4.3 Implementing Decision Results

Module 4, Lecture 3, Implementing the decisions that we’ve come up with. There are numerous change management processes.

We’ll just examine one here, and talk about some change in general. Process we’ll look at says, first, prepare for the change.

Get everything ready for the change. Let people know that there’s going to be change. People don’t mind change as much as they mind being changed.

So, we just let people know there’s going to be some change. You’re going to be involved in it. Here’s what it’s all about. Here’s what it’s going to affect.

And, we’ll start through the change process. So, we develop the change management strategy. How we’re going to actually roll this thing out.

We’re gonna prepare the change management team. We’re gonna have some sponsors that help move this thing through the organization.

Work with different people. We’re gonna put those people in place. Get them ready. We’re gonna manage the change itself.

Develop the change management plan, take actions to implement the change, and imp, implement the plan. So, take actions and implement the plans.

There was an organization it was a tax organization in one country. All countries have some kind of a tax organization.

In the United States, we have the IRS, tax agencies in almost every country out there. One of these countries, their tax authority said, okay, we’re going to change, what we want to do is become much more friendly to the taxpayers. We want to help them better.

We’re, yes we’re going to collect taxes from them, but we wanna help them. We wanna help them figure how they have enough money taken out of their paychecks, or how they save enough money aside, so that at the end of the year they have enough to pay their taxes.

We’re going to help them all we possibly can. We’re going to actually come up with a new name for our whole organization. We’re going to come up with a new look for everything.

We’re gonna come up with all different kinds of things. So, what they did was they said, all of the, here’s all the things we need to change.

So, they put process improvement teams on all kinds of things they did in the organization. And said, okay, how do we make this thing better?

How do we make it work better? How do we help the taxpayers of the country understand this better, work with it better?

So, they did a great job of all of that, the whole organization was involved in this, the whole agency. Then, they came up with new names for everything.

They came up with new logos. They came up with all sorts of physical changes to the way things looked. Everybody was just really happy with everything.

And then, they had a big meeting. And, a big group of all of these people came together in one place, and then smaller groups, so everyone was involved, came together in other parts around the country.

And, they all did this on the same day. They had this big, massive meeting, so everybody got together at some places around the country in small or large groups.

And, what the organization did was they rolled out their new letterhead with the new name on there, new business cards for everybody, and the whole new look of everything that they had for this organization.

And, they changed the organizational colors. They never involved anybody in changing the colors. The management group, the top executive group, picked the colors that they were going to use for the new look of the organization. Everybody in the organization had a fit, because they ended, had been involved with every single step along the way with this change.

And then, right at the end, bang, just like that, the executive group made one change that did not involve everybody.

That didn’t go over well at all. So, they eventually did go through another process of everybody turning in different color schemes, and different ideas about how this should look.

And, they picked a different color scheme eventually. Cost them a lot of money. Well, it cost the taxpayers a lot of money, which was not good.

But, they did fortunately not have billions of these forms, and cards, and letterhead, all printed out. So, it changed to something that involved everybody.

So, manage the change effectively along the way. Reinforce the change. So, collect and analyze the feedback.

They got a lot of feedback when they tried to put this, these, this change in place. Diagnose the gaps, and figure out okay, we’re still trying to get from here to here, and we’re getting closer.

And, we thought the change process would get us there, but it’s not quite there yet. What else do we need to do?

Implement corrective actions, and celebrate successes along the way. So, you know, it’s not always going to go exactly the way you planned when you implement some of these changes.

When we’re start to fix some of these things, we’ve come up with some solutions from these problems, some decisions we’ve made.

We’re going to start moving forward with these things. It means things are going to happen differently in the organization.

People will do different, different things that they’ve never done. They’ll have to stop doing things they’ve always done.

They’ll do things that they do now in a different way. There are all different things that are gonna happen. And that’s not easy for people to always accept that.

So, we just need to move through, and help people understand that. And, reinforce this change as we move along. And sometimes, step in and take corrective actions along the way.

Let’s take a look at this organizational change curve. What does this look like? Well in our organization, this is our organization here.

And, everybody in the organization, and they’re gonna fall into some groups. One of them will be a group called the Explorers.

These are the people that are out on the leading edge of any kind of change. These people like change so much, that they’ll just go out and change things just for fun.

They just think it’s fun to change things. Well, sometimes that doesn’t work out too well, and these people might get damaged by making these changes, cuz it hasn’t been well thought through.

But, we decide, okay, this is a change we want to make, we know we have a group here that likes change.

Let’s start working with them, get them out there starting to put this change in place. And then, there’s another group that has a little more sense right behind them.

The Pioneers here, are going to start follow the Explorers. The Pioneers kinda hold back a little bit, and look to make sure that the Explorers have not been killed off by this change.

They’ve lived through the change. Everything’s fine, and the Explorers are bringing success stories back. The Pioneers say, well, we kinda want to be involved in that too, and off they go.

So, now we have about 10% of the organization up here. Out there, leading this change forward, saying, this is pretty exciting, we really wanna do this, this is great.

Most everybody is gonna be in this spot right here, the Settlers. And, they’re gonna say, okay, let’s just hold on here, you’re gonna have to show me this thing works.

So, some of the Explorers are a little closer up to the Pioneers. And, the Explorers, they’re gonna start moving out there faster.

And, they’re gonna start embracing these changes as success stories come back from the first people that are out there actually implementing the changes. It does work. It is better.

This is wonderful. Okay, let’s go do that, too. I wanna be involved in that. Little, by little, most of the organization will move into the areas where we want to have this change taking effect.

However, there’s a group back here, the Stay At Homes. And, I don’t care what you do with them, they are never going to do anything different than they’ve ever done it before in their whole lives.

They’re always going to do things exactly the same way. There was a,a police department who decided, you know what?

Our officers are really the most important people in the organization, the front line officers out there on the streets every day.

They’re the most in people, important people in the organization. We’re gonna dump this organizational chart upside-down.

The front line people out there are at the top of the organization. And, the rest of us back here in the police stations, and in the central police station, those of us with higher titles, we’re here to support them.

The front line officers are not there to support us, and make us look good. We’re here to support them in what they do everyday out there.

In this organization, there were two captains that had been around forever. And, they were used to a military hierarchy where they just, you know, shout an order, and people would say, yes sir, and they’d just go do things.

And, that was that, no questions asked. And, they couldn’t understand that their job was now to support those people, instead of boss them around.

They couldn’t figure that out. They couldn’t figure out they were supposed to go ask front line officers, what do you need from me, so I can help you do things better out there in the field?

They just couldn’t get that. So what did the police chief have good sense to do? He realized, oh, these two people have a lot of organizational knowledge, experience, history with them. We don’t want to just let them go, and get them out of the organization.

What we’re gonna do is put over here, we’re gonna put those two in a little office down here, down the hallway, and let them work on special projects.

And, take all of their authority over anybody else in the organization away. They’ have no authority over anyone else in the organization.

They’re completely taken out of the org chart, and put in this little office over here for special projects.

They were never gonna change, and the police chief found a way we can still use their knowledge and expertise.

They don’t have to just be to, tossed out of the organization. They can have a valuable role in this as well. You’re going to have some Stay At Homes. Not everybody’s going to do this.

Fortunately, that will be less than 5% of the organization, so you don’t have to worry too much about that. It should be closer to 1 or 2% of the organization.

We’re gonna have minor and major, major changes. Minor changes. Minor changes are things that can be done, usually with just some kind of a simple, simple decision by somebody.

It’s not going to affect things drastically. We’re gonna have major changes along the way as well, that also say, this really is a major change, and we need to rethink things.

We need to think through things again, examine problems differently, we need to come up with new solutions.

We need to work through some of the issues we have to deal with, make different decisions along the way. We have to start over, basically, from the beginning, and work through this.

We might not have to go all the way back to the beginning, but we got to go a long ways back here. And, start from this point again, and then start to move forward. Minor changes.

We might just be able to have a simple change order. We were gonna paint a room a certain color, and we decided, no, we’re gonna change it to a different color. Change order.

Somebody needs to approve that. Because, there was a group that decided, at one point, this is the color we’re going to paint the room, and now it’s going to be different. Somebody has to achan, has to actually approve that.

So, is that a group decision? Is that an authority decision? Is that an authority decision with some input? However that decision is made, somebody will be the one that can say, yes, let’s go ahead and move this change forward.

So, we usually have a group of people somehow assigned to be able to approve changes along the way when we’re doing things.

Major changes that we talk about could include things like we’re gonna have an existing process that we do.

And, we just do this by hand all the time. Right now, you may have a hospital, and they got a little clipboard hanging at the end of the hospital bed with a piece of paper on there.

And they just go in and do some things. And they write some notes on that little clipboards on some form that’s on there.

Now, we’re gonna automate that. It’s going over here on a computer terminal. That’s a major change. Implement a new patient tracking system in a health care facility, another health care thing.

We’ve got a way that we take care of tracking people now, and that’s just not working. So, we need to put something new in, completely different, major change.

We had a large project going on, and all of a sudden we know that there’s a deadline here. Oh, the deadline has been moved up, and we have to get this thing do, done sixth months sooner, and still do the same project, same quality level.

Okay, we have to figure out how to do that. It’s a major change. Changing the way that people just do the daily work. We always do things this way, now we’re going to do it in a different way.

One factory that was manufacturing a product had a new factory manager come in, and found out that, you know, things could maybe be done a little bit differently, but it might mean some change.

What this factory manager did was went down to different people on the factory line. And, found the people who were doing each step, in each group, they found the people that were doing this thing the best way.

And, they found all of those people throughout the whole factory, throughout this whole manufacturing process.

And then, had those people trained everybody in their work unit in new ways to do things, so that things could be done faster.

And, sure enough, by implementing a new way to do all these different steps along the way, things got done faster in the organization.

And, this factory became much more profitable, and everybody at this factory got bonuses. But, it took some change. People had to do things in a different way.

I’ve been doing this thing the same way for the last ten years, and now you’re telling me to do it a different way?

Yeah, because of this, and this is how it works, and let me show you how it works, and here’s the value of that.

And, you’re going to get something out of it. We all got bonuses, because we actually started doing this. Adding new elements in to a project.

And, we might have something going on, and we say, yep, we’re doing this, this, this, oh, and by the way, let’s also do this.

So, you’re remodeling part of your house. You decide that what you wanna do is paint your kitchen. And, as you start to paint the kitchen, you decide, gosh, we really need to tear out all of the countertops.

So, you tear out the countertops, gut, get to put new ones in. Wait a minute. While we have the countertops torn out, why don’t we put in new cupboards.

Okay, so now we’re gonna put in new cupboards. So, it just keeps going on and on and on, we just keep adding new elements to this thing. That’s a major change.

We’re just gonna go in on a Saturday afternoon and paint the kitchen. Now, we’ve got a, we, a month long process where we’re redoing everything in the kitchen, because we added some extra elements.

There are numerous other major changes that you will find. All of these need to have a change control process, that we put in place to manage these things well and have the change actually work effectively.

And, that also wraps up our problem solving and decision making series that we’ve been going through here.

Thank you, very much. And again, this has been brought to you from University of California, Irvine. I’m Rob Stone. Thank you for taking the time to join us with all of this.