The issue:
The client is a global leader in the engineering consulting industry. The organization faced a number of changes (regulatory, financial compliance, systems integration challenges), and a major change to the global organization's capabilities was outlined, to seamlessly bring together local and regional client-leaders to provide a global service delivery model. It would be a major change as compared to what had made them successful up till then. These changes required modifications to the organization design, the creation of a global corporate center, and new systems, processes and coordination to be implemented successfully over a tight time-frame. The organization had upwards of 200 offices in 60+ countries world-wide and an existing culture that was the result of literally 100’s of acquisitions that had been woven together to create a unique localized service delivery model. Going global was a challenge that had to be urgently met. Each office site had its own structure and ways of working with no commonality of approach. This led to inefficiency, duplication, confusion in communicating with other offices and various external partners and authorities, and ultimately led to inefficiencies and worst of all – an inability to deliver a seamless experience for their clients.
What we did:
Following the organizational design project and revised strategy, the implementation team began to build the structure and major processes to run the global organization. The implementation portfolio was defined at global and regional levels, and a series of engagement sessions with region leaders was made to identify the portfolio workstreams, sequencing and resourcing requirements which would enable the project to run alongside the existing business. Technical organization leaders were engaged to create an engineer-friendly change vocabulary and common understanding of change issues and challenges. A risk review of regional portfolios enabled region teams to buy in to the scope, size and pace of the change, and also provide input the global organization. The result was regional leaders who were bought into the change, had a stake in how it could be sequenced and paced, and most importantly, were able to adjust on the fly in consequence with changes to the global business environment.
The Result:
Providing a lexicon for change, a risk approach that likened change to implementing a typical engineering project, and a process for understanding how to interpret implementation risks and proven mitigation strategies gave the regional teams confidence and an ability to address the implementation in a way which facilitated dialogue across the organization. Building in the steps of risk assessment, mitigation planning and on-going reviews of the plan ensured the project delivered what was needed in a timely way - and stopped other activity which didn't. Major issues based on agreed criteria were escalated to the global team for resolution enabling a critical dialogue between regions and the global team. Most importantly, client service delivery improved on both regional and global fronts, providing a seamless experience for the organization’s clients.