Letter of transformation intent.
Dear future client/ future colleague,
i am delighted to support you along your transformational path. In order to take the best out of our relation, i would like to set some guidelines for collaboration and provide a high-level overview of our journey.
Initiation.
Our relation will start with very informal get-to-know rounds and interviews with different stakeholders within your responsibility area to find out major pains and transformation goals.
I understand that you probably already tried one or another transformational activity that didn’t go well, therefore i promise to pay close attention to “change fatigue” among your team members.
New working model adoption requires commitment to change at multiple levels of the organisation, going well beyond using tools and redesigning processes, to include culture, mindset, structures, and information flows and demanding very different skills and roles for leaders (Rigby, Elk and Perez, 2020), teams (McKinsey, 2018) and individual employees (Muduli, 2016). True implementation of change requires embracing self-managing teams, servant leadership, openness to change, transparency of information and continuous learning through engagement with customers. During our relation we will start first with your area of influence addressing each facet of it.
We can scale, as a next step, but only after the first measures are successful are well accepted by the team.
Action plan.
Based on the results of initial analysis, we will define strategical and operational activities for each of four pillars and make sure we measure our change activities and their effects on a regular basis:
Strategy.
We will assess product strategy and it’s innovativeness. OKR method will help to link current initiatives to strategical aims and identify candidates that can be stopped and therefore release some employees and budget for change effort.
With regards to operational strategy, it is important not to confuse it with the formal organizational structure.
We will seek to first of all minimize waste and optimize the flow of value to its customers according to strategy by organizing organizational functions into multidisciplinary, empowered teams, that continuously align with changing business needs by sensing and adapting through open communication while operating in short cycles. (we refer to agile principles that will be reflected in all aspects of the operation including structures, roles, processes, and tools as well as skills and behaviours of management and employees.)
Organization.
In my experience nothing compares with the complexity and conservatism of organizations and procedures. If it is easy to replace some parts of the system almost without experiencing drawbacks, organization is so interconnected and so many soft factors like culture, behaviour, structure, roles and process are involved, that very often it is not addressed at all in hope that as it will follow the change in strategy.
How many organizations do you know that define employee development paths in accordance to the skills gap and organizational strategy?
While assessing organizational change opportunity we will analyze current management model and operational model and create a path to the desired state, where each color will represent certain operating model.
Leadership.
With so many buzzwords flying around like — servant leadership, leader as a coach — it still highly depends on the chosen organizational structure, what approach has to be taken by the leaders for successful transformative effort. However, in the modern world where innovation is a KPI in most organizations, there is no way around redefining management values, skills and redefine how is has to change in order to foster and encourage the rest of transformational initiatives.
Automation & tools.
Once the strategy, value chains, product and team definition and background processes have been created, we will find suitable tools to support and automate decision making and turn the organization towards data-driven. It will highlight dependencies and double effort, bring even more transparency and ease of access to information. That will require training and migration from the current tools. It will unleash free time of team to experiment and innovate, so that change will start accelerating once more and more standard processes are automated.
Expected benefits.
- fit between strategical aims and organizations’ activities
- transparency of operational activities, bottlenecks and impediments, skill gap and expertise
- after initial increase, subsequent reduction in transactions costs of performance monitoring, communication and coordination between teams
- measurable transformation activities focusing on pain points & bottlenecks
- turnover of team members and identification of previously unknown synergies between silos (if existing)
- innovation and creativity in solving the tasks and higher degree of team autonomy
- increase in team involvement and further introduction and implementation of improvement measures
Expected drawbacks.
- duplicated effort in the first phases (tools, meetings, processes)
- volatility and uncertainty regarding product and team setup
- failures of some of the change initiatives
- change fatigue among team members
- team uncertainty with regards to strategy
- initial decrease in team dynamics & dissent
- skills shortage gaps identification and employee absence due to trainings to cover the gaps
- employees turnover due to disagreement with new strategy / product
Looking forward to our cooperation.
