8.2 The Process

1. The Vision of the Effort

Before you are ever contacted by management to work on a project, they first need to have a vision of what they wish to achieve. Often this vision is supported by data, at various levels of specificity. At other times, it is not supported except by a subjective feeling that things are not as they should be. The vision, whether recognized as such, always comes first and sets the stage for all that follows.  

Suppose that in our example the manager has worked for a prior company that performed their maintenance in a well-planned and scheduled manner. This knowledge provides an objective point of reference with which to compare the current highly-reactive situation. Therefore, the manager can be very clear as to a vision for the future. On the other hand, a manager who does not have this comparative information may have a less-defined vision, recognizing areas for improvement, but without the supporting data.  

As an internal consultant, you often get called in on the initial stages of an effort where visions are or are not clearly defined. Your role at this point is very important because you need to work with the client to develop a clear vision of the future. This is essential work; without clear direction, you and the effort will flounder along the way. In that case, it is highly unlikely that the client will be satisfied with the end result.  

There are many ways to clearly define a vision for the organization and for the effort in which you are involved. To this end, I would suggest reading my first book Successfully Managing Change in Organizations: A Users Guide, Chapter 4: The Vision of the Future. The information in this chapter should help you help your client to clarify the vision.  

As an example let’s assume that the vision is: Perform plant maintenance in a manner that involves detailed planning and scheduling processes in order to optimize the utilization of the workforce.

2. Clarification of the Assignment

Once the vision has been established, with or without your help, you are ready to move to Step #2. The fact that the manager has established a vision does nothing to clarify your role in the entire process. As an internal consultant, your role could run the gamut from facilitating the entire work process redesign to a more simplistic role of supporting an external consultant brought in to manage the entire process. Regardless what your role will be, you need to clarify it so that what you deliver as your end product is in line with the project champion’s expectations.  

There are many ways to go about clarifying your role. These approaches range from meeting to discuss the role you will play all the way up to developing and reaching agreement on a written contract that delineates the role you will play. I have been involved with all sorts of methods to achieve role clarification. The one that I have found to be the best is the written formal agreement of work scope between you and the client. This document accomplishes several things: 

1. It documents the scope of work and clearly describes your role as a part of the scope. 

2. It provides a document that can be referred to by both parties as the work progresses to assure that the effort is on track. 

3. It can be used to control scope growth. This is a dangerous phenomenon that, once allowed to get out of hand, could cause even the most value-added effort to fail. The clarification document can allow you to reject additional scope and, hence, to control the work so that it stays in line with what was agreed.

Clarification documents often go beyond just the scope of work. They also can include things such as available funding, resource needs and how they will be satisfied, timing, and the latitude your client will be granting you as you work towards the project’s completion. 

In order to develop a document clarifying the scope of the effort, you need to meet with the principle clients, discuss and clarify the vision so that you understand it, and discuss both the scope and how your clients see your involvement in achieving it. Do not leave this meeting until you have these items clear in your mind. Taking detailed notes and not relying on your memory is highly advised. Once you understand all of these aspects of the effort, the next thing you need to do is to write the information down in a manner that you and your client will clearly understand. This may take several iterations until clarity is reached, but doing this is essential. Then, once finished, you and your client will be aligned. 

For our example, let us assume that you will be the only consultant involved in the redesign and that issues other than scope are not a problem. Let us further assume that you will be facilitating the effort, which includes a detailed redesign of the work process to convert it from its current reactive state to one more closely aligned with the maintenance vision. Once this is clearly understood, written up, and agreed upon you are ready to move to Step #3.

3. Strategy Development

In this step, you need to determine the strategy which will be employed to deliver the expected scope of work. This strategy does not address the work outcomes. Instead, it is focused on how you will get to the point where you are ready to recommend action items to achieve the vision. The strategy really addresses how you will get the information necessary to determine how to proceed. The strategy also addresses how you will approach the information gathering process. Do you undertake the process alone? Do you build a team to handle this task and, if so, what type of team? Do you contract out the work to a third party who has recognized expertise in the area of information gathering? 

Each of these strategies is viable and will work. However, certain strategies work better in specific situations than others. Table 8- 1 describes four strategies and indicates when they are appropriate.

For our example, let us assume we are dealing with a single site where you are recognized as an internal consultant and have performed as a third party participating on several key change initiatives. Therefore, the strategy you chose to employ for the information gathering effort is to handle the work alone.

4. Information Gathering

Once you have determined the strategy for gathering the information, you need to go out and get it. The first question you need to address before you start your task is what information do you need to gather? Without clarity in this area, you may very well acquire the wrong information, leading you to erroneous conclusions and failure of the initiative.

Table 8-1 Information Gathering Strategies

The information that you want to gather needs to provide you with a clear picture of the current process and the areas where people believe there are issues that should be improved or corrected. There are several ways to go about acquiring this information. I have arranged them in order of importance from highest (best approach) to lowest (weakest approach). You can select any one you wish. But as you move down the list, the various approaches have a higher likelihood of providing you with less accurate information.

A. Individual Interviews

This is the best approach, although it is the most time consuming. In this approach, prior to the interview, you prepare a set of questions focused on the areas where you are trying to acquire information. You then individually meet with a comprehensive cross-section of people, seeking to gain the information you need about the current state of affairs. 

If this process is handled correctly, you will discover that those you interview will have a great deal of information to provide. What you will also discover after the first half dozen interviews is that the information provided will be very similar. This is good because the interviews validate the information that was provided. As you keep hearing the same things over and over, you may get bored. Nevertheless, stick with it. The information is valuable and so is the feeling of involvement that you are creating in those being interviewed.

B. Individual Interviews Conducted by Two Members of the Team 

This is an alternative to strategy A. The only difference is that you are bringing someone else from your team to be part of the process. By doing so, you are freed to ask the questions and have the dialogue with the interviewee while someone else takes the notes. It isn’t a bad idea to interview this way; the exception is that some people will not open up and talk when there are two interviewers in the room. Another problem associated with this approach is that you are counting on someone else to take accurate notes the same way you would do if the notes were yours. This doesn’t always happen, leaving you with missing information and frustration with the manner in which you conducted the interview process.

C. Individual Interviews and a Project Team Panel

This is an even further extension of strategy A. The problem is that interviewees certainly will feel overwhelmed if they have to sit in a room and be asked questions by a panel of people. I have seen this approach tried simply because the entire team wanted to ask and hear the answers to the questions. The problem is that the majority of people being interviewed in a panel situation will not provide the same information or detail as they would have provided in strategies A or B.  

D. Group Interviews 

This process can be successful if you wish to get a lot of general knowledge fast. In this scenario, you bring a group of people into a meeting and ask them questions in an attempt to generate a dialogue among the interviewees to gain additional information. The problem associated with this approach is that the quiet people will most likely never speak up. As a result, valuable information will be lost. Secondary problems with this approach are that it is hard to get a large number of people together due to their busy schedules, it is hard to control the process, and the results are not always of the value you seek. Nevertheless, you are often stuck with the information acquired because you probably will not be able to get the interviewees together again as a group or individually.  

E. Interviews Via a Questionnaire 

This is the weakest of all strategies because a) you have no direct contact with the people, b) you can not build a dialogue and, hence, explore other areas, and c) questionnaires are open to individual interpretation. If you ask a yes / no question, you will never get sufficient information to form objective opinions. If you ask questions where people have to write out their answers, you will get results that you will have to interpret. You may not interpret what the person meant correctly. In addition, there could easily be handwriting problems that could render the information unreadable.

In scenarios A–D, there are certain processes and rules that should be followed in order to get optimum results: 

a. Develop your questions ahead of time so that you can cover all of the areas where you seek information. There is nothing worse than an unprepared interviewer. It wastes both your time and the time of the interviewee. You will never be able to address all of the areas you wish to discuss nor get all of the information you seek. 

b. Ask open-ended questions, not ones that can be answered by a yes or no. Open-ended questions leave room for the interviewee to expand, giving you more information related to the topic under discussion. 

c. Select a neutral location for the interview. Having it in your office or the office of the person being interviewed is not as good as having it in a conference room or an unoccupied office. Neutral territory is always best. 

d. Assure that you will not be interrupted. Interruptions break the chain of thought of both you and the person being inter viewed. This process is often difficult to restart after the interruption has occurred. 

e. Assure confidentiality so that what is said doesn’t get back to an individual’s supervisor. You may find that, when you present your findings, a manager may ask you who provided you with the information. Never reveal your sources. For external consultants, it destroys their credibility during the engagement. As an internal consultant, it will destroy your credibility forever! 

f. Feel free to ask clarifying questions to get additional information on a specific topic. However, as soon as possible, get back on track and continue on with your prepared questions. 

No matter what strategy you choose, you will obtain information about the current process and state of the organization. However, there is more information that you need to acquire so that you can form a clear picture of the areas requiring improvement. This information lies within the documentation, procedures, and reports available to you as you dig up information about the current state of the process. 

One revealing technique used to gain true insight into the existing work process is to physically follow the documentation through the actual process that handles it. In our example of trying to learn about maintenance planning and scheduling, you could literally attach yourself to a maintenance work order. Start out with production’s identification of a plant problem. Then follow the work order through planning, scheduling, and work execution all of the way to work completion. If you follow this process in every detail, talk to all of those involved to really understand what they do and how they do it. You will gain tremendous insight and a great deal of pertinent information. This, coupled with the information you obtained from the interview process, will position you for the next step.