Rose observes that a danger exists in adopting a method of
change that might be popular at a certain time but which might
not be an appropriate vehicle for a particular company. One
current example of this is the rush to increase the amount of collaboration between groups and departments to more effectively
bring about change.
“I think we need to collaborate a lot, but I think there is a
bandwagon effect (that says) ‘OK, we’ve got to get together’
rather than having some thought process about what we want
to achieve, who needs to be there, what are the costs of collaboration, what are the costs of not collaborating, what is the time
frame, etc.”
If a firm attempts to institute more collaboration but does not
give it the time or resources required to make it fly, the effort is
destined to fail, Rose says.
PLM benefits:
One-third of respondents in a recent survey reported
benefits associated with deploying product life-cycle
management technologies. Namely, they reported:
fewer problems
with new product
introduction
32%
fewer problems
with environmental
regulatory
compliance
29%
fewer problems
with product change
management
26%
0
5
10
15
20
25 30 35
Source: Symphony Consulting
Outsourcing savings lost to poor processes
Companies that outsource parts of their operations without appropriate processes in place could ultimately lose the potential
cost savings outsourcing promises. Survey results show that 85 per cent of 800 manufacturers polled outsource part or all
of their manufacturing operations, but two-thirds of those reported they use manual, time-consuming processes such as
phone calls, faxes and e-mails with spreadsheets. The survey, conducted by manufacturing product life-cycle management
(PLM) vendor Arena Solutions and consulting firm Symphony Consulting, also revealed that 52 per cent of manufacturers who
outsourced and depended on manual methods lost money due to communication and documentation errors. “While outsourcing
offers significant financial merits and enables companies to focus on their core strengths, it is not free of challenges,”
said Bijan Dastmalchi, co-founder and senior consultant at Symphony Consulting. “Outsourcing manufacturing without the
proper infrastructure and control is a recipe for failure.” Specifically, costly errors led to rework, scrapped inventory, excess
materials and product recalls, according to Arena Solutions. Areas that posed challenges for companies that outsourced
their manufacturing include coordinating new product introductions, managing changes and communicating information
across organizational and geographical boundaries. “Shepherding a product from design through manufacturing is difficult,
but introducing outsourcing into the process pushes it to a significantly higher level of complexity. Despite the cost savings
associated with outsourcing, the management task becomes even more difficult and carries greater risk,” Dastmalchi said.
“What I see a lot is the desire and the intent for collaboration,
and it’s all good, but it’s being attempted without the supportive
structure to make the outcome good.”
One trend Rose sees happening is the idea that collaboration is becoming so prevalent that some workers are becoming “collaborationed out.” She uses an example of a health
care initiative that spans across multiple disciplines and
hospitals, involving many different practitioners. Often, one
or two such participants’ expertise will become so crucial to
the project’s success that they are called upon to do more and
more around it.
effort) will probably not work without it, but they begin to get
pulled outside their role of medical technician, of serving the
patient, and pulled into administrative issues,” Rose says.
“They’re pulled away from what they want to do, which is maintaining their patient base. What you see is they say, ‘I can’t do
this for very long.’”
Being prepared
Rose says that effective change management comes about
when those driving and directing the change have done their
homework and decided that the methods to be used will indeed
result in a more efficient organization. Often, this guidance
originates at the executive level and spreads to other arms of
the firm.
“It has to be something that the top is aware of and something
that filters down, so that when departments throughout the
organization set out to do a collaboration project, they set out
with this awareness that, yes, collaboration is a good thing,”
Rose says.
Involved parties, she adds, “need to be on board together
at the start about the objective, about how it is going to take
place, and to know what it means for me personally and for my
organization.”
Rose asserts that the IT department’s role in the implementation of change management practices within a company can be
a large one, and can occur in two different streams.
“IT has so many potential roles that they can play in the organization, whether it’s devising or supporting a communication
strategy that‘s happening at the top to supporting it at a very
technical level across every department,” she says.
She acknowledges that the idea of IT getting more involved
in the strategic end of change management is a good thing, yet
warns that, if the technical responsibilities are still very much
a part of the department’s core activities, its people can get
pulled in numerous directions and suffer as a result.
“It seems so often that IT is really in the moment-to-moment
aspects of keeping the business running. The idea of working at
both the technical and the strategic level is good, but the potential for burnout is high.”
For effective change to take place, all stakeholders must be
on the same page, says Rose. Within large corporations, it’s
easy for miscommunication to occur.
“There are different things going on in different parts of the
organization. What happens is there are multiple changes going
on at any one time,” she says. “Sometimes the changes that are
going on work in contradiction to another change because one
change hasn’t caught up with another, or one department didn’t
know that the other one took that direction and there was a
negative implication coming out of that.”
Another factor that can play a role in how effectively a corporation manages change is one related to the age gap within
those companies. For generations, younger workers joining an
outfit largely kept their heads down and did what was asked of
them. If it was done effectively, promotions and raises would
come, but only after their dues had been paid.
Today, with many young workers having been immersed in
computers and technology from when they were toddlers, ideas
around contributing to the greater good of the company have
changed. This, says Rose, has profound implications for the
management of change.
This so-called “Generation Y” — those workers born between
1978 and 1985 — “doesn’t particularly like to be dictated to,
especially if that dictation doesn’t make sense for them,” says
Rose. “The whole idea of doing something just for the benefit
of the entire group is sometimes problematic. They tend not to
