The IT division of a Fortune 100 corporation had created a very aggressive schedule for replacing its regional structure with a centralized organisation —globalising both services and infrastructure. The challenge for the management team was to deliver an improved and more sophisticated service to the business while not relaxing any of the organisation's current objectives...
This organisational restructuring was to occur during a business cycle that required a reduction of costs not only in the long-term, but in the short-term as well. The management team's solution was to adopt a matrix management structure in which teams would cross functional and geographical lines.
This new structure required radically different individual and team behaviours within the 1200 person organisation, and yet the reorganisation had to be accomplished immediately and fit within shrinking budgets. This placed huge demands on both HR — to design and implement a flawless process for guiding the entire organisation through the change — and on the IT managers — to achieve and model personal change immediately and effectively. CPD had worked closely with this HR-IT team before, and they turned to us for support in this mammoth undertaking.
The Desired OutcomeThe outcomes for the organisation were very clear. Within a year they needed to:
The HR department was going to be very busy carrying out the reorganisation, and they asked us to be responsible for carrying out the paradigm shift. Specifically, we targeted the top three levels of management within the organisation — 70 people in all. The objective was to have every member of this group aligned with the new direction and exhibiting the new attitudes and behaviours required to operate effectively in the new environment.
The CPD SolutionThe size, complexity, and short timeframe of this project required us to shed the framework of an external consultancy. We joined HR as full team partners in a matrixed project team that shared decision making and all relevant information. This required us to live and practice the same type of paradigm shift we were asking of the IT department itself.
The members of the combined CPD-HR team co-wrote the project plan and assigned parallel project managers within the organisation and within CPD. Ten CPD consultants served on the project with well-defined roles. The project was composed of several phases and concurrent streams, but the principle mechanism for achieving the desired results was the assignment of CPD coaches to each of the organisation's division leaders.
Each division leader worked with their CPD coach to develop a planned program of intentional change for their division leadership teams within the framework of the larger team. Each coach supported both the division leader and his or her whole team in bringing the different divisions together within the new matrix.
We designed and delivered trainings to address the particular areas in which the group needed to succeed within the new matrix as well as helped guide the individual members through trainings already available through their HR department.
The ResultsAt the end of the year, the organisation's vice president deemed the project a complete success. The IT group achieved their strategic deliverables, met their goal of reducing overall costs while increasing service volumes, and had the new organisation up and running effectively within the scope of that first year. Our partnership with the HR team was so successful, that they asked us to stay on as virtual members of their team for the following year.