Transformative
Change Project
Project Intervention
816005267 - Kirt Lee Baptiste
Table of Contents
Understanding Organizational Interventions ............................................................................................... 3
Company Background ........................................................................................................................... 3
Background of Issue .................................................................................................................................. 3
Literature Review ...................................................................................................................................... 4
Planning and Organizing ............................................................................................................................... 7
Enterprise Diagnostics .............................................................................................................................. 8
Implementing, executing and evaluating ................................................................................................... 10
Diagrams ................................................................................................................................................. 11
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 14
Understanding Organizational Interventions
Company Background
The company we would be examining in this assignment would be a large multinational company, but
we would direct our discussion based on experiences within a local and by extension regional context.
The company’s identity would remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of its operations.
The company’s local site, operates as the sole solutions provider of financial remittance services for a
statutory board under a government ministry, because of this the company can only survive (locally) by
maintaining its relationship with said customer, and this is the case for other sites internationally as
well.
Because of the multinational nature the company, it possesses a rigid and highly structured
organisational hierarchy for each department, which makes up a larger hierarchy for each local site, and
for each regional site, and so on and so forth. Noting this would assist with understanding the behaviour
structures further down in the assignment.
Background of Issue
As previously mentioned the company provides remittance solutions (mainly tech-related). The nature
of the tech-world is constantly evolving at exponential rates thus creating opportunities for many
projects of varying magnitudes. This phenomenon permeated throughout the company’s culture and
enticed many, as prospects arose for development and recognition, by developing solutions for internal
and external issues.
At the lowest end of the hierarchy, departments were utilising the surge of technological advancements
to develop various in-house solutions to better serve its customers (internal and external) and decrease
departmental inefficiencies, this by extension made the local sites more efficient.
Somewhere along the timeline of the company’s history, these in-house developers and technical staff
began a resigning from the company for more attractive prospects elsewhere. Exit interviews indicated
the rationales behind the exodus, were that incentives weren’t as attractive anymore, as they didn’t
match the workload. As well promotion and transferring to other departments were being vetoed by
management. In many cases the aim or end-goal of the ex-employees (and some current ones) involved
was eventually transferring to one of the various centralised software unit teams and not remaining in-
house.
Due to the hierarchical nature of the company, solutions are assigned levels, and solution and software
development are handled at specific sites. In simply, solutions are categorised, these categories are
determined by its direct relationship to the customer, solutions deemed high level are executed by a
software development units1, from a centralised site (usually non-local).
The solutions developed at departmental level (in-house) were by company law, intellectual property of
the company and thus ex- employees could face severe penalties for removing them. At surface level
one would say the company retains possession of the solutions, no problem. But with IT-related
activities, maintenance (debugging, updating, etc.) is a vital process often overlooked, and without
proper knowledge transfer (procedural documents, etc.) maximising use of these in-house solutions
quickly began to wither and eventually died.
The company and its various departments are now faced with the issue of solutions being rendered
moot prematurely, and processes that were already re-engineered efficiently reverting to its inefficient
state, leading to lowering of moral at site level, and the decreasing customer value already achieved.
Literature Review
In this section, we will use the literature review to identify the relationship between: project leadership,
project interventions and transformative issues as it relates to this TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE PROJECT.
(Management 2012) describes leadership as the ability to establish vision and direction, to influence and
align others towards a common purpose, and to empower and inspire people to achieve success.
Leadership style and competence are not directly related to a project’s success, however do note that
the leadership role is indeed critical in facilitating various project success factors that contribute to
project performance (Anantatmula 2010). Diverse project leadership styles are fitting at various stages
of the project life cycle, and the project manager has a leadership role in creating an effective working
environment for the project team (Turner and Müller 2005).
This brings us to the leadership style suitable for this particular intervention. The transformational
leadership style inspires followers, meets their developmental needs, and encourages new approaches
and more effort toward problem solving (Seltzer and Bass 1990), (Bass and Avolio 1994) model of
1
These software units operate independent of local sites, and fall under the corporate umbrella as support and
complimentary services.
transformational leadership contains four components: idealized influence, inspirational motivation,
intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration. We mentioned this leadership style because
we observed that previous leadership style exhibited by the company’s management showed strong
characteristics of a transactional leadership style, which is based on an exchange of reward and work,
and is more suited to organizational processes.
Eventually, management took active interest in the issue (flight of talent as well as tools and processes
becoming useless) and decided to intervene within the last decade (mid 2000s). The company’s
intervention attempt at resolving this issue involved creating a process which solutions were to be
submitted to a corporate unit which in turn documented, registered and collated solutions developed by
in-house by local departments, in a sense creating a repository of these solutions. This repository would
periodically be analysed by the software units and solutions would be deemed replicable or not, as well
as the units would review solutions and provide recommendations with regard to the incentive program
to local managers. This in turn curbed employees’ zeal to produce vast range of solutions, employees
began to cherry pick certain solutions that would gain them maximum visibility and recognition,
everyday useful tools were now put on the backburner for more glamorous projects. Management
noticed departmental efficiency still wasn’t periodically increasing, but in some cases decreasing.
(Winter and Szczepanek 2009) described a framework called the “intervention image” which views
projects as intervention processes. Interventions are concerned with trying to improve a messy
problematic situation. In the diagram below we could see that projects are subsets of interventions and
viewing projects as interventions would greatly improve project success rates of adding meaningful
value to organizations. (Winter and Szczepanek 2009)
Figure 1
Figure 2
The term organizational change is used in relation to significant changes within an organization, such as
reorganization or adding a major new product or service, in comparison to smaller changes, for example
adopting new computer procedures. Transformational changes also known as quantum changes, are
often linked to changing organizations’ structure and culture from the traditional top-down, from a
hierarchical structure to a large amount of self-directing teams, transformational changes also are linked
to business process re-engineering (McNamara 2006).
Local sites were going through a transformational change and such experiencing transformational
issues, some of which include: inconsistent communication of direction, ineffective senior management
and lack of participation.
Planning and Organizing
Now that a comprehensive gist of the situation presented above we could begin the preparing and
managing stage project intervention process.
While the company operates within a competitive environment (other remittance service providers do
exist), the company is the only one in the industry who is contractually employed with the government
of Trinidad and Tobago. Remuneration from the contract is provided via commissions from transactions
completed. Therefore the company’s profit margin is directly linked to the amount of transactions
pushed through the proverbial pipes. So there is the illusion that there are processes which are direct
cash-cows and indirect cash-cows.
One thing we purposely omitted from the previous section is the Enterprise Structure of the
organisation. (Jantzen 2016d) discussed four types of Enterprise Structures present in organisations and
how they impact organization’s behaviour and performance. The four types are T-1 Traditional
Behaviour, T-2 Transitional Behaviour, T-3 Transformational Behaviour, and T-4 Total Integrated
Behaviour.
On the surface the organization wishes to appear as a T-1 type organization (refer to Figure 3), this
perceived notion of a highly structured ordered organization assists with maintaining bonds formed with
the main customer (statutory board), in a sort of weird mirror effect manner. Clear lines of authority,
lowering risks and accountability are all perceived as necessary for the image the company portrays to
the customer. But while the organization wants to be perceived as a T-1 externally, they openly
encourage departments to run and behave like T-3 structure (refer to Figure 4). The company’s mission
is to be the global innovation leader in their industry and it’s a collective understanding that T-3 systems
exhibit characteristics favourable for innovation, and driving said encouragement. This leads to
confusion experienced by employees because of a disjoint, employees are encouraged to behave a
certain way but still follow a rigid structure, especially with customer-related requests (statutory board
requests).
This inadvertently led to the creation of T-2 type structure (refer to Figure 4), exhibiting transitional
behaviour traits. There’s a divide between management and subordinates, and even a divide between
management and management (managers that interface with the customer constantly, and managers
that interface with production staff and occasionally with the customer). The transitional tension
experienced falls in line with structure and process. Creation of the T-2 structure wasn’t the only
unintentional conception, a shadow organization developed as well. (Jantzen 2016b) described a
dynamic of the shadow organization which directly relates to this intervention, i.e., any major
organizational change program activates the system's growth processes. With this came informal
problem solving as means of “cutting the fat” as a time saving measure and the emergence of many
more PRN-PG2.
Enterprise Diagnostics
(Jantzen 2016a) states the Solution Leader has the challenge of diagnosing organizational performance
illnesses by identifying both symptoms and underlying causes and to administer a cure that will make
the organization healthy. If this isn’t executed properly potential misdiagnosis could occur, which
occurred in this current case. Management decide to intervene and create a structure which wasn’t
widely accepted and while not resolving the issue, spawned more issues. Reasons to be the root cause
of the misdiagnosis are: insufficient information scanning, lacking the understanding of human
complexity and imposing a cure/solution based on a predisposed mindset. Utilising Jantzen’s diagnostic
framework the following was uncovered:
- Inconsistent communication of direction, and lack of participation in
Directional Issues
developing organizational direction
Operational Issues - Lack of operational synergies and cooperation
- Performance is not linked to compensation, performance and
Performance Issues
consequences are not linked, along with unclear performance standards
- Trust in leadership and management, performance issues arising from
Organizational Issues
‘visible’ organizational structures and processes
While all these issues were laid out in the open for further analysis and a general acceptance that there
is a need for a transformative intervention to occur (via a second intervention) the next step would be
Managing Organizational Transformation as a means of riding the wave of change.
Two interviews were conducted in order to gain further clarity of the situation. We interviewed a lower-
level employee who received a couple incentives in the past, as well as one of the managers who
interfaces with the customer regularly. Ideally four employees each from all quadrants of the company
spectrum would’ve been the ideal situation to gain a more holistic view of the scenario.
2
Personal Relation Network-Power Groups
Unforgivably surveys weren’t utilised, there was no need to use the Transformation Readiness
Assessment (pg. 333-335 of (Jantzen 2016c)) because the organization welcomes transformation (but
with a caveat). Also it wasn’t necessary to conduct the Information Resource Assessment (pg. 404-405
of (Jantzen 2016c)), however conducting the Organizational Knowledge Inventory (pg. 403-404 of
(Jantzen 2016c)) would have been extremely useful in addressing the continuity issue of in-house
solutions that are no longer maintained.
Implementing, executing and evaluating
As indicated by (Jantzen 2012) driving change interventions demands an integrated multidisciplinary
Solution Execution Approach ground in complex adaptive system behaviour. The solution intervention
methodology recommended by Jantzen is the “U or I will DIE if we don’t Institutionalize change and
Information” approach (shortened as I.U.D.I.E.-I.I.).
Identify both the external & internal critical issues facing the enterprise
Understand the dynamic environment and context of issues or problems
Develop solutions comprising of strategies, strategic objectives and priorities
Implement actions. Done by executing the plan
Evaluate the performance by measuring results
Inform communicate with all stakeholders involved
Institutionalize change for the long-term
This approach bears resemblance to (Winter and Szczepanek 2009) five aspects of Intervention
Processes (please refer to Figure 7).
In summary we identified the key issues to be “flight of talented employees” and an ineffective
knowledge transfer process. We understood at least one of the issues in context, losing employees
stemmed from lack of career development programmes for employees. I believe the knowledge transfer
problem was handled with the previous intervention, but it would need to be enforced on a site level.
Working alongside Human Resource Management team, a programme for career development would
need to be developed.
And unfortunately this is as far as the Solution Intervention reached, due to management constraints.
Diagrams
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
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