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DESIGN DILEMMAS
August 25 | 12:30 – 2:00 PM (EDT)

Managing Relationships between Stakeholders

Case Study:

Client:  Technology organization inside an Oil and Gas company, a subsidiary of a larger company.  Technology organization is ~35 employees + ~75 vendor/staff 

Challenge:  The initial “presenting symptom” was a lack of capacity to satisfy the requests from the business stakeholders. There was also a sense that once a solution was completed, the business stakeholders no longer cared.  The relationship overall between stakeholders and technology was one of disappointment.  Though the tone was respectful, they were unhappy customers.

Root causes:  Two of the root causes were lack of aligned prioritization and widespread multi-tasking across projects.  Multitasking was a result of an effort to optimize people’s time, skills were centralized, and tasked to projects as needed.  Most prominent is the structure of a “centralized pool of 40 data engineers”, (mostly vendors).  Each week a meeting is held with each vendor(2)  to negotiate who will work on what for the following week.

Note: the high percentage of vendors made it necessary to closely manage each person’s tasks.

Lack of prioritization compounded the capacity problem because each person was tasked across many projects they lacked the information to prioritize.  This is resulting in people working grueling hours and making sub-optimal trade-off decisions.  (ex.  2 meetings at the same time – how do you decide which to attend?)

Goal:  The technology organization would like to improve the value they deliver to the business, and move from being an “order-taker” to a strategic partner.  Right now they are so busy chasing down problems that they can’t be proactive.

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Our pilot session will be facilitated by Mark LaScola with ON THE MARK

Mark’s passion for collaborative organization design and operating model modernization sits at the heart of OTM. Since his first redesign experience in 1987, Mark has focused his career on learning, delivering, and innovating this honorable work over OTM’s 33 years. Mark authored OTM’s organization design solution – the most comprehensive, holistic, and integrated organization design solution in the industry based on OTM’s successful delivery of close to 500 redesigns and operating model modernizations around the globe.  He has trained over 5,000 internal change agents, managers, and executives in OTM’s unique organization design solution. Mark believes deeply in giving back to our industry. He and OTM team members and alumni are active members of the ODF, the ODC, EODF and STS.  Mark is a current board member on the Organization Design Community (ODC), a past founding board member of the European Organisation Design Forum and is proudly a Certified Organization Design Practitioner (CODP).  When not traveling for fun and work, Mark resides in Phoenix, AZ.