When a large organization rapidly grows through acquisition, it acquires more than a new book of business. It also acquires the many processes each newly acquired company has been using to do its work. Very often, these processes are different from the way the parent company has always done things, leading to inconsistencies, inefficiency, and confusion. Standardizing processes across a growing organization is a tough challenge, but when accomplished with the right framework and approach, the benefits can be tremendous.
APQC’s Executive Director, Advisory Services, Sarina Paul once led such a charge as an APQC client. From 2011-2014, she was group general manager, quality and performance excellence, for Transfield Services, a 26,000 plus-employee, Australia-based company providing global operations, maintenance, and construction services to the resources, energy, industrial, infrastructure, property, and defense sectors.
Witnessing Transfield’s aggressive growth during her tenure, Paul had seen many challenges arising from a “patchwork quilt” of inconsistent processes that had entered the organization through acquisition. With a massive SAP implementation about to launch, Transfield needed to get its processes in order, streamline delivery, and maximize efficiency.
The Process Journey
The first big challenge in implementing the new framework was getting a handle on the current state of the company’s worldwide processes.
“We were putting our arms around what processes we had, understanding how we would then place those in the PCF, removing duplication, and identifying some of the gaps,” Paul explains. “Outside of that was the education of the masses, and demystifying the complexity of the PCF so that people could see that once we’d done the hard work and gotten everything classified and cleaned up, we had a blueprint or X-ray of the organization in process form, and that it was incredibly powerful.”
Once stakeholders were identified, gaining their buy-in was critical to implementing this massive performance improvement effort. To achieve it, the organization gave people ownership of “their” sections of the PCF. By making process leaders responsible for maintaining, supporting, and improving a specific process; they were developing a powerful asset for the organization and became champions of their areas of expertise. This proved especially effective for overcoming resistance, as well as some individuals’ tendency to hoard intellectual property.
“It wasn’t a small group of people building a new frontier; it was the collective organization that was part of building this,” Paul says. “That was incredibly powerful, because people will buy into what they help build.”
A Culture Shift
Implementing the new process framework required reshaping people’s thinking throughout the organization, at all levels. The aim was to create a culture focused on being agile and process-driven, allowing the company to be first to market and provide a consistent level of service to clients, regardless of industry.
“Don’t assume you can get up one morning and say, ‘I’m going to change the world,’ without thinking about approaches to support that activity,” Paul says. “You can’t look at process change without looking at culture change. Because at the end of the day, you’re building a new organization that will start to behave and manage and work differently in order to be successful.”
Developing a sustaining organization also depends on ensuring that knowledge survives well beyond the employment of any one individual. To make all of the resulting process, knowledge, and quality information easily accessible by everyone in the organization in perpetuity, Transfield created a single, IT-enabled portal.
“Nobody wants to be in an environment where you’re frustrated because you can’t find the information you need to do your job,” Paul says. “To have a half-dozen people hold all the knowledge in an organization of 26,000 is just unacceptable. We have got to have knowledge-sharing and collaboration so that the organization goes on to be bigger, stronger, and continues to provide returns on investment for our stakeholders, our clients, and our people.”
Want to know more? Join us as Sarina Paul shares more about Transfield Services’ process journey in an APQC podcast. Listen now.