matters most, through the ramming of poorly architected solutions into production causing operational agony, resentment, and a lasting organisational memory that change is bad, he is determined to ensure that any architecture work ensures that funder and user satisfaction are paramount. With his extensive experience and knowledge, Leigh is driven to help individuals and teams achieve their goals, whether it is to gain a certification or overcome challenges they may be experiencing.
Leigh’s training philosophy is best expressed by Steven Covey’s second habit, “Begin with the end in mind”, the end being the development of delegate’s appreciation for the need to ensure architected change is led by and always aware of the need to deliver solutions that satisfy and delight the customers of the architecture, both external and internal to the enterprise. Architects do not deliver benefits, engaged users leveraging implemented architectures do, and therefore one of Leigh’s primary goals is to ensure that on-the-ground day to day stakeholders are front of mind for all enterprise architecture leaders, regardless of the domain they specialise in or the degree to which they work with the people who will ultimately ensure architected change is a success.
Understanding what success is for enterprise architects is also implicit to Leigh’s training philosophy. Success is not the creation of complex models, nor merely the deployment of architected solutions, the success of an enterprise architect’s work can only be confirmed through the achievement of beneficial outcomes, and beneficial outcomes can only be created by the consumers of an implemented architecture. Enterprise architects therefore need to have a keen interest in what happens during the months and years after architected solutions are delivered, and if customers and staff are not pleased with the results as expected they need to proactively engage in getting beneficial outcomes back on track.
The last element of importance to Leigh throughout training engagements is the reduction of Muda, or waste. It is wasteful for a large corporate or government organisation to duplicate a solution, process or approach they already have rather than reuse and or adapt. It is wasteful to deploy an architected change that does not fit in with and support an existing implemented solution context. Critical practices for reducing waste, maximising return on investment, and ensuring capability visibility and reuse are also key to Leigh’s approach to enterprise architecture training delivery.
