Internal Performance Improvement Teams

Regardless of industry segment or organization size, rapidly evolving new technologies, markets, and competitors have created a situation where unrelenting change is the one thing you can count on. And the stakes have never been higher, as your ability to compete and thrive depends upon how well you adapt and respond to change. As a result, organizations are recognizing that skillfully managing change is a competitive requirement and want to make sure that change management expertise is part of their organization’s skill set. Internal improvements like these are done in two ways: building performance improvement teams, enhancing the skills with their leaders and managers, and building new lean teams or departments (in part to reduce the need for outside consulting).

Carpedia’s methodology is based on transitioning skills and knowledge to local management so that changes are owned which helps make results more sustainable. Carpedia creates internal improvements through direct collaboration, ongoing coaching, case-based training and “on-the-floor” mentoring. Carpedia also supports and builds internal performance improvement teams and lean teams for organizations, helping shape how the teams are designed, staffed, trained, deployed, and held accountable for results.

Leading Change

To remain competitive, leading organizations understand that managing change must be a core capability of the organization, rather than just a project or program best practice. Instilling the drive for continued internal improvements in your organization and operationalizing its practice is critical, but companies struggle with how and where to begin. We regularly help our clients to assess these issues and determine the best way to structure and operate internal improvements—be it a centralized “lean teams” model or a more distributed approach.

Discovery & Analysis

Most often we are asked to build change management skills concurrent to our project work. This is part of our methodology but periodically organizations want to go a step farther and build an internal team or pair us up with their internal resources to learn our process. Either approach can be effective. The basic issues surrounding internal performance improvement teams tend to be:

• What is their mandate? Organization-wide or business unit focused?
• Are they adequately supported by executive management?
• What is their scope? Cross-functional or process specific issues?
• How are projects identified, assessed, selected, and prioritized?
• Do results ever make it to financial statements or are they primarily local process improvements? Do user groups pay for their services?

Implementation

Once we understand the issues, challenges, and opportunities, we work with you to develop the appropriate structure, as well as the recruiting, training and management tools needed to build your internal performance improvement capabilities.

We typically work directly with your team in real-time on real issues. We have found that there is no better way to build your change management capabilities to work concurrently on performance improvement issues. Over a number of project cycles your internal team members move from learning our methodology to managing the entire change initiative (exactly as we train our own consultants).

Sustainability

We continue to provide ongoing training, mentoring, or support downstream as required. This operates differently for different organizations depending on their stage of development and the nature of our relationship. We stay in touch with our clients and provide support when they need it. We have more formal follow-up arrangements with many clients that are designed to make sure the key process, system, and behavioral changes originally implemented remain in place (or have improved).