Case Studies

A factory employing 500 people is to be comprehensively redeveloped over the next 5 years. Numerous building & conversion projects have been identified but it has also been recognised by the senior management team that staff will have to alter their ways of working.

Historically staff have developed expertise in carefully defined and delineated roles. External factors are forcing the factory to radically alter the way it works. One possibility, looming on the horizon, is that there will have to be very significant staff redundancies. And the factory is located in a rural location where there is little scope for staff who have been made redundant to find alternative and equivalent work.

However the whole workforce has the opportunity to transform itself so as to be able to operate in flexible multi-skilled teams. There is a long term demand for these multi-skilled teams, both at this site and at sister sites in the group. The factory has been running a transformation project for some time, which although having noticeable successes in some areas, is starting to be perceived as a fragmented, even an inappropriate, approach to the wider behaviour changes.

Key players from the factory became aware of AFA's Change Management courses and several team members evaluated all four of AFA's one day Change Management Workshops:

• Individual Change
• Team Change
• Organisational Change and
• Leadership & Change

They were particularly attracted to AFA's offering as it would be compatible with PRINCE2, MSP & M_o_R. On reporting back to the management team they immediately commissioned AFA to run a One Day Change Management Briefing and Facilitated Workshop.

The entire top team attended and participated in a very active Change Management Briefing. They were delighted to have the opportunity to survey a wide range of individual, team & organisational management and leadership themes in a consistent and coherent manner. They were able to identify preferred approaches to:

• Helping individuals to cope with change
• Assessing and improving team effectiveness throughout the team's lifecycle
• Managing the site - the dominant and target metaphors within which the culture of the site operated and will change and
• Leading both from the top and throughout the organisation

Finally they were able to formulate an iterative and incremental approach to achieving change that would allow them to meet certain external constraints while leveraging the successes they had already achieved.

Moving forward, the management team also had an opportunity to see that a project approach would not be sufficient and they could more effectively manage the benefits of workforce transformation if they adopted a programme management approach.

The management team, assisted by AFA, is now working on refining the programme vision as the next step towards taking a site wide programme management approach to transformation. They next intend to formulate a Change Management Strategy through which they will be able to share the approaches they have identified in the workshop. Subsequently key change agents will be given training and mentoring in the preferred change management styles.

Thanks to AFA's Change Management training and mentoring, the change management team has been able to adapt a more coherent and focussed change management approach that holds the promise of achieving faster behaviour change with less personal turmoil for individuals, but using fewer projects and more effective team working.

For more information on AFA's Change Management training, please contact us.