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Gina Abudi shares a case study that explains how her company took a structured change and project management approach to a complex initiative.

This case study is the story of one of Abudi Consulting Group’s (ACG) clients, a national IT professional services firm. ACG has been working with this client for over three years, providing consulting services that have included facilitating annual strategic planning sessions with executives and bi-annual 360 assessments. This particular case study follows work ACG did with the client helping them ensure a successful implementation of a process improvement initiative through providing “behind the scenes” change management support.

The Problem

The client, an IT professional services firm, is a national organization headquartered on the East Coast with numerous offices throughout the United States. About a year ago, the client started down the path of discussing – at the executive level – how to best make improvements in the organization to better support a growing client base with increasingly difficult challenging technology implementation demands. Little has been done to makes changes in the firm as it has grown, thereby creating inconsistencies in processes and procedures and client support. As one example, some offices were better known for their customer service support than others. This created a problem for national clients who accurately perceived that some of their offices were provided far better support than others.

The goal of the process improvement initiative was to better align all national offices through consistency in processes and procedures, support protocols and project management. The end goal was to have one group, based out of the East Coast headquarters, as a Center of Excellence with responsibility for all processes, procedures, and project management practices. This was going to be difficult because many of the offices would likely be hesitant to change how they worked; this being especially true for those offices who were serving the client successfully. A number of successful offices were using dramatically different processes and procedures to manage client initiatives and would be hesitant to give up control to a centralized group.

This initiative called for a strong change management lead to ensure that the initiative was successful and that common processes and procedures could be developed, implemented and followed throughout the organization. Additionally, a change management process would enable the organization to embrace the Center of Excellence. If the organization did not embrace the Center of Excellence, the group could not be successful in their efforts.

Key points include:

• The process improvement initiative
• Executive support
• Structured change and project management

Read the full article, Framing Change Behind the Scenes, on Linkedin.