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Large Scale Organizational Change
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| Organizational change sometimes requires strong buy-in from scores or even hundreds of people. Examples of this are: |
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Convince a professional work force to adopt a new technology |
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Engage a highly focused customer-facing organization in a new
go-to-market approach
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Gain a member-controlled organization's acceptance of necessary budget cuts |
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Maintain productivity during an acquisition or reorganization |
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Meet a competitive challenge by finding and making many incremental improvements over a wide area |
Large scale organizational changes cannot simply be ordered by management.
What is needed is understanding, alignment and commitment to action
that carries across the full organization.
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The Complicating Factors and the Standard Solution
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Complicating factors in these situations include the likelihoods that:
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The organizational activity in question is highly complex, simply due to its scale.
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There are many different opinions and views about the proposed change. |
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Organization members work in many different locations, and even different languages. |
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The work of the organization change must be broken out and assigned to sub-groups, that need to be managed in a parallel organization of their own.
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The targeted change requires many steps in several phases, which in turn requires an irreducible amount of time to complete.
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A standard approach to dealing with these challenges is to use program management. Program management can supply valuable services to the organizational change initiative, such as planning, communications, budgeting, goal tracking, resource allocation, technical support and so on.
The Core Challenge
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The core challenge is that large scale organizational changes need more than administrative support and coordination. They need specific tools and procedures to help organizational members build the understanding, alignment and commitment to action that they must have in order to actively support the change.
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To optimize the value of people's time, to keep them engaged, and to increase the chances of success for the organizational change as a whole, these tools and procedures must go beyond conventional meeting facilitation, surveys, discussion groups and the like. |
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They need to include well-structured, easy-to-use, quickly distributable techniques for process analysis, design, evaluation, consensus-building, planning, and decision-making: collaborative solutions development.
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The ActionMap Solution
ActionMap has the required set of tools and procedures.
It's called the ActionMap Toolkit.
ActionMap has a successful track record of applying these procedures in large scale change initiatives, in both stand-alone operations and integrated with formal program management.
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The ActionMap Toolkit is based on process engineering techniques that have been specifically enhanced in order to rapidly produce high quality understanding, alignment and commitment to action. |
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These procedures allow large areas of organizational activity to be quickly divided into workable units, which can then be rapidly described and evaluated in a common format. |
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Toolkit procedures are highly intuitive, and skills in their use can be acquired by sub-groups in literally a few minutes.
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Toolkit procedures provide a flexible work plan that each sub-group can adapt and follow to systematically build understanding, alignment and commitment to action with respect to the proposed organizational change, and how to accomplish it. |
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Toolkit procedures are capable of capturing literally every idea, interest and concern that hundreds of people might express about an activity area, and organizing and prioritizing those inputs to focus on the points that need the greatest attention. |
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Because of the process engineering techniques that the Toolkit is based on, the different elements of the new design, along with all their associated evaluations and priorities, can be quickly recombined for overall review and acceptance. |
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Supported by widely available software tools and electronic collaboration utilities, ActionMap Toolkit procedures can be used to execute these steps in a short amount of time. The limiting factor is how long it takes for people to absorb and integrate the information involved. |
How ActionMap Helps with the Surrounding Challenges:
Executive Alignment, Program Planning and
Program Management Team Work.
Executive Alignment
Large scale change initiatives require focused attention from the organization's management team. ActionMap provides executive alignment and planning sessions, based on the ActionMap Toolkit, to assist the management team in directing the program.
These sessions can be used at the start of the program to create alignment, define objectives and identify major challenges. Sessions can be used throughout the program to maintain alignment, track on objectives and make necessary course adjustments.
Program Planning
In individual work sessions, the ActionMap Toolkit provides a flexible work plan that can be started immediately and adjusted during the session.
The same general work plan also applies in large scale organizational change initiatives. However, the challenge in large scale initiatives is that there is too much information to process in a single session.
The solution is to design a series of sessions that will reliably produce the necessary level of understanding, alignment and commitment to action
in the shortest amount of time.
In addition to being able to provide the ActionMap Toolkit, ActionMap also has extensive experience in large scale change initiatives and program management. We apply this experience in planning sessions to design, evaluate, and build consensus on the optimum program plan for your situation.
In initiatives that focus on only a few major decisions, the ActionMap Toolkit can provide the "backbone" structure for the entire effort, greatly simplifying program planning.
Program Team Work
Large scale change initiatives need to be managed by teams of people that are assembled from different parts of the organization. ActionMap provides Toolkit sessions and training to help make program coordination meetings efficient and effective.
Conclusion
Large scale change initiatives are expensive and time consuming in terms of
development resources, productivity impacts, and opportunity costs.
Fundamentally, these changes are about the development, adoption and acceptance
of process change.
While it's critical to change people's mental models, results don't change
until the processes change.
ActionMap delivers powerful process development procedures, simplified for use by people from many different backgrounds, and scalable to address the largest change initiatives.
These procedures focus on changing both people's mental models
and their work processes at the same time.
If you are responsible for a large-scale change initiative, let ActionMap provide you with a demonstration session, to show you how the Toolkit procedures can accelerate the results you're looking for.
You will find this demonstration session valuable in terms of both giving you insights about your change initiative, and for assessing the types of methods that you need
to use in it.
Click here for more information about the ActionMap Toolkit.
Click here for examples of how and where the ActionMap Toolkit can be applied.
Click here for examples of engagements delivered using the ActionMap Toolkit.
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