The issue:
The organization is a global leader in the Internet space. It provides market leading solutions for it’s global client base through its global network of data centers, connectivity and co-location.
A major functional organization faced a number of changes typical to rapidly growing companies in the technology and Internet space. For years, the company had grown at a blinding pace, upwards of 40% per year, adding data centers, assets and buying companies to supplement it’s market-leading offer and keep ahead of competitors. These included regulatory, compliance and systems integration challenges. Most critically, the company was reaching critical limits, and some of the growth had resulted in compliance issues. Issues were reaching a crisis levels, and a major change would be required to address the multiple challenges that they were up against – while not disrupting the growth trajectory that the company’s leadership had promised to the market.
The changes required major upgrades to the function’s processes. Most critical was the ability to address a number of issues in parallel if they were going to be successful while not disrupting the support provided to the business. The organization operated in 60+ countries world-wide, with over 5K employees. Much of what needed to be done involved addressing issues stemming from 100’s of acquisitions that had been woven together to create a unique localized service delivery model. The major part of the change was moving to automation – i.e. introducing software processes which enabled existing manual processes to be done much quicker and with significantly higher robustness levels. While the group could handle many of the changes, the biggest challenge was to implement these changes with the business.
What we did:
Following an initial assessment of the portfolio, ChangeVU ran risk assessment pilots using it’s SuccessFactors database with two of the portfolio teams. Each team was at different stages of implementation – one at the beginning and another at the implement stage. The biggest insight was that the risk reviews by the teams revealed significant value gaps in both how they were seeing the change but also how they were prioritizing risks. In the late stage team, they uncovered implementation sequencing assumptions which would have derailed the entire effort because of misunderstanding. The pilots were deemed successful, a third pilot was cancelled and the risk review process was widened to include all initiatives in the portfolio.
The result:
ChangeVU’s approach enabled the leadership team to significantly accelerate their implementation efforts. One quote summed it up. “With ChangeVU we’ve moved forward more in one month than we had collectively over the previous 4.” The company adopted ChangeVU’s RoadmapBuilder application. Workstream leaders aligned their initiatives to in the context of a common framework. Each workstream leader was able to assess the risks not only across each initiative, but then also across the portfolio, enabling teams to learn from each other, and also providing a holistic view of the change so that leaders could work together to sequence their plans with the least disruption to the effort or to their impacted communities. Sponsors and initiative team leaders alike were able to celebrate successful implementation to a most critical aspect to their rapidly growing organization.