Assessing the root cause of operational break-downs
Assessing operational and relational dependencies and improvements.
Synopsis
Fortune 10 company experiencing rapid growth experienced break-downs in processes and communications. This required an assessment of gaps in current policies, structure, and functional relationships.
Problem Statement
A Real Estate and Facilities team of 12,000+ located across North, Central and South America grew at a rapid rate, increasing the square footage and customers managed by over 400% in less than 5 years. New headcount was difficult to acquire and involved a lengthy and thorough process for review, approvals, hiring, and onboarding. To scale quickly, employees instead hired contract workers from a variety of third party companies. Within a few years the ratio of employees to contract workers was 1 to 239.
The Real Estate and Facilities team used a diversity strategy in hiring contractors to avoid over-reliance on any one particular company. However, many of the contract workers were direct competitors, and this led to tension in vendor-to-vendor relationships and operations to occur in siloes. It eventually resulted in a lack of collaboration, visibility, alignment, and an inability to share and document best practices. This proved frustrating for employees who were stretched too thin to provide the level of support required by contract workers. They found themselves working longer and harder hours to address and fix risks, misinterpretations, and miscommunications that emerged from a lack of documented policies and methodologies. Duplicative efforts, confusion on ownership of tasks and processes, poor collaboration, inadequate communication, inconsistent data, and different interpretations of strategic objectives and decision-making rights all surfaced as pain points.
Approach
To address the numerous pain points felt throughout the organization, an assessment to identify root causes was completed via interview and survey technique. In addition, program documentation across vendor companies was collected, reviewed, and compared to identify duplicative efforts and variances in approaches and directions.
Although the organization had over 400 companies contracted with them, only 20 contractual companies accounted for 90% of their vendor spend. Those 20 companies, in addition to full-time employees, were deemed in scope and participated in interviews and surveys. 80+ were selected and 180+ survey participants were selected. This sample group of individuals included full-time employees and account and service leads per region and contracted vendor company.
Anonymous interviews included open-ended questions regarding what was working, primary pain points or barriers to completing work, and advice the interviewee had on improvement opportunities. Responses were transcribed and the qualitative data was compared and grouped together based on a published and revered set of values and rules the team uses to steer their vast portfolio of work. This set of 14 primary values for guiding their work included things like thinking strategically, healthy debate, and putting customers first. The interview data was grouped by value. Survey questions were coded to values and 1 – 5 Likert scale was used to assess agreement levels with sentences that represented each value. Survey and interview data was then compiled and based on those results; a score was assigned to each value. The score was based on the percentage of participants who indicated the value was a barrier or enabler.
The information was presented in the form of an audit on how well the team displays their guiding values. Program documentation was assessed separately, and data provided to Executive Sponsorship regarding duplicative efforts and variations in how work is executed. Values appeared on the audit document in the order in which they scored, and a set of recommendations was made to address the feedback received on each.
These audit recommendations culminated in an overall proposal that was presented to 5 Executives. The proposal outlined the need to stand up a Project Management Office to centralize the management of best practice documentation such as playbooks, policies, processes, and metrics. A Change Management Office was also recommended to partner with Project Managers during implementation of new initiatives, and provide training material and communications support to the entire region. A Shared Services office was also recommended to better manage contracts, budgeting, service level agreements and contract worker onboarding. In addition, a recommendation to stand up a Business Intelligence group to build consistent data collection methods, reporting, and dashboards was proposed. Finally, a revised organizational structure to reduce dependencies and risks associated with the uneven contractor to employee ratio was recommended to be stood up immediately.
Results
Agreement that a lack of scalable processes and policies put in place during cycles of rapid growth was the core business problem. Additional headcount was immediately increased, and the team tripled in size over the next year.
One year after the initial proposal, a Project Management Office (PMO) was formed, and teams completed playbooks and standard operating procedure documents that were stored centrally and dispersed to avoid redundant efforts and activities. A change management team was also formed within the PMO to support high-visibility and strategic initiative roll-outs.
Two years after the recommendation, learning and communication taskforces were formed to stand-up and implement global solutions and methodologies for all contractor teams.
The approach to diversifying vendor companies stopped. The company stood up strategy, structure, language, and technology changes that naturally alleviated relational issues and allowed for a more frugal and customer-centric approach.
The team is now recognized for regularly demonstrating their values, has seen a positive ROI (return on investment) result, and reduced high-risks to the business associated with having too many contract workers and not enough employee oversight.