Time for a Rethink?

What about an Organisational Review?

It is said that organisations are perfectly designed to achieve the results they do! Not good enough? Then something needs to change! A review will determine what, where and why and recommend how, when and who.

Reviews may be focused on systems, processes and/or people.

The First Five Steps:

• Know your organisational goals

  Situations where the organisational goals themselves have precipitated the need for change include:

  • a change in stakeholder and/or market expectations
  • a new mandate through a merger or acquisition
  • a continual struggle for the organisation to achieve the goals expected
  • lack of organisational performance
     
• Understand how you best achieve these goals – your strategies

  Your strategies should clearly link the operations of your business with the outcomes your organisation requires. If this is not certain you may require a strategic review to ensure your strategies are appropriate and that you know what you must excel at – your organisational competencies – to get the best return on the investments in your people, processes and systems.

• Consider the organisational values and culture that best supports your staff in their work

  For example if you require an innovative organisation do you have structures, processes and systems that support:

  • active involvement in decision making
  • the sharing of information, ideas and influence across the organisation
  • support and collaboration within and across teams to achieve goals
  • the development of people and their careers

  A review needs to take your values and culture into consideration and provide recommendations that have ‘fit’ with the required culture to best support your organisation’s progress.

• Identify the issues that are causing you concern

  This is not always as simple as it sounds. Sometimes you may just have a gut feeling or a suspicion that that ‘all is not well’. This concern may initiate the review to determine the issues, the causes and potential solutions.

  Knowing the issues and being able to articulate these to staff is the first step in enabling the organisation to make the changes required. It also enables a review to be focussed on the issues that need to be addressed, notwithstanding the need to keep an open mind on other contributing or causative factors.

• Clarify the restraints that may limit change to processes, systems and/or the structure

  To get the best out of a review and ensure the recommendations can be implemented, any restraints to change should be identified and ratified at the outset. Fortunately there is usually ‘more than one way to skin a cat’.

  Having undertaken reviews of different types across public, private and not-for-profit sectors, Probity has sound experience in undertaking reviews that provide pragmatic recommendations and ‘can-do’ strategies for change.

Organisational Development

Organisational development is the process through which an organisation develops the internal capacity and capability to be as effective as possible in achieving its goals. Organisational development supports the organisation to be flexible and responsive to changing stakeholder needs and changing market forces, ensuring currency of purpose and sustainability.

This requires an effective culture and infrastructure that supports organisational development through:

• providing a safe environment for learning and change;
• valuing open communication and trust within and between teams across the organisation;
• strong feedback loops between organisational performance and its operations;
• effective leadership that motivates ownership of, and involvement in, critical reflection and continuous improvement;
• investing in individual, team and organisational-wide development;
• embracing sound assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation strategies.

In turn, effective organisational development will further strengthen and mould a strong organisational culture that is confident to embrace change and ensure an organisation’s long term sustainability and purpose.

What Organisational Development encompasses

• Building organisational and strategic leadership;
• Implementing processes and systems that provide effective feedback;
• Identifying and developing the organisational competencies required ;
• Developing a learning culture which supports individual, team and organisational accountability;
• Implementing strategies to monitor, manage and improve operational performance;
• Functional and cross functional team building;
• Training and development;
• Performance Management and Career Development;
• Assessing capability and capacity to learn and deliver;
• Managing change;
• Recognition of success and effort;
• Regular appraisals of perceived organisational strengths, weaknesses and culture.

Where to Start

• Assess :
• your performance against your organisational goals and strategic focus. Establish where your organisation:
  a. is doing well and why
  b. could improve and what that would require
  c. is failing to perform and why

  Distinguish between process, systems, people and resource issues;

• your business risks and identify future stakeholder needs;
• process and system issues and address these where feasible;
• your organisational development requirements given the organisation’s goals, processes, systems and future needs.
   
• Plan
• Examine and realign your organisational development strategies.

  Develop an organisational development plan. This plan should involve people throughout the organisation and identify:

  a. the organisation’s learning goals;
  b. current skills, knowledge and competencies that require strengthening;
  c. training and development priorities for the organisation;
  d. solutions to address capability and capacity gaps;
  e. an implementation plan;
  f. accountability for the components of the plan;
  g. the resources required;
  h. how the plan will be monitored and evaluated.

• Implementation
• Recognise this is a change for the organisation;
• Provide leadership throughout the organisation to champion the benefits, make; clear the milestones expected and model participation;
• Consider the best approach which may differ for different parts of the organisation or for the different development initiatives e.g. top-down versus bottom-up; directive versus voluntary;
• Monitor progress in a transparent way;
• Recognise achievements.
   
• Evaluation

  Ensure the evaluation:

• covers the scope of the organisational development plan;
• provides timely feedback;
• feeds into future OD strategy development.