Understanding Workplace Information Systems (Institute of Learning & Management Super Series)

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The ultimate aim of any commercial organization in making such a major change is to increase its profits. But the precise nature of the change will depend on a number of factors, both within and outside the organization. As in the case of small-scale gradual change, internal factors include the need for improvements in physical conditions, resources including finance , staff skills, relationships and procedures. Factors within the external environment may be of a political, economic, social, technological, legal or environmental nature. Just one example is the introduction in of the Climate Change Levy, a tax on businesses which is designed to encourage them to reduce their energy consumption.

Among the more short-term social factors are changing fashions in such things as clothes and food. Just one simple example is a planned European regulation for scrapped cars to be returned to the manufacturers, thus putting pressure on them to produce cars whose parts can be recycled. These fall into two categories: Concern over environmental factors has resulted in many laws and regulations that affect the activities of organizations.

It has also created many opportunities for organizations, such as The Body Shop and its competitors, to develop new products for consumers who wish to purchase goods that use natural, replaceable resources and recyclable packaging. All the various types of factor discussed above can represent both threats and opportunities to an organization.

Either way, any organization that chooses to ignore them, and not change, will lose out in the end. The job of managers is to give the lead to their teams. This does not mean that people have to be told exactly what to do and when and how to do it. The primary skill of leading and managing is to find ways of gaining: Higher management may make plans for the organization as a whole, but more often than not it is the first line manager who has to turn these plans into reality. If you are intending to take this course of action, it might be better to write your answers on separate sheets of paper.

Before we continue this session, think about your own work situation, and if possible identify two fairly major changes, one which you have already experienced, and one which you expect could happen in the near future. In each case, briefly describe the change.

What contribution did you and your team make to it? You will need your answer to Activity 16b for Activities 21, 23, 24, 28 and Explain how you and your team plan to play your part in its implementation. However, this need not always be the case, as the following example illustrates. On a construction site for a complex of large buildings, Michael was manager of the wall-building team.

One of the things about his job that had often annoyed him in the past was that the team who installed the ducting, through which the wiring passed in the ceiling area, always worked ahead of his team. This meant that when his team came to build a wall, they had to spend at least half a day making fine adjustments to its design, and then implementing these adjustments, to take account of where the ducting was positioned.

This often meant working for a long time on a ladder supported by scaffolding, with your head back. This was not only uncomfortable but an incredible waste of 27 Session B time. Michael thought there had to be a better way of doing this and decided to talk to the site planner, who was responsible for sorting out the sequencing of work. The site planner agreed he had a point and suggested that a meeting be arranged which was to be attended by herself, Michael, the manager of the ducting team, and at least one building designer.

It quickly became apparent during this meeting that the designers did not always know exactly where the interior walls were going to go once the outer shell of the building had been constructed. Sometimes this outer shell had been erected just a few centimetres to the side of its planned position, but this did not mean that the designers then recalculated the positions of the interior walls. Neither they nor the planner had any idea of the importance for the teams doing the actual construction of knowing the exact position of the interface between the ducting and walls.

After much discussion and drawing of alternative process flowcharts on a whiteboard, it was agreed that in future the main stages of the process for installing walls and ducting should be as follows: Once a wall is approaching ceiling area, members of walling team to take a piece of rectangular ducting and install it within top of wall. When the various people involved in this process tried it out over the course of the next few weeks, they found that the job of installing a piece of ducting in the top of a wall took about 30 minutes.

This compared exceedingly well with the half-day it had previously taken for the walling team to do the best they could with the ducting that was already in place. In a building with six walls this represented a saving in time of at least 18 hours — which in turn represented a big financial saving for the construction company.

In looking for ways of improving processes, products and services, you too may come up with ideas that have important implications for your organization and require you to work with other managers. Why not seize the initiative and voice your ideas to your manager? You may need permission to put the change into effect, but your idea and enterprise will almost certainly stand you in good stead.

Activity 17 3 mins Take a look at your description of a change in Activity 16a. Was it one that you helped to instigate, or was it imposed on you by senior management? Whatever your answer, what do you think was the main reason for the change? Was it, for example, made in response to economic factors in the external environment, or in response to something within the organization, such as the inefficient use of resources?

Alternatively, you may be asked to estimate costs of particular actions or processes. Alternatively, choose another occasion when you gave feedback to your team, which resulted in the modification of plans. Other elements in your role as leader of change may include: Where substantial changes are underway, this aspect of the work can become more difficult than usual. In this case, the workteam will pay you in their commitment to the project.

You must empower your workteam to manage things in their own way. More and more, organizations are realizing that the old ways of managing by telling people what to do and how to do it are no longer appropriate. As competition gets more fierce, greater commitment is needed from staff at all levels. The only way to achieve this is by allowing increased levels of freedom for people to organize their own work — to hand over control of tasks to those who have to accomplish them. Handing over more authority to your team is a courageous step. It involves watching them learn from their mistakes.

It cannot be taken lightly. If and when you do it, the workteam will certainly depend on your full trust and support. You will also have to provide them with the practical resources and training they need beforehand. For the project you described in Activity 16a, describe the recommendations you made, and the steps you took, to provide the workteam with the necessary resources, perhaps including training. Your team will be a lot more committed to the change if they feel they are controlling the action themselves and are: If you can manage to do this, they will become enthusiastic about the change, and promote it to others.

Another key to success is ensuring that your team always receives sufficient information. Finally, there is the need for you to inspire enthusiasm by being enthusiastic yourself whenever possible. Here we are going to focus on the importance of keeping your team informed right from the beginning of any change programme. Activity 20 5 mins At the HiPrint works, there was a lot of discussion going on. It was a wellknown fact that the company had been looking for new premises for some time.

A few months previously, a lot of the staff had expressed concern that the company would move away from the town — perhaps to one of those remote government development areas — and that everyone would be given the choice of moving house or finding a new job. But nothing seemed to come of the idea and the workforce more or less forgot about it. As you can imagine, a lot of questions were being asked.

What do you think the main concerns of the workforce would be? Write down three or four questions that might be going through their minds. They would probably be asking questions like: Is there a bus service? Will the company provide a company bus? Will it bring new problems and how will I deal with them? Will it perhaps bring new opportunities? For the first line manager, it can mean a hundred new problems, often compounded by the fact that management insist on minimum work being lost during the move. For the team member, the worries are more personal. The greatest fear in any upheaval is job loss.

After that, the concern will be over money, disturbance, intrusion and inconvenience. These anxieties are in addition to the unease felt about changes related to the job itself. The effects of all these cares may be to cause: Once all the uncertainty has been resolved, most of the worries disappear and the mood changes — even before the change takes place. And to avoid uncertainty, you need to provide information. There is nothing more likely to cause mounting levels of anxiety than making an announcement that there is going to be change and then not saying anything more about it.

So the first thing you need to do in any major change is to define its scope — that is, produce a broad outline of what it will involve. Doing this will help you to define the scope of the change, as in the following example. Stella was the manager of a long-established health club which was beginning to lose clients to a new club that had opened up a couple of miles away. From talking to the reception staff about various comments made by clients, she knew there had been several causes for complaint, including: Clearly a major overhaul of the club was necessary if it was to stop losing clients and attract new ones.

It was going to require some investment from the owners, training for the staff in the fundamentals of client care, and some reorganization of the way various things — such as the cleaning and maintenance of the equipment in the gym — were done. And once all the improvements had been made they would have to be publicized in order to attract new clients.

It was a lot of work for one person to manage while still keeping the club running as efficiently as possible on a day-to-day basis.

Stella decided that the only way to handle it was to think of the work as five sub-projects and delegate responsibility for them to five sub-teams: But first she needed to establish: For Stella, deciding who was going to be in the team was easy: She hoped that involving everyone in this way would actually be a first step to getting them more committed to the club and more prepared to look after the clients properly. However, drawing up the list of aims and objectives, and working out the approximate timescale and budget, was more problematic.

She would have to hold some meetings with her team, and possibly collect more data on what clients actually wanted, before she could complete her proposal. How would you define its scope? Is it possible to think of it as a number of sub-projects? If so, what are they? However, to be realistic, at the start of a project you may only be able to sketch out your main aims.

You will then have to refine these at a later stage. When producing your objectives you will find it helpful to bear in mind the SMART principle, which means that they are: Session B Activity 22 5 mins Thinking back to Stella and the health club, she might have said that one of her broad aims was to improve the level of cleanliness in the changing and shower areas. Of course, there are numerous possible answers to this question.

The following objective is just one of them: If there are not, then the objective is not achievable. Whatever the objectives of the project, it is best to agree them with the people involved wherever possible. If management has instigated the change, the objectives may be defined already, although they may need to be modified in some way.

And it may not be wise to get the team involved in setting objectives if the project is going to lead to redundancies. We will return to the subject of redundancies in Session C. You will have to make up your own mind about the most appropriate time at which to get your team involved, depending on the situation. Return to the change project you outlined in Activity 16b. Does the project have stated aims and objectives?

If there are not stated aims or objectives, what suggestions do you have on what they should be? The purpose of a feasibility study is to establish whether the desired outcomes of the project can be achieved within the available time and resources, most notably the budget and staff.

When carrying out a feasibility study it is often very useful to include a cost-benefit analysis. This is discussed in some detail in the workbook entitled Managing Projects. In this workbook we will note simply that financial costs are often divided into two main categories: Benefits are also often divided into two categories: In the case of Stella and the health club, for example, the intended main financial benefit of the change project is obviously increased revenue from an increasing number of clients.

Non-financial benefits could include a more motivated staff, leading to improved quality of service, which in turn should help to increase the number of clients. Returning to the change project outlined in Activity 16b, consider the following questions: Does the timescale appear reasonable? Do you have a budget for the part of the change project for which you are responsible?

If so, do you think it is enough?

And how much of their time will you require? Is it the same group of people for both, or are there people who may be involved in one stage but not the other? Are there people, for example, from other teams or departments who need to be consulted in the planning stage but do not need to be involved in actual implementation? In practice you are sometimes given a date by which a project has to be completed and you then have to work backwards from that in your planning, rather than the other way round. You may also have to plan around the staff who are available to help — and the number of hours they are able to devote to your project — rather than beginning with your ideal requirements.

If you have not been able to do so before, this is certainly the point at which you need to involve your team. There are a number of tools you and your team may find very useful in planning the project activities. The main ones are: Begin by establishing with your team what the main activities in the project will be: You can then write each activity on a sticky-note or piece of adhesive coloured card and arrange these on the flipchart or board until you have them in a logical order.

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The final step is to draw the diagram with arrows between the stages. The clients also had a lot to say about how the gym was run. But more fundamental was the feeling that no one on the staff took a personal interest in them once their initial exercise regime had been established at the beginning of the year. Stella produced a proposal taking all the new data into account and she secured the go-ahead from the owner. During discussions of the proposal with the staff, it was decided that the main activities were as follows: B Consult with clients on their views about designs and amend accordingly.

C Organize redecoration and installation of new furniture. E Organize deliveries of requested drinks and snacks. F Establish procedures for checking state of changing and shower facilities, and cleaning during day. G Draw up rota for checking and cleaning procedures. H Establish procedures for checking equipment in gym every day and arranging for any broken equipment to be repaired. I Draw up rota for checking equipment. J Draw up new list of classes. K Consult with clients on list of classes to establish best times plus level of demand.

L Recruit teachers for classes. M Organize and run client care session for teachers to stress importance of turning up on time and being well-prepared. N Set up appointments system for gym during peak periods lunchtimes and evenings. O Organize client care session for all non-teaching staff, with emphasis on how to look after clients in gym. P Run client care sessions. Q Establish system for ensuring that clients in gym receive personal attention from one staff member throughout the year. R Organize publicity brochure.

S Distribute publicity brochure. Activities B, D and K, all of which involve consulting with clients, could be carried out at the same time. So too, perhaps, could Activities M and O, both of which are concerned with giving staff training in client care. Whether this is actually possible in practice will depend on the number of staff available.

In fact, Stella and her team decided that they could carry out A, F, H, J and N in parallel, and so ended up with the logic diagram on the next page.

There are a number of things to notice about this diagram: The arrows show which activities are dependent on other activities. There is no timescale.

No activities are assigned to people. Draw up list of classes E. Establish procedures for equipment maintenance I. Rota for checking equipment N. Set up appointments system for gym Logic diagram for health club change project G. Organize client care session P. Run client care session Q. A critical path diagram also known as a network analysis is a useful tool for doing this, as it shows how long individual activities should take and the relationship between them. The first step is to look at each of the main activities included in your logic diagram and decide with your team: This route is the critical path — the minimum amount of time it will take to complete the project.

Organize brochure 6 J. Consult with clients 3 A. Recruit teachers 8 S. Distribute brochure 2 P. Organize client care session 1 F. Rota for checking equipment 1 H. Establish procedures for equipment maintenance 1 E. Rota for cleaning 1 N. So if everything goes according to plan, the whole project should take less than four months. In reality, there could be some slippage.

It may, for example, take more than eight weeks to recruit all the teachers. However, the diagram does establish the basis for week-by-week planning and monitoring. Imagine you are asked to prepare the following menu: Draw a logic diagram and then a critical path diagram with the time for each task in minutes. The task that is going to take the longest time in this menu is scrubbing and boiling the new potatoes.

In fact, it is probable that this task alone will constitute your critical path. Parallel to it will be all the other tasks. All you need to do is work out how long each one is going to take and the best order in which to do them, ending with cooking the omelette. The activities are listed down the left hand side and the timescale appears across the top. In this chart, a number of activities are all shown starting in the first week.

But in fact, if the main priority is to get all elements of the project completed by the time the publicity brochure is distributed, rather than making lots of small improvements over a period of time, there are a number of activities that could be completed as late as week 13 Activities F, G, H, I and N. This is shown on the chart by the addition of a line. Consult with clients C. Establish procedures for maintenance of gym equipment I.

Draw up rota for checking equipment J. Draw up new list of classes L. Recruit teachers for classes M. Organize client care sessions N.

Set up appointments system for gym P. Establish client care system R. Distribute brochure Critical path activities Gantt chart for health club change project Activities not on critical path Line indicating float time Week number 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Activity 27 15 mins The health club project has several sub-projects, one of which is to produce and distribute a publicity brochure.

The critical path analysis for this sub-project looks like this: Write text 1 C. Get quotes from printers 1 K.

Draw up distribution plan 2 P. Design pages 1 M. Print brochure 1 Q. Distribute brochure 2 Try producing a Gantt chart for this sub-project using the outline overleaf. Bear in mind that the printers may need to be informed at least a week before printing that they have been chosen to do the job. Other information that can be added to a Gantt chart includes: As you can see, it is a fairly easy task to draw a Gantt chart.

However, computer software is available that will enable you to try out a number of different scenarios very quickly, showing what will happen if an activity takes a longer or shorter period of time than you originally forecast. When drawing up a project plan, you need to bear in mind that plans have a tendency to go astray. So always aim to build some contingency time into your plan — and possibly some contingency resources — to help you cope with the unexpected. There are all sorts of ways in which things could go 49 Session B wrong for Stella: Rather than telling the club owner that the project will be completed in under four months, she should make it clear that this is the minimum amount of time it will take.

Whether you do this during the stage of planning the activities, or afterwards, will depend on the particular situation. However, whenever you do it, remember that if your team is to feel empowered, every member must have an established responsibility within the project. Going back to Stella and the health club, for example, she would be making a big mistake if she thought she could manage all the key activities herself. In this particular example, the ideal time to do this may have been after the team had drawn up the logic diagram but before they started on the critical path diagram. However, this may not always be the case.

If they require further training, this may have the knock-on effect of an additional cost. You may need to consider ways of amending your plan to accommodate the requirements of people outside your team. Going through this process will have the added benefit of helping to break down any existing barriers between departments.

Never ignore signs of resistance or try to overcome it just by repeating arguments in support of change. Instead, as we saw in Session A, attempt to understand the reasons for the resistance and be prepared to discuss these while pointing to the possible benefits of change for the individuals concerned. If you are intending to take this course of action, write your answers on separate sheets of paper. Look back at your notes in Activity 16b on a change project and consider the following questions: How will they be affected? This means not only two-way communication between you and your team, but also keeping people outside the project informed about progress.

The people who need to be kept informed will certainly include your manager. They may also include people in other departments or teams in your organization as well as all the members of your own team. The methods you use may include: However, never regard these as a substitute for other forms of communication. We will return to the subject of communication in the next session.

You must also empower them to control the necessary activities themselves. For questions 9 to 11, circle the type of diagram that is being described. Which of the following statements about these terms are correct? Computer software is available that will not only help you to draw Gantt charts but also try out different scenarios very quickly.

You also need to ensure that there will be effective communication both within your team and with people outside it. This means that when you implement a change project plan, you must be ready to: The good news is that if you have been thorough in your initial planning, this dual task of monitoring and making adjustments will be a lot easier. However, no amount of planning can make dealing with the mixed emotions that change can arouse in people any easier. There may well be times when you will need all your interpersonal skills to cope with signs of stress among your staff.

And you will certainly need not only to maintain your own enthusiasm for change wherever possible, but also to communicate this enthusiasm to others. Even when a change project comes to an end, your role in managing change is not over. It is only through communication that you will learn how the project is progressing and whether adjustments have to be made to the plan to deal with any deviations. The monitoring process generally consists of the following stages: One way of dealing with slippages in the schedule can be to employ more resources, whether they be in the form of people, equipment or materials.

However, a lack of resources may in itself be a cause of deviation. Suddenly finding yourself without vital staff for whatever reason can throw the best-laid plan into confusion, and some people with particular skills are very difficult to replace at short notice. Imagine, for example, a pub that is relying on an excellent, recently employed, chef to help restore the reputation of its restaurant and so build up its customer base. The owner has initiated a small change project with the aim of reaching a certain weekly profit.

If the chef suddenly has to take time off work, what can the pub owner do when the agency chef sent to replace him turns out to be bad at his job? He may have imagined a wonderful display of flowers and then found that certain plants fail to flourish because of the poor soil. In such a situation the best strategy is to revise his plans for the garden! This is particularly so if you have used computer software to produce your Gantt chart. You can then make any necessary adjustments to your chart as you go along and leave the software to 59 Session C reveal what the possible knock-on effects might be.

At the beginning of week 5 of the project, Stella begins to organize the new publicity brochure. However, when she rings up the copy-writer to ask him to come in for a meeting she discovers that he is in the middle of desperately trying to meet a deadline for another project and would like to delay their meeting for a week. Stella feels she has no alternative but to agree. Stella next rings the designer to arrange for her to come to the same meeting as the copy-writer.

This is no problem.

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Looking at the Gantt chart and making a couple of adjustments will give her the answer. Activity 31 5 mins Have a look at the Gantt chart you produced for Activity If not, how late will it be? Delaying the initial meeting with the copy-writer by one week — so that it takes place in week 7 rather than week 6 — adds a week to the schedule. This means the brochure will go to the printer in week 12 rather than week This is fine, as the brochure is not due to be distributed until week However, if there is any further slippage, the project will not be completed on time.

It will become 60 Session C necessary for Stella to make some additional plans, such as getting either the copy-writer or designer to work late in the evening or at the weekend. They could be to do with: Whatever the nature of the problem, you may have to undertake some serious problem solving with your team. Suffice it to say here that among the tools you can use to help analyse the causes of problems is the fishbone or cause and effect diagram. If you look at a critical path diagram for a project, you may well be able to identify various points at which problems are particularly likely to arise.

Activity 32 3 mins Take another look at the critical path diagram for the health club project on page If you were Stella, what are the points at which you would want to keep a particularly close watch for problems? As a general rule, activities that follow a merge need to be watched closely, as do activities that: While monitoring is about comparing what actually happened with what was planned, evaluation goes one step further and involves drawing conclusions about: Evaluation does not all have to be done at the end of a project.

Lessons can then be learned and acted upon as the project progresses. What could you hope to learn from the evaluation that you might feed back into the subsequent stages of the project? After talking to members of the two groups, you might also discover who is more likely to act as a leader, who has good organizing talents, who is particularly committed to establishing a broad range of classes, and so on. This information can then be used to ensure that the most suitable people take on basic organizational tasks, such as setting up rotas, while the person particularly committed to expanding the classes becomes the one responsible for recruiting teachers.

One obvious answer might be: However, in reality, the original objectives and planned activities may have to be amended as the project evolves and as factors arise that are outside the control of you and your team — such as developments in the external environment. Furthermore, even the achievement of SMART objectives is not always possible to assess straight away. And then various steps might have to be taken to improve the assessment of needs. There are notable exceptions to this rule — as when the change is a change of premises. Generally speaking, there is always room for improvement.

Once the final activity in a project plan has been carried out, the best course is to keep on monitoring the outcomes and collect feedback that can be used as the basis for a programme of continual improvement. Different teams celebrate in different ways. You could send a letter of thanks, addressed either to the team as a whole, or to each person individually. It is very important to show appreciation for an endeavour above and beyond the call of normal duty.

If so, what were they? If not, are there any follow-on activities that you think should have taken place? The completion of the final activity in the project plan may come as something of an anticlimax. Time is needed to recover: They begin to feel that change is being instigated for its own sake, and without any apparent overall plan. As change after change takes place, they naturally become reluctant to co-operate, wondering when the latest project will be supplanted by another one. Apart from stopping the programme of change, was there any particular action by management that may have helped to alleviate it?

Your answer to the question in Activity 35 will depend on your particular circumstances. However, there is one general rule that all managers at all levels can follow where there is a danger of change fatigue: However, there are some types of change in organizations that can have adverse effects on people, the most obvious of which is redundancy. We hear a lot about the trauma suffered by people who have been made redundant. Security of employment hardly exists any more, and we are naturally sympathetic when someone suddenly finds himself or herself without a job.

Institute of Learning & Management Super Series

To go through a career without having been made redundant seems to be an exceptional feat these days. The survivors of redundancy often feel threatened, guilty and overworked, and they need special handling. If you have ever found yourself in the position of managing a team following a spate of redundancies, you will know the importance of: You may find that the team members feel they need to do more to help them get over their sense of guilt.

However, it is usually a mistake to make that the norm. Redundancies are often caused by restructuring programmes. Such programmes can give new responsibilities to the remaining staff — responsibilities that they do not always feel equipped to handle. One response to this situation can be to feel inadequate and stressed; another can be to see it as a welcome opportunity to develop new skills. This can apply as much to first line managers as it does to team members. Activity 36 5 mins Have you ever been in a situation where a change programme required you to develop new skills?

What help were you given in developing these skills? Rather, it has the Session C potential to provide exciting new opportunities to develop the skills of both you and your staff and help your organization to prosper in a constantly changing environment. Self-assessment 3 1 Complete the following steps in the monitoring process with a suitable word chosen from the following list.

Can you say a bit more about what these problems are likely to be? What is wrong with the statements that you think are not good advice? Answers to these questions can be found on page State of the Computer Book Market Blackboard Essentials for Teachers. Fundraising with The Raiser's Edge. Tools for Grassroots Activists. The Internet for the Older and Wiser. The Cleveland Clinic Way: How to Start a Nonprofit Organization: Don't Step in the Trap: The Nonprofit Board Answer Book.

Social Movements for Good: Editing and Publishing e-Books. CAE Study Guide Managing Organizational Change in Public Services. Video and Audio Analytics with Piwik. Make the Most of Your PC. Reflections for the Effective Nonprofit Executive. The Law of Tax-Exempt Organizations. The Principles Of Netiquette Deluxe. The Art of Governance. Creating Great Android App: Not-for-Profit Budgeting and Financial Management. How Best to Use Internet and Email. Project and Report Writing. Organisational Culture and Context. Effective Meetings at Work.

Understanding Change in the Workplace Super Series, - PDF Free Download

Planning Training and Development. Storing and Retrieving Information. Budgeting for Better Performance. Working with Costs and Budgets. Managing Lawfully - People and Employment. Managing Relationships at Work. Making a Financial Case. Managing Lawfully - Health, Safety and Environment.

Securing the Right People. Caring for the Customer. Planning and Controlling Work. Networking and Sharing Information. How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long. The title should be at least 4 characters long. Your display name should be at least 2 characters long.

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