Business Development: Change Initiation Project
Procedure
1. Read the Case Study.
2. Using Project (and Risk) Management methodology, develop an innovation and continuous improvement focussed Change Initiation Project for strategic, tactical, and operational business development.
Competency specifications
To be considered competent in this assessment task the Candidate must satisfactorily address the following functions:
- Analyse performance reports and variance from plans for key result areas of the organisation
- Identify performance measures, and assessment tools and techniques, and evaluating their effectiveness
- Conduct cultural assessment
- Participate in organisational change-management recommendations or processes as required
- Redesign aspects of the business in an innovative manner using online technologies according to the organisation's business strategy
- Include opportunities for innovation in the organisation's business strategy and prioritise them for implementation
- Encourage, testing and recognise new ideas and entrepreneurial behaviour where successful
- Obtain approvals from relevant authorities to confirm the change management process
- Approve innovations through agreed organisational processes
- Consult with relevant groups and individuals for input to the change process
- Develop change management project plan
- Action interventions and activities that are set out in the project plan in accordance with the project timetable
- Undertake risk management and cost-benefit analysis for each option or idea approved for trial
- Undertake risk analysis, identifying barriers to change, and agree and document mitigation strategies
- Conduct a risk management analysis and formulate a plan for dealing with contingencies according to organisational requirements
- Identify and respond to barriers to the change in accordance with risk management plans
- Communicate costs and benefits of innovations and improvements to relevant groups and individuals
- Develop a communication/education plan to promote the benefits of the change to the organisation and to minimise loss
- Ensure objectives, timeframes, measures and communication plans are in place to manage implementation
- Assign resources to the project and agreeing on reporting protocols with relevant managers
- Arrange and manage activities to deliver the communication or education plans to relevant groups and individuals
- Activate strategies for embedding the change eg information session
- Address impact of change and consequences for people, and implement transition plans
- Implement contingency plans in the event of non-performance
- Follow up failure by prompt investigation and analysis of causes and manage emerging challenges and opportunities effectively
- Integrate innovation into the business and monitor to gauge usefulness and maximise implementation
- Develop procedures to regularly evaluate continuous improvement systems and processes
- Ensure that knowledge and skills from activities is captured and managed to inform future work
- Conduct regular evaluation and review, and modify project plan where appropriate to achieve change program objectives
CASE STUDY
You have been hired as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for a small company "Hosted Desktop Solutions" (HDS), which provides hosted "open-source" IT solutions to small and medium sized businesses.
Having undertaken an initial analysis of HDS to get an idea of the company's current position, it is now time to think about how the company will build on its strengths and opportunities, and manage its weaknesses as well as the threats HDS faces.
Your analysis has revealed the following:
- Informal policies and procedures are not managing the increased growth
- Roles and responsibilities are more and more blurred, so that some key outputs fall between the cracks
- The website, for example, a key result area for the business has not been updated for some time, with key marketing and communication information now out of date, but everyone seems too busy to fix it, and who would do it anyway?
- As well Administrative response turn-arounds are getting longer and becoming inaccurate, with client and project documentation not being kept up to date, impacting on client invoicing
- IT client service response turn-arounds are also getting longer, placing customer relationship pressures on old clients as the needs of new clients are prioritized, however new clients require more attention and as resources are stretched new and old clients are becoming frustrated
- Project margins are therefore declining
- Systems to manage client service both in admin and IT are frayed
- Cash flows are under pressure due to late payment due to late client delivery while expenses are increasing trying to deliver client projects on time
- Research and development, a key result area for future revenue streams is falling behind
- Internal infrastructure is over used, under maintained, struggling to meet performance demands
- Strategic settings have become muddied impacting staff's understanding of what is trying to be achieved, this is effecting organisational culture, which is becoming directionless, "what are we doing, where are we going"?
- Jeff and Bob are so caught up that their interaction with staff, once warm, friendly and consultative is now short, swift, demanding and directive.
- Everybody is aware that something has to be done, but nobody knows what, this instability is further eroding organisational performance.
Bob and Jeff have asked you to undertake further analysis and research and develop a Change Initiation Project for Strategic, Tactical, and Operational Business Development focusing on innovation and continuous improvement.
Background
You have been hired as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for a small company "Hosted Desktop Solutions" (HDS), which provides hosted "open-source" IT solutions to small and medium sized businesses.
HDS is a small full service company located in the Sydney IT hub of North Ryde. It will install hardware, software, configure and manage systems, create websites, intra and extra nets. Clients currently come from design companies and other individual companies who do not see a need to internally manage their IT infrastructure as it is not a core result area.
The company's two founders (brothers Bob and Jeff) are still very hands on in all aspects of the business, including still looking after foundation clients.
There is a small 2 person admin team, a senior and junior IT technician. Marketing and Customer Relationship Management are still handled by the founders.
The company is still delivering some hosted services from equipment within the premises. As well as developing open source solutions for clients, the company has also started to develop and deploy its own applications. Again most of this work is carried out by the founders.
The company is undergoing significant growth as "cloud" computing is becoming more acceptable, and affordable, for businesses small and large.
The company has indentified significant opportunities to expand the depth and breadth of its "cloud" computing services, particularly into the education sector. These services are expected to increase revenues from current customers, increase the company's market share, and create opportunities to enter other markets.
However, other larger more well known competitors are also making inroads into these markets. While these companies do not offer the same level of high quality customer service that HDS is renowned for, they can offer very competitive pricing, and are often preferred by the bigger customers that HDS is trying secure.
Additionally while the market for cloud computing services is expanding, actual IT expenditure is not. So while the company is having resource capacity issues across all areas of the business (knowledge management, planning, human, IT infrastructure, organisational, budgets) revenues are not increasing sufficiently to enable additional resource investment; staff are feeling the strain.
HDS still operates under a "small family business" culture. Roles and responsibilities are ill-defined. Strategic planning is ad hoc at best. So while Jeff and Bob have some idea where they are headed, staff generally feel uncertain of where the company is going and their future in the company. Tactical decision making is also often usurped by pressing operational service delivery requirements, which adds to the current sense of instability in the workplace culture.
There are only two levels of skills and capability within the company, most staff are in junior to mid level roles (apart from the senior technician, who does not though have significant management responsibilities) with Bob and Jeff performing all the higher level management functions across the business.
As the founders deal with increasing operational workloads, research and development activities are becoming stymied and bogged down and development milestones are not being met. As well, Jeff's and Bob's ability to maintain industry currency, awareness of future directions, understand the market through industry and competitor analysis is being undermined by the constant operational pressures. For an IT company, not understanding, or being able to meet market requirements can have serious consequences, (just think of Nokia and its delay into smart phones which has resulted in a huge drop in market share from what was once the world's top selling mobile phone manufacture). Additionally, budgets are becoming stretched due to establishment overheads for new larger clients, however the revenue stream from the new clients is yet to make a difference to the bottom line.
As the company tries to maintain organisational performance levels, and as resources become more and more stretched to manage the increased workload, staff morale is declining and the once warm family work culture is starting to fracture.
With the company's growth, and the founders growing capacity management issues impacting customer service quality and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Bob and Jeff have decided to bring in to the company a senior resource, the Chief Information Officer (CIO), to assist the company's growth into a larger company. Additionally a mid-level cross-functional support role is also to be created, reporting to the CIO.
The new Chief Information Officer will have key internal and external strategic, tactical, and operational responsibilities to help enable the business to manage growth sustainably. The role is primarily focused on:
- Alleviating some of Bob's and Jeff's tactical and operational decision making
- Managing internal operations across all areas
- Contributing to IT deployment into larger companies
- Contributing to application development
- Assisting the founders with strategic planning
The idea is give Bob and Jeff the opportunity:
- To focus on internal strategic activities to enable the business to continue to grow and innovate while still maintaining a culture that is caring and supportive, as well as effective and efficient.
- To focus on strategic activities to take advantage of industry developments and favourable market opportunities/conditions
- To focus on the application development strategy which is often delayed and interrupted by new, larger, and ever increasing service delivery requirements that only the founders currently have the experience to efficiently and effectively manage initially.
words: 2000.
Harvard Referencing.
Number of References: above 8.