Change Management Case

Evaluating the Change Agent Program at Siemens Nixdorf (A)

Students: Marwa Mourad Mohamed Kotb Mohamed Ossama Lecturer: Dr. Ahmed Amin Course: Organizational Development and Change, Winter 2013

Question 1:
Advantages of Change Management Program: Schulmeyer has determined a vision for the program, studying the organization he became responsible for and determined the required outcome which was: 1. Changing the behavior of the managers. 2. Changing the work systems. 3. Changing the process to ensure the emphasize on customer and primacy of the customer service. Which if we have gone back in looking at SNI were very relevant to the problems it was facing, which was that it was slow in responding to the market changes and customer responsiveness. Also by adding supportive initiatives such as Friday forums program and profit improvement programs he had in some way ensured to motivate the change by the company employees and creating a state of acceptance that the change will be in their favor, and that was proven by the employees willingness to work and motivation after the Hanover meetings. Also by adding members of the senior managers of the division to change management teams as a business leaders he has ensured that the top management support to the program does really exist and their involvement in the program will eventually yield the obstacles the team might have.

Disadvantages: However the change management program and the road map were on the road no specific measurable criteria was shown to measure the actual output of the CAP Program, the article highlighted several steps in the program as well as the no. of the people trained the training program itself but with no impact on the organization itself and the tangible output of the training program, accordingly the link between the improvement program and the project objectives are not that clear. Its obvious that Schulmeyer has linked the poor performance of NSI with the objectives mentioned in the first question but the article fails in showing the improvements in those areas and the linkage to the CAP Program. Another serious issue is that the road map didnt mention how the program and the output of it will be sustained and integrated in the company operational strategy and the freezing process will take place after the transition, managing the transition phase and failing to institutionalize the new approach has resulted in relapsing many of the program pillars such as the training duration and changing the goals of the project from costs decrease or the return on the training investment to some other goals set by the employee and the superior which might be irrelevant to the origin of the project.

Question 2:
To start the evaluation process of the CAP program there are several steps to be implemented: 1. 2. 3. 4. Entering and contracting process. Determining Investigation Methods. Sampling Plan. Survey or Questionnaire to determine the evaluation of the intervention.

The process of measuring the interventions effectiveness the feedback needs to have some measurable criteria and instrument which are both reliable and valid. The items explained next can be the outline of the evaluation.

1. Entering and Contracting: Since that the CAP program involves different levels of the organizational structures represented in the Opinion leaders as a staff and the business managers as a senior managers, the contract of the evaluation should have some ground rules defining the below: Access to Senior Managers (Business Leaders) Access to Staff (Opinion Leaders) Access to Information about the training programs, participants evaluation of the training courses in the universities. Access to projects conducted after the training programs and its deliverables. Legal agreements of confidential data release.

Involving the different level of the organizational structure in the evaluation process can make them integrated in the feedback loop which will have eventually have an effective impact on the whole feedback process from the evaluator. The Purpose of the evaluation should be clear and clear deliverables defined from the evaluation.

2. Determining Investigation Method: The Typical Evaluation or diagnostics process starts with:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Planning to collect Data. Collecting Data. Analyzing Data. Feeding Back Data. Following Up.

The entering and contracting process can be linked to the first steps which are planning and collecting data, based on the Task nature the best method would be initiating a sequence of investigation actions to analyze the actual state and the improvement done by the CAP and its relevancy to the problems initiated the program in the first place. Analyzing and determining the relevancy between the goals of the CAP which were building an understanding of business fundamentals and business change along three dimensions: customer, competiveness and culture and the issues Schulmeyer detected and tried to change which are:
1. Changing the behavior of managers and employees. 2. Changing the work system to foster a culture of operational change. 3. Changing processes to emphasize the customer and to ensure the primacy of customer service.

Would be the first evaluation step followed by defining KPIs to measure the progress done in the above issues after the initiation of the CAP which will allow some real measuring of the effectiveness of the program. The measuring KPIs can include some assessment of the organizational structure before and after the CAP since that the organizational structure of the company was considered as one of the weakness points in the company, also assessment of the customer and market responsiveness in terms of its manufacturing strategy and its focus on the products which also was one of the main issues it faced. Prior to the feedback as much as its important to assess the end impact of the CAP on the organizational level its also important to evaluate the CAs themselves. In this case the use of Surveys or Questionnaires to assess the change agents understanding of the program, targets and expected deliverables would be useful.

The process can be done on several steps as below:

1. Sample Design Since that the CA program had many variables such as the organizational levels involved in the training, different waves of training over several years the use of stratified sampling procedure would be best. The stratified sampling procedure provides the opportunity to divide the population which is in our case are the 142 participants over the 6 years and then to include in equally portion members from every wave in the sample divided between the different organizational levels. In that method the sample would be both inter heterogeneity and intra homogeneity and also will include all relevant subpopulations which shall somehow provide a credible data to work on. 2. Survey or Questionnaire The Survey or the questionnaire forwarded will be our main data collection item, hence the validity and reliability should be guaranteed. In the survey design we should ensure the reliability through the next items: 1. Adding multiple questions for the same variable we would like to measure. 2. Providing a specific measurable scale in which will help us later in the interpretation process, lakert scale can be valid in this case. And checking the validity through the below: 1. Experts approval on the validity of the measures, Content Validity. 2. Criterion validity, or checking the correlation between similar measures. 3. Discriminant validity, or checking the non-similar variables answers.

The Questions themselves should be directly related with the variables we need to measure hence defining the variables is crucial, variables proposed: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Proficiency of the instructors in the institutions of the training. Adequacy of the training duration. Top management support for the program. Acceptance of the different organizational levels to the program. Clarity of the targets and desired deliverables. Resources availability to the change. Consistency of both management support and training.

The above items can be converted to specific criteria which can be formulated in survey questions with lakert scale from 1 to 5, after checking the validity and reliability of the instruments and responses the analysis can come out with some items that can be the core for improvement for better deliverables of the program.
A questionnaire sample may include the following questions:

How succsessful would you consider the CAP experience to be? How evident are the results of CAP? Did CAP improve your level of commitment to the organization stronger? To which extent do you think CAP improved the customer satisfaction? To which extent do you think the CAP changed the companys culture to the better? To which extent do you think CAP increased the companys competitiveness? After implementation of CAP program have you noticed any improvement in the companys bureaucratic system?