Ineum Consulting
Continued
Leadership Makes the Difference
In Ineum’s case, the CEO was the sponsor and Tirlemont the decision-maker. The first thing he did was to ask the partners to outline their needs and identify the business process owner in each group who could participate in the process. He assembled those process owners into a transformation team at a single location—in the same building, on the same floor, with open space to facilitate rapid communication flow—and scheduled weekly meetings that focused on decision-making rather than communication. “We’d have a two-hour meeting where we were making maybe 40 decisions,” he says. “It encouraged people to show up, because if they didn’t, the decisions were made without them. It also encouraged them to read the material upfront, because if they didn’t, by the time they understood what the issue was, it had been resolved.” Tirlemont’s operational standards also weeded out anyone who wasn’t interested in fully participating in the process. The group experienced some turnover, but within a month it had coalesced into a real working group.
“Everyone had to trust the process,” he says, “but trust doesn’t mean that you don’t maintain executive control over it. We had a controlling body where I was presenting our key scenarios for decisions to my CEO and to the board of partners. We did that on a regular basis, every four weeks during the course of the project.” Tirlemont says he now has greater understanding of what his clients are going through when they undertake business change, adding that he believes if you want to change an organization, it’s easier to do it from the outside than from the inside. “When you are an external consultant working for clients, you are aware of internal politics, but you aren’t impacted by those politics,” he says. “I now have more empathy with our clients.”
Change Management Powers Transformation
Another significant lesson learned from Ineum’s client commitments is that without change management, transformation doesn’t happen. That meant having a variety of tools available—Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, training sessions, DVDs, CD-ROMs, conference calls, videoconferencing. “We knew we could not use a single method and that we had to offer the whole set of options that would maximize the efficiency of training in change management,” Tirlemont says.
The problem was that it was difficult for people to make training a priority, given their normal work duties. Tirlemont’s solution was to continue training for a full six months after go-live. Another lesson from clients? When you go live, triple or quadruple the hotline staff, which Ineum did. Tirlemont also established a strong relationship with the integration team the company brought in, and he relied on his team of internal IT consultants to run frequent quality assurance analysis on the project, which helped keep everything on track.
In addition to “time-boxing” the project, which Tirlemont says is critical, managing the scope of the workload is key to a successful transformation—another lesson learned from client engagements. “If you listen to users, they ask you for hundreds of reports they never read and never use,” he says. “So at the beginning, I said, ‘On this project, because of the time frame, we are going to develop ten reports—that’s it. Tell me which ones are most important.’ We ended up rolling out 15, and we’ve since developed five more, so we’re at 20 reports now. But we’re not at 150, which is what you get if you ask the users. That shortens the workload on reports development by a lot.” It’s a lesson Tirlemont says he and his team are taking into client engagements.
Shifting its processes into a PeopleSoft environment has given Tirlemont and his team new insights, but it’s also had a big impact on improving internal performance. They’ve pared down the tools they use for activity planning and managing engagements, and reduced the number of system interfaces from 64 to 12, which significantly increases data reliability. Transparency is another benefit; it’s now impossible to hide resources, making it easier for managers to maximize resources on billable engagements. They’ve also streamlined and strengthened their recruitment and human resources development processes, which are meaningful improvements in a company where talent recruitment and retention is the lifeblood of the organization. Put it all together, and Ineum’s got a solid foundation on which to grow an increasing presence in the international marketplace of transformation.
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Molly Rose Teuke is a freelance business writer based in Wisconsin.
