Enter Craig Conway, new CEO.
Enter Mike Gregoire, new EVP. And we quickly began the “Drive to 45”.
45 days to reorganize the services business and our regions around a Sell-Deliver-Staff model.
45 days to do a complete organization shake-up and move 1000-ish people into a completely new mindset and organization structure.
45 days to identify strengths, hopes and dreams and move people into roles that suited them: Selling, Managing Projects, Developing Consultants, Delivering to our Customers.
We’d transformed before. We were a software company, it’s what happens in our space. Regional Alignment, Functional Alignment, back to Regional. I lost track.
We knew we wouldn’t get everything right on the first try. We also knew we couldn’t afford to wait for perfection. It was clear we needed role clarity, consistency across the organization, and an enhanced focus on measurements.
So we moved fast, worked through the inevitable bumps, and learned a lot about what it takes to transform an organization without losing the culture that made it special.
There are a lot of ways to transform. Gradually with a waterfall plan, pilot in one area and expand, or rip the bandaid off and get it done. We were in “rip the bandaid off” mode.
Not all transformations can be accomplished in 45 days, nor should they. Speed can be an advantage when the organization knows where it is going and is empowered to work through the inevitable problems.
Frances Frei and Anne Morriss wrote “Move Fast and Fix Things” in 2023 that could have been the playbook for our 1999 transformation. Their principles: identify the real problem, build trust, create an environment where people thrive, communicate powerfully, and empower teams to move fast, echo much of what we learned firsthand.
The vision was clear: growth through greater clarity, specialization, and regional accountability. Sell-Deliver-Staff gave us the operating model to make it happen. We had 45 days to get there.
With the knowledge that a successful transformation requires more than a new structure, we had clarity of purpose, speed of execution, deliberate attention to culture, and the discipline to fix what breaks along the way. Some lessons:
- Perfection is the enemy of Done. We were aligning a lot of people into a completely new paradigm. We were moving at lightning speed and were going to get some things wrong. We knew this and kept moving. We could fix things if needed. We had to get it done.
- Process change required focus. Broken process flows cause confusion and frustration. With this fast and widespread change, we broke a lot of flows. We quickly rallied around the key flows, got the right people across the organization involved and empowered them. New ways of doing Resource Management, new Project Reviews, new Skill Tracking and Assessment, etc. Each process driven by people with the expertise and mindset to drive what was needed for our new organization.
- Share the vision with everyone. Key to the success of this evolution in our business was getting everyone on board. Not just leaders. The team formulated a comprehensive communication plan for all org members at both a summary level and details. The what and the why. Stand-up meetings with managers, question and answer sessions, open forums, all geared at one thing. Every communication designed to accomplish one thing: alignment.
- Preserving our culture was a priority. We were a tight group at PeopleSoft. We encouraged employees to be involved in the business, not just perform their job roles. PeoplePeople cared about each other, our customers, and the company’s success. We were careful to engage people along the way and to retain the warm, supportive culture of our organization, even with the disruption. We deliberately protected our warm, supportive culture rather than assuming it would survive.
- “What gets measured gets done.” Mike G’s favorite phrase. We set new strategic goals, ways to measure, and marched toward attaining them. Without measurement, there is no true way to gauge progress. We rethought our measurements from margin, utilization, customer satisfaction, time to staff, average skill levels, and employee satisfaction. New goals. Clear accountability. Operating discipline.
Day 45 came and we were ready for our new roles, (some of) our new processes, and a fresh approach to Services. We were excited, worried, and launched.
It was a blast!
If you’ve been through a major transformation, I bet you have battle scars of your own. What’s your one lesson you took away? Message me and let’s chat!