Date:
April 3, 2003
To: Bruno
Bellweather, HR Director, Technotic
From: William
Slater, IT Staff Consultant, Technotic
Subject:
Answers to Your Questions
Regarding the Planned Announcement on the Transition to the Cranberry Computer
System
Dear
Bruno,
Thank you for bringing your questions and
concerns about Mr. Technotic’s Cranberry Computer System announcement memo to
my attention. I understand and share
your concerns.
To be blunt, it would seem, that by his
own admission, Mr. Technotic’s zeal and subsequent haste in this decision is
strongly influenced by the fact that his brother-in-law is the founder of
Cranberry Computer Systems. He also
proudly disclosed the fact that they made this mass migration decision
together, apparently without input from other Technotic employees. So this memo, as written, will no doubt
create, in the minds of Technotic employees, the image of a CEO who seems to
think more of business deals he can arrange with a family member, than being
concerned about possible hardships of forcing rapid change on his own
employees. All in all, not a good
thing.
The possible impacts of this rapid
migration on morale alone could be very strongly negative. And if this project were to go as the memo
suggests, the company will pay a heavy cost because of the loss in workforce productivity
as employees have to overcome the product learning curve of the new machine and
the new word processor, and because of the loss in productivity for the
conversion of the previous documents that are in MS Word format.
Yet, as I ponder the circumstances of the
situation of this announcement memo from Mr. Technotic, I am reminded of the
famous lines from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, “The Charge of the Light
Brigade”, which dramatically, and poetically chronicled the suicidal charge of
a brigade of light cavalry of British soldiers during the Crimean War in 1854
(Tennyson, 1864):
`Forward the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
These lines are often quoted when a
leader laments about the hopelessness of a situation. However, if you remember,
that during our very recent five-week course in Change Management Training, we
learned some important concepts about managing change in an organization. Let’s examine some of the ones that probably
apply to this situation (Robbins, 2002):
Resistance to Change
Examples of Individual Resistance to
Change
Habit
-- People having to change their work routines
Security
-- Resistance when security needs are threatened
Economic -- Having their salaries
threatened
Fear of the Unknown -- Fearing what they
don’t know or understand.
Selective Information Processing -- To
keep their perceptions intact
Examples of Organizational Resistance to
Change
·
Structural Inertia
·
Limited Focus or Change
·
Group Inertia
·
Threat to Expertise
·
Threat to Established Role
·
Threat to Established Power Relationships
·
Threat to Established Resource
Allocations
Some Proven Methods for Overcoming
Resistance to Change
·
Education and Communication
·
Participation
·
Facilitation and Support
Organizational Development
·
Survey Feedback -- Employee feedback is
important
·
Process Consultation – having a
consultant perceive processes and events
·
Team Building – using group activities to
create strong teams
Another set of ideas to consider about
leadership and change is shown below from a collection of articles in a book
titled, Skyhooks for Leadership, edited by John A. Shtogren. James O’Toole, author of Leading Change,
published by Jossey-Bass, Inc.1996, is the original author of this excerpt:
“…leaders fail when they have the
inappropriate attitude and philosophy about their relationship between
themselves and their followers. Those
who do not respect and trust their leaders cannot follow them, Conversely,
those who succeed at bringing about effective and moral change believe in and
act on the inherent dignity of those they lead – in particular, in their
natural human capacity to reason. In
bringing about change, these leaders of leaders always include the people
affected in the change process. ” (Shtogren, [Ed.] 1999).
Based on many of the ideas listed above,
the high risks and costs associated with this migration notwithstanding, if had
a chance at managing this project, I would take the following steps:
1. Have
a serious talk with Mr. Technotic, telling him that it is essential to the
success of the project that he rethinks his current plans. And then I would ask that he empower me to
lead this project. During this talk, I would emphasize the need for some
well-thought out steps to introduce this migration.
2. Ask
for two weeks to assess the impacts as much as possible, both in terms of lost
employee productivity and the cost to the company for converting the format of
thousands of electronic documents.
These need to be quantified as much as possible before proceeding. In addition, we need to determine the
impacts of losing access to other programs that may not be available in the
target Cranberry environment. For
example, what about the employees’ databases, spreadsheets, presentation
software, and especially their e-mail?
Does the Cranberry system have programs to handle these essential functions
that our employees need and use daily?
3. Get
an advance copy of two of these Cranberry systems and well as the Cranberry
Phrase word processor. Work with our support staff to determine the ramp up
time to be able to properly support our employees as they experience problems
or require technical support.
4. Ask
for a longer window, of perhaps six to eight weeks for the conversion.
5. Based
on findings during this two week analysis, create a project plan that would
scope out each of the steps required to be successful in this rollout,
including support ramp up, demonstration, education, documentation conversions,
and implementation of the new Cranberry systems.
6. Search
for some kind of effective, but inexpensive training program. Also considered here would be computerized
training and perhaps videos on using the system and the Cranberry Phrase word
processor. We should buy the absolute
best Cranberry Phrase handbook or user’s guide for each employee as well.
7. Identify
fast learners who are technically savvy, and work with them to develop a
brown-bag lunch training series, to help the employees learn the nuances of the
Cranberry system as well as Cranberry Phrase and any other software that will
accompany these systems.
8. At
the right time, send a company-wide announcement memo that the migration is
coming, and accompany this memo along with the timelines for the roll out. The memo, but not the timeline is attached.
9. Execute
the project plan, based on the timeline we established.
10. Based
on the assessment and understanding of the Cranberry system and Cranberry
Phrase, I would create a survey that would be distributed to each of the
employees four weeks after the rollout.
This survey would attempt to measure six things: 1) their satisfaction with their training;
2) their satisfaction with the Cranberry system; 3) their satisfaction with the
Cranberry Phrase software; 4) their satisfaction with the technical support for
the new environment; 6) their satisfaction with how the rollout project was
conducted, and 7) what difficulties are they experiencing related to the loss
of any other programs that they no longer have. Preferably, we would use e-mail for this purpose, sending
Cranberry Phrase format documents.
Based on this survey, we would be able to determine our success, and if
additional training was required.
For your review, I have also written a
revised copy of Mr. Technotic’s memo, incorporating the ideas discussed in this
memo to you.
Sincerely,
William
F. Slater, III
One
Attachment: Revised Memo to Terry Technotic:
Date:
April 3, 2003
To: All
ACME Enterprises Employees
From: Terry
Technotic, President
Subject:
Announcement on the Transition
to the Cranberry Computer System
Dear
Fellow Employees:
I am delighted to announce that after much
analysis and planning, we have determined that it will be in the best interest
of our company to migrate our workstation computers to the high quality, high
performance Cranberry Computer System.
Along with this migration, we will migrate to their revolutionary word
processor known as Cranberry Phrase. I
have chosen a well qualified, experienced IT professional with over 25 years of
experience to lead this very important project. He is our very own staff IT consultant, Mr. William Slater, and I
hope you will support him as he works with each of us to make this Cranberry
rollout project successful.
To make this transition as smooth as
possible, ACME Enterprises will provide training, excellent technical support,
as well as a conversion process, to assist in the rapid conversion from your MS
Word format documents into the Cranberry Phrase format.
I want to assure you that we understand
the concerns that go with making a change of this magnitude, and that we will
be as supportive and understanding as possible, as we go though this big change
together.
Next Friday, we will kick off this
project by beginning our very first brown-bag lunch and learn session on using
the Cranberry system and its associated applications, complete with a
demonstration Cranberry system loaded with all the applications to show
you. It is important that you attend
because we will provide a project schedule timeline at this meeting. And in
addition to having some great free training materials, an excellent free user’s
guide, and a free lunch for each of you, we will also have a fresh loaf of
cranberry bread for each of you to take home and enjoy over the weekend.
We want this transition to be an
experience that makes us stronger as a company, and we want to emphasize that
your embracing this change is essential to our success, both for this project
and the future prosperity of ACME Enterprises.
Please contact Mr. Slater if you have questions about this project.
Thanks in advance for your support.
Regards,
Terry Technotic
President
References
Robbins, S. (2002). Organizational Behavior: Concepts, Controversies, and Applications (10th ed.). [UOP special edition], Englewood Cliffs. Prentice Hall.
Shtogren, J.A. (Ed.). (1999). Skyhooks for Leadership. New York: AMA Publications.
Tennyson, A. (1864). “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. Retrieved from the website located at: http://www.nationalcenter.org/ChargeoftheLightBrigade.html