bridging the gap between central organisations and the field · 2018-02-25 · bridging the gap...

White Paper

© Copyright 2013 by ComDyS Business Services B.V. All rights reserved

Bridging the Gap Between Central Organisations and the Field

How a Leading IT Services Company Bridged the Widening Gap in an Increasingly Complex World

Have you ever wondered why large organisations have a hard time

delivering quality services and keeping their costs under control? Why

your project, best practice or investment could not deliver to its promise?

This paper shows how, in an IT services company, the harder employees

tried to improve quality, reduce cost and deliver as promised, the more

bureaucracy and complexity they got into. In turn, this fuelled a widening

communication gap between central and local organisations, undermining

improvement initiatives and moving budget into unproductive tasks.

A small group of employees approached the challenge a different way. The

solution resulted in unlocking enterprise knowledge and making complex

and bureaucratic processes obsolete. It had far-reaching impact on quality,

cost and delivery.

Do you recognize the challenges? Then read on, you might make a

difference as well.

Eugen Oetringer and Charles de Monchy

V1.0

May 2013

Leading in a Complex Environment

@IntelligentOrgs, #IntelligentOrgs

Blog Leading in a Complex Environment

http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Leading-in-Complex-Environment-2841999?trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

http://www.twitter.com/intelligentorgs

https://leadinginacomplexenvironment.wordpress.com/

http://www.denktankproject.nl/


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Content

PREFACE 3

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 4

1 HUMAN TASKS WERE TRANSFERRED INTO SOFTWARE TOOLS AND PROCESSES 5

2 IMPROVEMENT NEEDS FROM THE FIELD, AS WELL AS OFFERINGS, DIRECTIVES AND GUIDELINES

FROM CENTRAL ORGANISATIONS, DID NOT ARRIVE AT THEIR DESTINATIONS 6

3 GUIDED SELF-ORGANISATION BRIDGED THE GAP BETWEEN CENTRAL ORGANISATIONS AND THE

FIELD, PREVENTED COSTLY MISTAKES AND FREED AGENDAS FROM TROUBLESHOOTING 9

3.1 LEVEL 1: PROVIDE QUICK ACCESS TO RELEVANT INFORMATION 10

3.2 LEVEL 2: IMPROVE OFFERINGS, DIRECTIVES AND GUIDELINES WITH THE HELP OF COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE 11

3.3 LEVEL 3 – GUIDED SELF-ORGANISATION: INTEGRATE COPS INTO GOVERNANCE 12

4 BRIDGING THE GAP STARTED AT THE COFFEE TABLE 16

5 EPILOGUE 20

APPENDIX A LAYOUT EXAMPLE OF THE CENTRAL REPOSITORY 23

APPENDIX B IMPLEMENTATION − TIPS 24

APPENDIX C STARTING AT THE COFFEE TABLE − TIPS 29

APPENDIX D TRADITIONAL VERSUS OPEN BEST PRACTICES VERSUS INNOVATIVE INITIATIVES 34

APPENDIX E REFERENCES 36

ABOUT THE AUTHORS 37


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PREFACE

Denktank Project NL (Think Tank Project Netherlands) declares:

This White Paper is a real-life demonstration of the ideas that we endorse:

Benefits for clients and employees were leading.

The parties involved converged gradually towards a common cause and a

common goal.

Quick results motivated and kept the momentum going.

The initiative and the solution provided the flexibility to cope with

unpredictable situations in an effective way.

Self-organisation emerged and proved to be an effective solution.

George Barbulescu

Chair, Denktank Project NL

Think Tank Project NL (Denktank Project NL) is an independent, not for profit

organisation. Its goal is to increase trust in large projects in The Netherlands.

http://www.denktankproject.nl/


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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

From the media, small group discussions and as a result of our involvement at

Denktank Project NL and the Stoos Network, we have heard countless times that

highly innovative solutions are needed to conquer today’s big business challenges.

Here we feature a case of an innovation with enterprise-wide impact. It differed from

what solutions are expected to look like today. This presented us with a challenge.

How do you present a case so that it aligns with the current problem-solving

approach? This was no easy task.

It took several review rounds, many reviewers and several rewrites until we were

satisfied. Some reviewers contributed extensively. Others had made only a single

remark, but nevertheless that one comment had a far-reaching impact. We would like

to express our gratitude to all contributors and particularly to those who we believe

made a difference:

Arie Baan, Arie Baan Consulting and Denktank Project NL

Floris de Monchy, De Monchy & Bakker

Daphne Depassé, Plan B / Depasse.nl

David Gurteen, Gurteen Knowledge

Richard van Ruler, Ruler Consultancy and Denktank Project NL

Robbert van Alen, Sogeti Netherlands and Denktank Project NL

Arjan van Unnik, Van Unnik Business Services

René van Vught, MomentuM and Denktank Project NL

Erick Wuestman, VAXA and Denktank Project NL

King Wullur, Creating What Matters and Denktank Project NL

Karen Zimmermann, Connectives

There were also many who contributed, one way or the other, outside the review

process. All deserve a big thank you!

Eugen Oetringer and Charles de Monchy


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1 HUMAN TASKS WERE TRANSFERRED INTO SOFTWARE TOOLS AND

PROCESSES

In 1962, Ross Perot founded EDS. At the time, the company had only a few employees.

EDS offered long-term data processing services that also included hardware. The

services developed into taking over and operating entire IT departments of large

organisations. To act as a single company and to run it as efficiently as possible, the

EDS management team directed the company through a handful of policy and

standards documents that contained the concentrated IT knowledge of the top

experts, thereby providing answers on what to do, what to avoid and why. The

system worked well and EDS became the largest IT services organisation worldwide,

surpassed only by IBM. When the company was taken over by Hewlett Packard in

2008, it had grown to 139,000 employees and operated in 64 countries.

As IT advanced, cumbersome and time-consuming human tasks were automated

through software tools. When best practices such as Service Management (ITIL),

Governance and Project Management came along, IT provided the tools to document

and to automate them, along with their inputs and outputs. This delivered new levels

of efficiency and provided quick and reliable communication over distance.

With time-consuming manual tasks automated and the

previous distance challenges between locations and

countries bridged by Intranet, email, screen sharing and

video conferencing, projects became larger and the rate of

speed at which business was done increased to

unprecedented levels.


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2 IMPROVEMENT NEEDS FROM THE FIELD , AS WELL AS OFFERINGS ,

DIRECTIVES AND GUIDELINES FROM CENTRAL ORGANISATIONS , DID

NOT ARRIVE AT THEIR DESTINATIONS

New complications began to appear during the mid-1990s, and it took a number of

years for a new challenge to emerge. During this period, the number of employees,

locations and countries continued to grow rapidly. During the same period, the

handful of mainframes, which had previously filled complete data centres, were

replaced by thousands of servers. Instead of a few standard mainframes, thousands of

servers from different vendors, with different operating systems and software tools

had to be managed. The matter was complicated as new computers and software

tools with needed features were released by vendors quicker than the IT

organisations could bring them into production. In order to keep this increasingly

complex environment manageable, to reduce associated costs and risks, and because

clients were demanding it, the further implementation of best practices was given

high priority.

This situation led to the handful of policy and standards documents mentioned

previously being replaced by ever more documents, providing directives1, offerings

and guidelines. What used to be process descriptions of half a page per ITIL process

became documents of many pages.

When employees in the central organisations based in the United States found that

their European colleagues did not execute the directives and offerings as intended,

they demanded the most logical thing: control and policing measures. In Europe,

however, the employees argued that they could not find the up-to-date, concise and

ready-to-use directives, offerings and guidelines they needed to do their job properly.

A few employees, who were positioned between the central organisations in the

United States and the European locations, took the initiative to analyse the situation.

They found that, by passing through a variety of processes, negotiating lengthy

hierarchies and complicated by language and cultural obstacles, too much of the

importance and meaning of the directives, offerings and knowledge was lost.

Additionally, important instructions were mixed with less important ones, thereby

weakening their impact.

1 Policies, strategies, standards, process descriptions and instructions: the type of documents to which compliance was expected


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The communication and compliance

issues described above were a two-

way, not a one-way problem. The same

challenge existed the other way

around. It became increasingly difficult

to incorporate the needs from the field,

lessons learned and innovations into

the central organisations’ operations.

When new directives, offerings and

guidelines were developed that did not

incorporate those contributions, it was

common to see that they were

insufficiently aligned to local needs.

The local employees therefore had

pretty good business reasons not to

execute the directives imposed upon them.

Once again a closer look revealed what was going on. Experience, importance and

knowledge from the field got lost because the combination of software tools,

processes and hierarchies was not suited to communicating importance and the level

of knowledge needed to understand the local situation.

At the end of the day, most of the information both sides needed was available via

websites, emails or in people’s minds. However, those in need of information did not

have the time, network, knowledge or experience to find, research and consolidate

the available information for optimal effect.

The difficulty in accessing the required information, in combination with the speed of

decision making, had consequences. All sorts of decisions, from the workshop floor

level up to investment decisions, had to be made without access to quality

information. This led to unnecessary investments, service issues and costly

corrections. Moreover, best practices such as Service Management, Governance,

Quality Management and Project Management could not function properly, since their

processes required quality directives to be readily available as inputs.

The consequences did not end here. Managers and experts did what they could and

tried to solve these challenges. Managers did it the management way; best practice

experts the best practice way, IT experts the IT way and accountants the accountancy

way. The result was a further increase in the number of processes, control objects,

tools and Web pages. The matter was yet further complicated as the growth rate of

direct and indirect dependences far exceeded the growth rate of the ‘bits and pieces’

that had to be managed. Beyond a certain level of complexity, the impact of changes

could not be predicted any longer.


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Impacted by the increased complexity, management and experts did the most logical

thing; they started simplification efforts within their areas of responsibility and

expertise. However, due to the external dependencies, what was a simplification in

one organisation caused complications and corrective actions elsewhere. What was

one solution became multiple solutions. Simplification was creating more complexity!

In the day-to-day work in the field and up to the highest management levels, agendas

were filled with troubleshooting and corrective actions, leaving insufficient time to

work on productive tasks. Contributing lessons learned made little sense as it

required a considerable effort to get them published, while the chance of the lessons

being found and used was low. The matter was further complicated as more and more

employees found themselves stuck in situations that the process and instruction

writers had not foreseen. These process and instruction writing styles had come with

the traditional best practices, which had been designed at a time when environments

were stable and predictable. Overall, the best practices worked well for highly

repeatable tasks but they failed to align with unpredictable situations, which are

common in complex and dynamic environments.

Together, this led to a communication gap between organisations and, in particular,

between central and local (i.e., field) organisations.


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3 GUIDED SELF-ORGANISATION BRIDGED THE GAP BETWEEN

CENTRAL ORGANISATIONS AND THE FIELD , PREVENTED COSTLY

MISTAKES AND FREED AGENDAS FROM TROUBLES HOOTING

In Europe, a few individuals started initiatives to address the new challenges. They

started from functionality and features that had worked well. They asked questions

such as: “Is there perhaps something better that does the trick, at a fraction of the cost

and effort?” and “What structures are needed that drive the company to act as a single

organisation but also enable quick decision making for the situation at hand?”

Eventually, their bottom-up initiatives came together. They continued locating better

and missing solution elements, until they were satisfied the identified issues could be

overcome without radical changes. They called it “the strategy management process”.

It contained traditional solution elements as well as elements of self-organisation; it

was indeed the first use of ‘Guided Self-Organisation’™. They built their strategy up

gradually through the following levels:

Level 1: Provide quick access to relevant information

Quick access was provided to relevant enterprise-level offerings, directives and guidelines. Users were able to find these documents within a few mouse clicks in a central repository.

Level 2: Improve the knowledge, with the help of Communities of Practice (CoPs)

Offerings, directives and guidelines were updated with the help of CoPs. In the rapidly changing environment, the CoPs published local needs and lessons learned, from the central repository, and contributed this knowledge to offerings, directives and guidelines. When users found a document in the central repository, they also found related lessons learned.

Level 3 − Guided Self-Organisation: Integrate CoPs into Governance

New levels of efficiencies were achieved through integration of CoPs into corporate governance, by making it interesting to participate, and through natural workflows.

The new system went into production for the 30,000 European employees, part of a

120,000-strong global workforce. It provided far-reaching contributions to project

success, client satisfaction and cost savings.

In the next chapters, we explain in more detail how these levels of self-organisation

were achieved and how it helped employees, organisations and best practices to

become more efficient.


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3.1 LEVEL 1: PROVIDE QUICK ACCESS TO RELEVANT INFORMATION

The enterprise directives, offerings and guidelines, which provided critically

important information but were difficult to find when needed, were brought

together in a central repository. About 1,000 documents, with current and

previous versions, were presented on a few Intranet pages. Access was provided

through a menu at a central Intranet page.

A consistent table layout provided a unified look and feel. On each page, the first table

contained the current versions and previous versions that related to things still in

production. A second table contained the archived versions. The browser’s search

function was used to quickly find documents in these tables. To further ease search

challenges, documents that belonged together were brought together in document

sets. This was made visible through the merging of table cells.

Each row contained one document, together with a summary of the document’s

content and other information the visitor might like to know before opening the

document. As many of these documents needed to be updated faster than could be

achieved, additional cells were provided for aging flags and owner updates. Appendix

A illustrates what a typical table looked like.

The tool used was MS Word. It was a matter of creating and maintaining the tables in

MS Word, saving them in a Web format and publishing them on the Web page.

Integrating the repository into other processes was a matter of stating: “Go to the

central repository”. However, it is questionable if anybody ever wrote this into a

process description. It was not in fact necessary, since there was only one such

repository.

With quick access to relevant information, colleagues didn’t waste time searching the

many repositories, reading through old documents or trying to find their way through

a repository they had not used before. Moreover, the argument, “We could not find

directive document ABC.” did not work any longer. In line with these developments, it

helped that the sales organisation modified their bonus system towards favouring

standard solutions.

If you consider implementing Level 1, see Appendix B for a few tips.


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3.2 LEVEL 2: IMPROVE OFFERINGS, DIRECTIVES AND GUIDELINES WITH THE HELP OF

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

With the offerings, directives and guidelines in the central repository, the

next challenge was to keep them up to date, connected to the needs in the

field and connected to client needs. Before this could be achieved, an

infrastructure was needed that enabled employees to connect with each other and to

exchange information.

This infrastructure was provided through a central community directory that

provided access to discussion groups and the ability to register for various email-

based distribution lists. Discussion groups and distribution lists were arranged for

groups such as application development, security and operating systems. One

distribution list – “Technical Leaders” – was by invitation only. It was the group

through which important information was sent for quick distribution to the European

technicians. The experts aspired to be in this group. When somebody had a question

like, “where can I find xyz?” or “where can I get help with challenge abc?” this was the

preferred group to ask. The usual response time was 10 minutes. In addition to this,

easy access to screen sharing and teleconferencing facilities provided effective

communication beyond emails and online discussions.

Once the infrastructure was available, extensive online and email discussions took

place. Although successful, it was clear from the beginning that something additional

was needed, allowing the employees to see their contributions were worthwhile and

followed up. This was where the ‘Communities of Practice’ (CoP) came in. They

brought experts with similar backgrounds and interests together from organisations

across Europe. Each CoP had about 10 members, a formal chairperson and was linked

to a senior manager.

From the online and email discussions and from their day-to-day work, CoP members

collected lessons learned, made them available to central organisations and published

them in the central repository.

As CoPs became known at headquarters, they became an easy way to connect with

European experts. In this way experts in both Europe and at headquarters, who

didn’t know each other previously, could connect with each other. As they became

acquainted, it became easier to get Europeans’ needs accepted at the enterprise level.

Some CoP members got directly involved in the development of enterprise-level

offerings, directives and guidelines.

Colleagues liked to participate and contribute as it eased their work through reduced

nightly calls to fix problems, happy clients and contributions far beyond their normal

roles and career advancement.

If you consider implementing Level 2, see Appendix B for a few tips.


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3.3 LEVEL 3 – GUIDED SELF-ORGANISATION: INTEGRATE COPS INTO GOVERNANCE

Levels 1 and 2 were on a voluntary basis and were sponsored by managers

who saw benefits for their own organisation. The traditional practices,

hierarchies, tools and processes had not been touched. The contributing

employees were bound to be hit by many obstacles. Only a fraction of the value

potential was achievable. To get to the real value, a jump was needed but, a major

change project was not an option. The next step had to be taken without making

radical changes2.

This led to the integration of CoPs into governance. During the approval processes of

enterprise-level offerings, directives and guidelines, CoPs verified those from the

expert perspective and for sufficient alignment with lessons learned, local needs and

client needs. It turned out that a single question was sufficient to drive the central

organisation staff to connect with their European colleagues and to align their

offerings, directives and guidelines to local needs. The question asked was, “How can

we see that the proposal is executable in Europe?”

For those who had done their homework, CoP approval was a case of ticking the box.

Those who had not done their homework had learned that involving European

experts at the beginning of new efforts would ease approval and acceptance in the

field. However there were spin-off effects.

The need to build and maintain bureaucratic processes between the local

organisations and headquarters had become obsolete. Moreover, before the CoPs

were integrated into governance, unexpected directives often came from

headquarters. In such situations, and given the complex nature of the environment,

misalignments and conflicts with local views were common. This gave the European

staff valid business reasons not to execute these directives. However, when local

experts participated in the approval process via the CoPs, it created a different

situation. The typical reaction wasn’t one of, “Let’s find the business reasons why we

cannot execute the directive” but one along the lines of, “What are the benefits for us

and our clients?” A culture shift became visible.

Another task of one of the CoPs was to: 1) initiate workgroups to review the offerings,

directives and guidelines from time to time; 2) concentrate related lessons learned

and improvement needs in terms of what mattered; 3) publish those together with

2 Why a roundabout symbol instead of a green traffic light? Traffic lights turn green and then back to red. Why wait when there is no reason to wait? Roundabouts provide better throughput at lower cost and fewer accidents.


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green, yellow and red flags alongside each document in the central repository (see

Appendix A, last column, for some examples). In this way, those in need of answers to

common questions and lessons learned did not have to waste their precious time with

research efforts. A few clicks and they had access to this information. Once again,

there were spin-off effects.

People often complain about things that do not work as they should. What received

little attention was what did work well. It turned out that the number of yellow- and

red-flagged documents were lower than expected. For green-flagged documents, the

argument that the central organisations ignored local needs did not work anymore.

With yellow- and red flagged documents, local organisations could react in a more

flexible way, as the flag and its associated information identified one or more issues

that should be prevented.

A further example of a CoP activity relates directly to Internet availability, when

clients started requiring 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year service. To management and

even to many experts, it looked like a straightforward matter that the IT architects

should be able to handle. This was one of the reasons why it didn’t have the attention

it should have been given. It turned out to be an extremely complex challenge that

created high-impact availability issues. Architects and managers were in urgent need

of guidance that told them what to do and what to avoid. When one CoP discovered

that nobody was addressing this challenge, it took the initiative.

A few calls and mentioning the prospect of reduced fire-fighting were sufficient to get

the top experts together in a virtual team (they happened to be the people who were

frequently called to do the fire-fighting). The experts translated their knowledge into

strategies and standards. They used a table format (available from [1]3) that allowed

readers to quickly find the specific instructions, their importance, what to do, what to

avoid and why it made sense, from the reader’s perspective, to follow the

instructions. Instead of being told to execute instructions while important questions

remained unanswered, readers could see why it was in their and their client’s

interest, to follow the instructions. They did something else.

With the standard governance practice, the instructions would have been written in

the form “If situation X, then do Y”. Because this was a complex environment involving

complex technology, processes and tools, it was impossible to predict the possible

situations that would occur. Instead, the instructions had to be written in such a way

that management and experts could make the optimal decisions for the situations at

hand. It was written in the form “If situation X, this is the boundary within which to

3 Guided Self-Organisation was originally published as The IT Strategy Management Process – Supporting IT Services through Effective Knowledge Management. The only reason it had IT in the title was that it was unknown whether it would apply to organisations other than IT.


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make decisions. Here is why we think it is beneficial for you, your team and your clients.

If you think this needs adjustment, please have a CoP raise a yellow or red flag”.

Providing rules for making decisions reduced the number of instructions, associated

descriptions and maintenance dramatically while providing the flexibility that

architects and local management needed. What would have been a more than 300-

page tome became 60 pages. A side effect was that many deviation approval needs,

associated bureaucracy and debates became obsolete; yet, it remained clear when

higher-level approval was required. The instructions, together with the information

mentioned above, provided the rules for making decisions. It went into production as

an enterprise-level strategy and standards document. Despite the speed by which

things changed, it remained in production for many years.

The experience provided a way to instruct decision makers and authors when to

write instructions the, “If situation X, then do Y” way versus when to write them the,

“If situation X, this is the boundary within decisions to make...” way. It was a matter of

providing related instructions through a Ground Rule4. Something else became

apparent. There was an easy way to overcome the barrage of existing, “If situation X,

then do Y” instructions that left people stuck in unforeseen situations. It was a matter

of writing a ground rule that made it easy to gain approval to deviate from the norm

when instructions were not designed for the situation at hand. Unfortunately, an

industry development driving for the, “If situation X, then do Y” way prevented this

from going into production. Later, this conflict became the biggest obstacle to

enterprise-level acceptance of Guided Self-Organisation.

You may wonder how the organisation got the employees “on board” and

contributing. One technique was making participation natural by providing features

that eased the daily work. The central repository, the central community directory

mentioned at Level 2 and tools to connect with each other provided such techniques.

Another technique was based on, “What makes contributing worthwhile?” The

prospects of reduced nightly calls, happy clients and career advancement criteria

based on work at the European or enterprise level, rather than the local level, made

contributing attractive. Moreover, those who contributed got credit through a

mention of their names with the associated publications, as well as through becoming

a member of a restricted distribution list or a member of a CoP.

4 Ground rules provide highest-level policies. They have a special place within Guided Self-

Organisation. For further information see [1].


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The most important benefits appear to have been the following:

An environment that enabled staff to quickly find reliable information they

needed to do their job. It didn’t matter whether this was from a people,

organisational, process or best-practice perspective.

An environment that demonstrated organisational listening, organisational

learning, flexibility and quick alignment to the latest needs and lessons learned

(a foundation to trust each other).

An environment through which meaning, importance, experience and

knowledge got to the other side; and, for situations where this did not work,

safety nets that triggered corrective actions (e.g. flagging in the repository,

discussion groups, CoPs concentrating knowledge into what mattered)

Demonstrating a non-linear/open process model that operated by natural

workflows and by making it worthwhile to participate.

Solving high-impact problems at their root cause.

It was at this level where a boost in value was achieved, with countless direct and

indirect effects. For example, employees working from standard architecture designs,

as opposed to reinventing the wheel; best practice processes receiving input

documents they required, but had previously not received; projects that were

successful versus previous projects that had failed one way or the other (due to lack

of quick access to the do’s and don’ts); bureaucratic, resource and time-consuming

processes that were not developed once “simple” techniques made the need for such

processes obsolete.

Level 3 became self-organisation within defined boundaries. A few implementation

tips are in Appendix B.


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4 BRIDGING THE GAP STARTED AT THE COFFEE TABLE

You may wonder how a small group of people, based in Europe and whose budget

allowed for very few background support functions, implemented all these changes

without conducting a big project.

The author, whose name is listed first at the beginning of this paper, participated in

this group. The following is a review from his perspective:

What may look like a carefully planned operation from today’s perspective was an

evolutionary process. We did not have a clear view on how to approach the challenge

at hand, even though it was already common practice for us to identify innovative

solutions that provided the best short and long-term value for: clients, colleagues, the

enterprise and the impacted organisations. We felt that we had to take action and

implement something that provided the best value for all involved. Looking back, it

turns out that somehow we managed to successfully pass through what the authors of

this paper now call the four transitions:

1. From complaints and finger pointing to the problems hiding behind them;

2. From problems (=changeable situations) to the future situations needed;

3. From future situations to a solution framework;

4. From being sceptical to taking action.

In the following paragraphs, we share some of our experiences and learning points

that may be useful for you. We added a small section on the subject of trust.

1. From complaints and finger pointing to the problems hiding behind them

We wanted to know what was going on in the field, and we wanted to have an

overview. We wanted to see both the trees and the forest. At coffee and lunch tables,

during meetings and when travelling to other locations, we listened and asked what

problems our colleagues were experiencing regarding information that was supposed

to come from organisations other than their own. We asked what problems the

owners of such information were experiencing when they expected their information

to be used. We listened carefully and heard how managers and technicians, central

and local departments, were all blaming each other for not doing what one expected

from the other. We also collected cost and impact indications. Finally, we listened to

what worked well.

A typical complaint was this, “The field does not follow the policies, strategies and

standards”. In the field we heard, “We cannot find them [the policies, strategies and

standards]. When we find them they are outdated, confusing or conflicting”. Both

groups said, “The others are not doing what they are supposed to do.” We discovered

that there were many such complaints, all real and relevant, but impossible to change.


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The complaint that the field did not follow the policies led to a demand for command

and control measures to ensure compliance. Such initiatives got started and the

inevitable happened...they failed!

Instead, we tried to find out what went wrong in such situations. In this case,

command and control measures were worthless when the instructions could not be

found and, if they were accessible, were outdated, confusing or conflicting. Without

solving those issues, global clients were bound to get different services in different

locations and delivery promises were bound to be missed. The focus had to be on

ensuring global clients got consistent services and that promised services could be

delivered to.

Such discussions led to the following question. Why did projects keep failing for the

same reasons, despite project management methods and skills having been

improved? We discovered that the improvement efforts had been focusing on

improving project management. However, a substantial part of the problem came

from outside project management. The lack of easy access to quality offerings,

directives, guidelines and associated ‘lessons learned’ was one of the reasons why

projects were continually confronted with more issues than they were able to handle.

It didn’t end there.

Something similar was going on with various best practices. Service management

(ITIL), governance, quality management, risk management and the like required up-

to-date, concise and ready to use offerings, directives and guidelines as input to their

processes. Without those, these processes could not function properly.

From these discussions, we created a list of 42 issues. We consolidated them into six

root causes (some say problems= issues; in this context, issues and problems are

largely the same. The full list is available from the IT Strategy Management Process

publication [1]). When we then discussed problem situations with the full list at hand,

the basic question was, “Is this what is going on?” The usual answer was ‘Yes’. This

opened the door to another important question, “Do you want to continue like this?“

2. From problems (=changeable situations) to the future situations needed

With the changeable situations identified, the next step was to transfer them into

desired future situations (goals). This was rather straightforward.

The full list, available from [1] provided a useful tool. With the list, it became possible

to assess whether projects and operational tasks, supposedly there to address

challenges of cross-organisational communication, collaboration and compliance,

were able to deliver to their value proposition. –An initiative, such as the one outlined

here, may provide the possibility to save a substantial amount of money quickly and

to move some of it to your initiative. For a tip, see Appendix C.


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3. From future situations to a solution framework

We could have entered into a problem-by-problem solution approach but the detail

involved by going down that path would have complicated matters and was therefore

not an option.

In a short focused meeting we observed the patterns (e.g. the high-impact problems;

the six root causes, service impact, unnecessary cost, missed revenue opportunities

etc.) and their desired future situations. We also remembered the solutions that

worked well and took a step back. From an open problem-solving perspective, we

asked, “What is the lowest-effort but highest-impact solution for the whole?”

Amazingly, the solution framework was identified in half a day. It was a matter of

integrating high-impact techniques and features of the best solutions into a single

overall solution and then filling a few gaps.

A pleasant surprise came later, when our colleagues came up with problems we had

not considered that were also handled by the solution we had devised. It turned out

those problems were at a lower-level and were tied to the root causes and issues we

had already identified and addressed.

4. From being sceptical to action

Many colleagues were sceptical as to whether or not this solution could be made to

work. Next to natural workflows, and making it worthwhile to participate, one of the

key factors that persuaded employees to get on board were the two committed

individuals who had a clear view of the ultimate solution framework, along with

passionate co-workers whose on-going activities demonstrated progress and value.

If you consider starting an initiative like this, even if it is “only” for Level 1 or 2, a few

tips are available from Appendix C.

Creating Trust

Creating trust started by accepting that documents in the central repository would

require updates by the time they were approved, and that they could never be

perfect. Consequently, we saved time by not driving for perfection. Instead we

decided, “Let’s approve them”. If there is an update or issue, it can be added to the

repository along with a green, yellow or red flag. This provided a feature of critical

importance.

Flags and associated information were added to the repository and feedback became

visible in offerings, directives and guidelines; colleagues could see their contributions

had impact and that the organisation was listening. It turned out that listening,


19

followed by impact or action (i.e. it was easier to get deviation approval in the field

with a yellow or red flagged document) was a vital feature in building trust among the

employees.

Trust was also a matter of employees getting to know each other well enough that

they could count on each other. Face-to-face engagement at least once a year helped

to form lasting business relationships. All of the above combined with short

collaborative chains of experts between the field and central organisations helped in

making a difference. The latter was established as experts from the countries

involved became members of the European Communities of Practice and established

working relationships with the central organisations, the European organisations,

their CoP peers and their co-workers in various locations.


20

5 EPILOGUE

In this chapter we, the authors, link the story of self-organisation at EDS to today’s

perspective.

A bottom-up initiative brought Guided Self-Organisation into production for the

company’s 30,000 European employees and linked it into the approval of enterprise-

level offerings and directives. It covered the core business and IT. The level achieved

was somewhere between Level 2 and 3. Proof of concept was achieved for further

Level 3 components. The next step was to implement Level 3 enterprise-wide, which

would provide the basis for implementation of the remaining components, and for the

integration of Guided Self-Organisation into the DNA of EDS.

While making three steps forward, two steps backwards and three steps forward into

enterprise-level acceptance, unexpected challenges emerged during the fourth year of

operations. With the increased speed at which the business operated, senior

managers changed quicker than new managers could be brought on board. Another

challenge was that, following the advice of industry experts, clients demanded the

implementation of the latest best practices and associated certifications. Those got

the higher priority. As they were implemented, more and more decisions, previously

taken by human beings, were “hardcoded” to the, “If situation X, then do Y”, way into

software tools, processes and directives. While Guided Self-Organisation supported

this approach for predictable situations, unpredictable situations required, “If

situation X, this is the boundary within which to make decisions...”. After years in

production, the barrage of obstacles became too many and Guided Self-Organisation

disintegrated.

A surprise came in 2008. Gartner, the leading research and advisory company for the

IT industry, said, “Current Programme and Portfolio Management (PPM) best practices

are optimised for a world gone by”, and advised that governance should change from

making individual decisions to developing the rules for making decisions [11].

Remarkably, Gartner’s advice was contrary to the advice given by industry experts

only a few years earlier, which advocated best practices based on linear processes,

predefined decisions and control measures. All of a sudden, the most challenging

conflict Guided Self-Organisation was hit by became a feature advised by Gartner.

Four years earlier Guided Self-Organisation had shown how to provide the rules and

associated knowledge for making decisions. –Unfortunately, Gartner’s advice for

providing the rules for making decisions came too late for EDS.

Gartner wasn’t the only one with such radically different advice. In Good to Great [2],

Jim Collins advised organisations to build a culture of freedom and responsibility as

well as building red flag mechanisms that turn information into information that

cannot be ignored. In the US Department of Defense’s Power to the Edge [9], Alberts


21

and Hayes published a new command and control doctrine for the United States

military. It involved the empowerment of individuals at the edge of an organisation,

such that the individuals can make the optimal decision for the situation at hand. In

Management 3.0 [4], Jurgen Appelo advised organisations to apply principles of agile

software development [14] to manage agile teams, one of them being, “individuals and

interactions over processes and tools”; another, “responding to change over following a

plan”. These were features provided through Guided Self-Organisation.

In today’s situation of traditional best practices being criticised for being optimised

for a world gone by, open best practices getting attention and lots of innovative

initiative around, the field of best practices and innovative initiatives can be rather

confusing. In that respect, we invite you to review Appendix D: Traditional Versus

Open Best Practices Versus Innovative Initiatives. We further invite you to investigate

how Guided Self-Organisation could be utilised to integrate the high-impact features

of traditional best practices, open best practices and innovative initiatives into the

DNA of an enterprise. We also suggest examining how Guided-Self-Organisation could

be used to direct what type of features provide value, versus when the same features

are counterproductive.

A further consideration relates to the countless initiatives that were started to

address the big business challenges of today. Following the disappointing results of

traditional initiatives, a new breed of initiatives can now be observed. Starting in

2010 and in line with the new advice of the experts mentioned above, we came across

initiatives that went well beyond the boundaries of the traditional solution

approaches. What we find fascinating is that despite the experts coming from

different backgrounds they appear to reach similar conclusions and head in the same

direction. Remarkably, much of this isn’t new. The following text introduces two such

initiatives and a development, all of which have attracted our attention.

In The Netherlands, a group of senior project managers and advisors formed a think

tank called the, ‘Denktank Project NL’, their goal being to increase trust in large

projects in The Netherlands. Admittedly, we are biased as we are active members of

this think tank. However, as far as we know, it is the only initiative that has been able

to identify patterns as to why projects consistently fail and yet some projects are

exceptionally successful. Among the main characteristics of the successful projects in

complex environments were: self-organisation; plan for the unpredictable; and

building trust amongst all parties involved.

Next, there is the ‘Stoos Network’, with its origin in the field of agile software

development. This different way of going about software development led to

substantially improved project success rates and better alignment with user needs.

Jurgen Appelo realised that the techniques used conflicted with common

management practices. In his book, Management 3.0 [4], he identifies the

management techniques needed to manage agile teams. With the results seen so far

http://www.stoosnetwork.org/


22

and the potential this could have for the big business challenges, the prospects are

exciting. Four individuals initiated the Stoos Network. Stoos’ main message became:

“There has to be a better way”. Today, a little bit over a year later, it has many active

contributors and some 1,800 followers on LinkedIn.

One of the challenges almost all open best practices and innovative initiatives are

confronted with is that of being expected to operate within the problem solving

framework of a world gone by. Albert Einstein once said, “The significant problems

we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created

them.” [17]. Indeed, the question at hand is this, “How do you open fixed ways of

thinking such that innovative solutions become acceptable?”

In the course of time, we have come across methods that help to develop productive

interaction, unlock energy and establish positive patterns. Although these were not

available at that time, they would have helped to speed up and deepen the process of

self organisation described in this case, which is why we mention them here.

One such method is a planning technique based on the principle of transforming

endless discussion into coherent action of the relevant stakeholders and experts as

mentioned in Chapter 4: Appendix C gives some more tips and tools.

We have also seen the effectiveness of developing leadership based on the principles

of the ‘Three Laws of Performance’. This approach enables us to listen authentically,

open our minds for out-of-the box thinking and to become persons of integrity and

leaders people want to work with.

With this paper, we do not pretend to show that we have a ‘one-size-fits-all solution’.

Given the complexities involved, every environment is different. Solutions have to be

tailored by the actors to their specific environment and there will be different

solutions. However, we discovered that this case of bridging the gap provides a good

platform to share experiences and to create new courses of action. In the Appendices,

we have put together some tips, tools and examples that can be used to make things

happen. Enjoy!

For further information, to facilitate the recognition of the business problem or to

‘simply’ speed your initiative up, feel free to contact the authors.

Bridging The Gap Between Central Organisations and the Field

23

Appendix A LAYOUT EXAMPLE OF THE CENTRAL REPOSITORY

Following is an example of the central repository’s layout at Level 1. Clicking on the title opens the document. The community feedback in the last

column came from Levels 2 and 3.

Document Set

Document Title, Description Owner Version, Status,

Date

Tier Applicability: Organisations -------------------

Locations

Compli-ance

Confidentiality

Approval Status

Document Status

Owner Age Community

Desktops PCs and mobile devices: General

Desktop and mobile devices: Policies

Contains the security, backup, and replacement policies.

John Pitt

2.1 Current

21-Aug-05

1 All -------------------

All

Expected Internal Approved

Desktop and mobile devices: Hardware Standards

Contains the standard devices for desktop PCs and laptops.

Pratt Denver

4.0 Current

12-Jan-04

2 All -------------------

All

Expected Internal Approved The next version is expected mid-December 2012.

The small laptop configurations

create productivity losses 20 times the cost of a user-

aligned laptop.

Desktop and mobile devices: Software Standards

Contains the standard software packages for various user groups.

Mike Smith

3.5 Current

14-Feb-05

2 All -------------------

All

Expected Internal Approved Software tool “ABC” will be replaced by “XYZ” as “ABC” is too cumbersome to use.

Desktops PCs and mobile devices: Messaging

Desktop and mobile devices: Messaging Policies

Contains email, security, backup and archiving of specific policies for messaging, such as email and chatting.

Jane Donavan

5.1 Current

15-Mar-04

1 All -------------------

All

Expected Internal Approved Version 6 is under development. Check for conflicts with V 6 draft.

Contact the messaging team for advice on conflicting

situations.

Desktop and mobile devices: Messaging Policies (Draft)

Contains email, security, backup and archiving of specific policies for messaging, such as email and chatting.

Jane Donavan

6.0.2

19-Sep-05

1 All -------------------

All

Internal Draft Section 3.4 needs

alignment with new EU privacy law by 31-Dec-

2005.

FIGURE 1: REPOSITORY LAYOUT EXAMPLE


24

Appendix B IMPLEMENTATION − TIPS

The following are implementation tips for levels 1 to 3.

Level 1 Tips

Tip L1.1 – Make an impact list

For potential use during your discussions and for the business case, make a list of the

direct and indirect activities, delays, costs, reinventing-the-wheel projects, fire-

fighting and service issues that become obsolete when the enterprise-level documents

are presented as illustrated per Level 1. There is no need to work this out in great

detail. Writing it down in bullet form should do. Include guesstimates for cost and

resource savings where possible.

Tip L1.2 – Keeping the green, yellow and red flagging up to date

Whether and to what extent the flagging can be done at Level 1 depends on your

organisation. When you do it, be sure to have structures in place to keep the flagging

and the associated information up to date. When you don’t have those structures, do

not provide these flags. It will create credibility issues down the road. As a rule of

thumb, owner and aging flags should be possible. To incorporate community

feedback, Level 2 may be a necessity.

Tip L1.3 – Maintaining the repository

Somebody will need to keep the repository up to date and ensure consistency. For the

purpose of consistency across the repository, this function includes coordination and

advisory activities with document owners.

Tip L1.4 – Linking documents versus including documents in the repository

Document owners may dislike the prospect of making their publications available via

the central repository only. A compromise would be to have the repository open the

documents via a link from the owner’s Web page. This does, however, create broken

links, as well as user confusion, and increases the maintenance needs.

A better possibility is that of simply copying the documents into the central

repository. As the users find the central repository easy to use and reliable, this is the

place where they will search first. Pointing the document owner to the benefits of


25

easier communication and easier acceptance by the users should help as well. When

this still creates issues, a further possibility is that of local organisations saying

“Sorry, we need easy access to the documents we are expected to use. From now on

we will only use those directives, offerings and guidelines that are in the central

repository.”

Tip L1.5 – Using a document management system

A document management system may be available and the central repository can be

made available with this tool. There are, however, some things to consider.

For the tool specialist, it is easy and tempting to activate features that will look

beneficial. Down the road, however, they can create maintenance burdens and costly

corrections for which there may be no budget. As a guideline (one that should not be

tweaked and twisted), the tool needs to align to user needs, not the users to the tool.

Whether the tool delivers to the user needs should be judged by a few critical users

from outside the IT department.

One non-optional requirement is this: “I found one document. Show me the full

document set within one mouse click.” That is the documents making up a service

offering or a technical architecture (see also Appendix A). As it is easy to add

documents that apply to a country or location, it makes sense to make those available

through the same search. In that case, the following requirement needs to be

delivered as well: “Show me the documents that apply to me within a few mouse clicks,

and only those.” In other words, the user, located in London, must not get confused by

presenting documents that do not apply to London.

Moreover, there is a trap you should be aware of. Document management systems

can be set up for the document owners, for approval workflow and for visitors who

are searching for information. Rigorous testing may ensure these three functions

work via a single application. And…this may work well for a while.

At the next reorganisation, however, changes may be needed to adjust the application

to the needs of the new organisation(s). Those changes may look straightforward and

easy to execute. The trouble comes from the complex dependencies between the

three functions. Changing something in the workflow can easily have implications on

the user presentation. Documents that previously showed up in a particular search

may no longer be able to be found. As more and more such problems occur, a barrage

of old problems reopens. For as long as neither the document management tool nor

the application are designed and tested to handle this challenge, it is advisable to

separate document owner, workflow and user presentation into three different

“applications.” A manual transfer of the documents between these applications may

well be the lower cost solution, making organisational and other changes easier.


26

Level 2 Tips

Tip L2.1 – Selecting tools

When selecting tools for screen sharing, online discussions, information handling and

the like, it is of critical importance that these tools encourage collaboration as

opposed to discouraging it. Strangely enough, some popular tools discourage

collaboration as they are user-unfriendly. As a rule of thumb, such tools have to be

easy for occasional users to use.

Care should also be observed when a tool that is popular on the Internet will be used

within an organisation. The Internet may have 10,000 to 1,000,000 more content

items and users than a company with 1,000 to 100,000 employees (whatever the

actual numbers are.) What works on the Internet should not be expected to deliver

comparable results on the Intranet. Using such tools needs a clear understanding of

how to make it work permanently, when the colleagues are pressed for time, and

when priorities and organisational responsibilities change.

Tip L2.2 – Background support

To make Level 2 work, a little bit of background support is needed. A central

directory needs to be maintained and CoP Web pages need to be updated.

Tip L2.3 – Keeping Level 2 alive after the initial enthusiasm is gone

To avoid reducing participation, disintegration and credibility loss, only implement

Level 2 when you are confident there is sufficient commitment and there are

sufficient incentives for the parties involved to make it work on an on-going basis. If

that confidence cannot be obtained, stay at Level 1 or go straight to Level 3.


In the list identified per tip L1.1, add the direct and indirect activities, delays, cost,

reinventing-the-wheel projects, fire-fighting and service issues that become obsolete

when, in the central repository aging flags are set; some document owners provide

updates under the “Document Status: Owner” column of Appendix A and CoPs

provide lessons learned and improvement needs in the last column.


27

Tip L2.5 – Find the balance between online-only and face-to-face

communication

One of the challenges encountered was one in which German and Dutch employees

wrote something in English and attempted to express it in a positive way. For native

English speakers, who rarely had contact with their German and Dutch colleagues, it

surprisingly appeared to be negatively worded.

Those who knew each other understood how the message was truly meant to be. It

was these small details that determined whether or not employees would collaborate

and do what they promised they would do. Similar things happened between

individuals in different organisations. Getting to know each other through face-to-face

meetings and at social events taking place at least once a year drastically reduced this

challenge.

Level 3 Tips

Tip L3.1 – Design Guidelines

You can build Level 3 from scratch or you can use the IT Strategy Management Process

publication as a template [1]. Whatever the choice, following are a few design

guidelines:

As few changes to the existing environment as possible;

As much central direction as needed, as little as possible yet just enough to

make the enterprise deliver consistent, competitive and quality

services/products as well as to act as a single organisation;

As much flexibility as is needed to meet local and client needs without

jeopardizing consistent, competitive and quality services/products;

Quick decision making at the optimal level and for the situation at hand: Senior

management agendas should be free from decision making that can be handled

at lower levels;

Integration of ideas, innovations, local/client needs and lessons learned into

the services and products, as well as into the supporting directives;

Level 3 implementation and execution within timeframes acceptable in the

Information Age.

One Guided Self-Organisation implementation per area that requires staff to

collaborate across organisational boundaries; that is, one per core business or

business line, one for IT, one for HR and so forth, as well as one for all

employees.


28

Tip L3.2 – Accept that every environment is different

When you start a guided self-organisation initiative, it is important to have the

following in the back in your mind: By their nature, the environments that need Level

3 solutions are complex and dynamic. Although the environment contains many

common things, each individual situation is different. The solution has to be tailored

to the specific environment and it has to be updated as the environment changes.

Review and adjust the identified solution until there is confidence it will be able to

overcome the issues identified. Redo the exercise once a year.

Tip L3.3 – Old documents remain in production

Documents that were developed prior to Level 3 going into production can remain in

production. They should be aligned when a non-trivial update is needed.

Tip L3.4 – Handling “If situation X, then do Y”-type instructions

Many existing documents can contain “If situation X, then do Y”-type instructions.

While such instructions remain valid for predictable situations, they create

bureaucracy and conflicts for unpredictable situations. This challenge can be

overcome through a top-level policy along the lines of, “a strong business case for

deviation approval exists when an instruction is not designed for the situation at

hand. In such cases and with the wider implications in mind, deviations can be

approved at the local level.” (or the level suited for the particular environment).


In the list identified per Tip L2.4, add the direct and indirect activities, delays, cost,

projects, fire-fighting and service issues that become obsolete when the flags in the

repository are integrated into objectives, goals and balanced score cards; when

central organisations are driven to deliver services and solutions that are aligned to

local needs; when decision making takes place at the optimal level; and when local

organisations use repository content proactively.

Establish each item’s impact on the competitive position of your company in bullet

form.

Create a simple drawing of how ideas, innovations and reusable information flow

through Level 3 and how Level 3 drives its use (for instance, reusable information,

such as the documentation of a successful project, is published in the same repository

and maintained the same way as the directives.)

Create a third list that shows how talented employees are identified and how the

enterprise can benefit from the talent its employees contain.


29

Appendix C STARTING AT THE COFFEE TABLE − TIPS

Tip I – Creating a problem list

As you see challenges similar to those discussed in this paper, you can start collecting

complaints and identifying the real problems hiding behind them. A workshop can

speed things up. You can also use the 42 issues available from [1]. Since every

environment is different, it is advisable to begin a brainstorming session without the

42 issues and then introduce them when the brainstorming dries up. Moreover, try to

get answers to these questions: “Do clients get, from within our company, incentives

to move to a competitor?” and “Is the company’s competitive position at risk?” If any

of these questions is answered with “yes”, add it to your problem list.

You can use the table format from [1]. However, the technique of problem trees, with

the highest-impact problems appearing at the top, may provide an easier-to-

understand overview of the situation at hand. In turn, this makes it easier to identify

the solution framework. An example of a problem tree is shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 3 illustrates a solution framework.

Tip II – Saving a substantial amount of money quickly

With the environment-specific problem list at hand, you have a powerful tool. Could it

be that hundreds of thousands to a few million could be saved by adjusting projects

and operational tasks to what they can truly deliver and by stopping those that are

bound to fail? With the environment-specific list of problem situations at hand, what

you can do is to assess projects and operational tasks that are supposed to address

challenges in the fields of communication and cross-organisational collaboration.

Projects and operational tasks in the following areas may provide interesting

candidates: Strategy/standards development and compliance; knowledge

management; document management; the Intranet; IT and business alignment;

control measures; taxonomy; improvement efforts for various best practices; cost

savings initiatives; re-organisations; bureaucracy and complexity reduction efforts.

With projects identified for adjustment, the following can happen: Project managers

and owners, trained and expected to deliver to what they have promised, may want to

go through great length to deliver to the promise. What they are probably unaware of

is that there is a way that can leave them in a stronger position than does delivering

as promised. You can help them make it happen.


30

Here is how it works [13]: A word (promise) that cannot be met can still be honoured

by informing all parties involved and by cleaning up the mess. As people (in this case:

project managers and owners) honour their word, trust will materialize almost

instantly. The interesting thing about it is that you actually create trust more rapidly

if you fail to keep your word but you honour it, because this is always so surprising to

people.

For first-time use, we advise you to involve somebody who has experience with this

technique.

Tip III – Creating a convincing business case

Tip II may be sufficient to get your initiative going; although, in today’s environments,

it can be challenging to keep it moving forward. Moreover, business cases acceptable

before the turn of the century may be insufficient today. Following is an approach

that could make the difference.

Bring a few senior managers into one room, together with the employees who are

bearing the brunt of problem situations. Start with the first transition. As complaints

and the hidden problems are identified, and as the participants experience how

smaller problems built up through the problem tree to high-impact problems and the

extent of the damage becomes “visible”, the door opens for the following question:

“Can we afford to continue this way?” At this point, it will be hard to say “yes”. This

opens the door to go through the remaining transitions. As Albert Simard said in a

LinkedIn contribution: “Once the members see how it works, the rest, as they say, is

history”.

The main challenge of this approach is in the first step. Before you do it, consider

training or have somebody facilitate it who is experienced in the four transitions.

Tip IV – Understanding Level 3 prevents traps for Level 1 and 2-only

implementations

In your environment, are staff members having difficulty finding information they

need to do their job? Are departments blaming each other for not doing what one

department expects from the other? Have there been initiatives that tried to solve

these challenges? Then, they have failed, most likely because there was an insufficient

understanding of the issues involved, and they may not have had an overall solution

framework available to work to. Hence the importance of gaining a decent

understanding of Level 3 before designing Level 1 or 2. Alternatives are that of

obtaining Level 1 training and/or involving somebody experienced with a Level 3

implementation.


31

Tip V – Have a few elevator speeches readily available

It will help to have a few elevator speeches, tailored to the specific environment and

audiences, readily available. In addition to the information available throughout this

paper and through references of Appendix E, here are a few further ideas and

references you can use:

Why waste hundreds of thousands to a few million when a small effort can

identify what can be stopped and, by doing so, taking causes of frustrations

away?

In the information age, organisations able to unlock enterprise knowledge are

bound to be the winners in the market.

“Putting knowledge into action” (David Gurteen).

“On average, the 200 biggest companies are losing an estimated 10.2% of their

profit (EBITDA) as a result of the bad (value-destructive) form of complexity.

That is $1.2bn of lost profits on average per firm.” [10]

“Afraid of losing control? Get over it! Control is an illusion.” (Gartner) [12]


32

FIGURE 2: PROBLEM TREE EXAMPLE


33

Assumptions

Contribution to company strategy

Clients trust the company as a top-quality service provider

Market share increased

Benefits for clients and company

Client knows: Best possible support to make his business grow

Company: Productivity of colleagues increased

Service improvement

Company delivers IT services as promised New services fit clients’ needs

Performance of actors

Local service delivery processes are consistent with the needs of global clients

Services are ‘quickly’ adapted to client needs

Success rate of projects increased considerably

Business opportunities enter production quickly

Service-level agreements are realistic

What we do differently

Migrate the relevant “compliance-expected documents” to a single location

Consolidate and show feedback on instructions and standards (traffic lights)

Re-assess projects based on issue list and lessons learned

Present community feedback in such a way that it cannot be ignored

Sales focus on selling standard solutions

Translate ‘community knowledge’ into strategies and standards

Introduce structure to adapt instructions and policy (ground rules)

Integrate technical communities into the development of company directives

Develop new opportunities with clients

Introduce “low effort/high impact” rules for whole company

Adapt instructions to the optimal level of decision making for all situations

Integrate knowledge exchange in natural workflows

Evaluate the contribution of old and new opportunities to business success

Make it worthwhile to be ‘compliant’

Information needed

All instructions in a single repository (one per: production, IT, HR, Finance)

Status information of all documents

Lessons learned per topic

Health dashboard of repository content

IT activities

FIGURE 3: EXAMPLE OF A LOGICAL FRAMEWORK: TOWARDS GUIDED SELF-ORGANISATION IN A COMPANY


34

Appendix D TRADITIONAL VERSUS OPEN BEST PRACTICES VERSUS

INNOVATIVE INITIATIVES

Quite a bit of confusion can be observed in the field of best practices. While some

groups argue that best practices need to be better applied; other groups argue that

the same best practices are too theoretical, too bureaucratic and deliver insufficient

value. In addition, there is a group that says traditional best practices/methods are

optimised for a time gone by. Those in need of effective solutions are overloaded with

conflicting advice. In that respect, we invite you to look into this challenge as follows:

Group Observed Patterns Examples

Traditional best practices/methods

Process and compliance over common business sense and agility

Strength: Very effective with highly repeatable tasks and undisputed definitions

Weakness: Difficult to predict situations; non-linear dependencies; time is needed to adjust to new developments

Governance

Service Management (ITIL)

Project Management

Quality Management

Open best practices/methods

Common sense, self-organisation, speed and results over restrictive processes, standards and compliance

Strength: Effective with difficult-to-predict situations

Weakness: What works in a certain space may not work when extended to the wider enterprise; too much freedom leading to different locations heading different directions

Agile Software Development

Communities of Practice (CoPs)

The Cynefin Framework

The New Way of Working (Dutch: “Het Nieuwe Werken” see for example [18])

Value Engineering

Innovative initiatives/methods

Opening the mind for fresh solution thinking, self-organisation, utilizing the human mind and “everything is possible”

Usually run by passionate individuals or small teams and through networks

Management 3.0 [4]

Mental coaching

Constructive Dialogue: Transforming endless discussion into coherent action.

Knowledge Cafes

Plan B

The Stoos Network

The New European Way of Organising (Dutch: “het Rijnlands model“)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_engineering

http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/services-kcafes

http://www.actplanb.com/

http://www.stoosnetwork.org/

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rijnlands_model


35

Group Observed Patterns Examples

An emerging new generation of practices/methods complementing each other

(see above) Management 3.0

Constructive Dialogue

The Three Laws of Performance (mental coaching) [15]

Value Engineering

The New Way of Working

New European Way of Organising

A different and related grouping is that of technology-centric approaches (Intranets,

Wikis, content management systems) and people centric approaches (Communities of

Practice, knowledge cafes) [8]. At senior management levels and headquarters, a

preference can be observed for traditional best practices and technology-centric

approaches. Locations and employees seem to prefer innovative and people-centric

approaches. The open best practices are somewhere in between.

Noteworthy are Management 3.0 and Plan B. They show attention to lessons learned

and issues to overcome in the space between organisations.

The challenge is on to select truly efficient practices, methods and innovative

initiatives that are suited for the particular environment, tune them to the specific

environment and integrate them in such a way that, together, they deliver a value far

beyond the value possible from the individual practices, methods and tools.


36

Appendix E REFERENCES

1. The IT Strategy Management Process. E. Oetringer. Van Haren Publishing. Zaltbommel.

2004.

2. Good to great. Jim Collins. London, United Kingdom: Random House Business Books.

2001.

3. How the mighty fall. Jim Collins. London, United Kingdom: Random House Business

Books. 2009.

4. Management 3.0 – Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders. Jurgen Appelo.

Boston. United States: Pearson Education, Inc. 2011

5. “10 Lessons Learned”. Daphne Depassé. Congres Kennis in Praktijk. 27-Sep-2012.

Rotterdam, Netherlands. Presentation.

6. “Is there a problem with traditional KM projects?” David Griffiths. Blog. 17-Jan-2013.

http://t.co/wgkEyoEd

7. “Hierarchies are Not Always the Best Way”. Nick Obolensky. Video. 17-January-2013. http://illustra.tv/2013/01/hirearchies-are-not-always-the-best-way.

8. “Social KM – de tools en de mensen”. David Gurteen. Congres Kennis in Praktijk. 27-

Sep-2012. Rotterdam, Netherlands. Presentation.

9. Power to the Edge – Command... Control... in the Information Age. David S. Alberts,

Richard E. Hayes. Department of Defence. Command and Control Research Program

(CCRP). 2003, 2004, 2005. Download: http://www.dodccrp.org/.

10. “The Global Simplicity Index: 10.2%” – The Hidden Cost of Complexity. Simplicity

Partnership LLP. 2011. Download: http://www.simplicitypartnership.com

11. “Projects and Programs: The Future Must Be Smaller, Faster and Easier”. Gartner

Symposium 2008, Barcelona, Spain. Presentation.

12. “The 10 Most Difficult Problems to Solve by 2015”. Gartner Symposium 2008,

Barcelona, Spain. Presentation.

13. “Integrity: Without It Nothing Works”. Michael C. Jensen. Harvard Research and

Barbados Group Working Paper. 2009. Download: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1511274.

14. Manifesto for Agile Software Development. K. Beck et al. 2001.

www.agilemanifesto.org

15. The three laws of performance. S. Saffron, D Logan. Jossey-Bass, Wiley Imprint. San

Francisco.

16. “On the planning crisis: systems analysis of the ‘first and second generations”. Horst

Rittel. Bedriftsokonomen nr. 8, 1972.

17. The New Quotable Einstein. A. Calaprice. Princeton University Press and the Hebrew

University of Jerusalem. 2005.

18. “RaboUnplugged – Het nieuwe werken binnen de Rabobank: Effecten op

werkbeleving onderzocht”. W. de Groot, J. van de Weijer. Congres

Gezondheitsmanagement. Presentatie. 2010.

http://t.co/wgkEyoEd

http://illustra.tv/2013/01/hirearchies-are-not-always-the-best-way

http://www.dodccrp.org/

http://www.simplicitypartnership.com/

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1511274

http://www.agilemanifesto.org/


37

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Eugen Oetringer – Effective solutions to complex challenges

Analyst, Information Architect, Coach

ComDyS Business Services

A common solution approach for complex challenges is to split them into supposedly

manageable parts. This works well with stable challenges. With complex challenges, however,

important aspects located between the parts receive little attention until deadlines become

tight. This can have devastating consequences. Eugen is driven by the prospect of

understanding how the complex system operates by identifying its fundamental patterns, and

by integrating effective solutions of the parts (tools, processes and human aspects) such that

the overall solution delivers a value far beyond the value of the individual solutions.

Eugen is an active member in the “Complexity” workgroup at Denktank Project NL.

E-mail: [email protected]

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/eoetringer

Charles de Monchy – Transforming endless discussion into constructive

dialogue

Planning Facilitator, Coach

De Monchy & Bakker

Charles enjoys facilitating people who want to get a complex idea off the ground. He likes to

get opposing parties into a room, get their conflicting views and complaints transformed into

changeable situations, and see them leaving with a solid solution framework identified.

Charles is an active member in the “Complexity” workgroup at Denktank Project NL.

E-mail: [email protected]

LinkedIn: nl.linkedin.com/pub/charles-de-monchy/2/1a9/122

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