Jumpstarting Your Organizational Change

The team developed a model to depict the dynamics of organizational change and the elements that must be considered. (See Figure 1.) The model first illustrates how the environment drives organizational change in three dimensions: the weight of the past, the push of the present, and the pull of the future. It then illustrates how change affects four aspects of the organization: strategy, structure, people and culture, and processes and technology.

RT-381 studied case studies and conducted interviews to characterize organizational change in the capital projects industry. Upon this basis, the team identified organizational change in three general types and five specific instances shown in Table 1 (FR-381, p. 13). The team also extracted examples of relevant change practices from the case studies.

RT-381 investigated 11 case studies to document which practices enabled successful change in capital project organizations. The team extracted 60 change practices, then mapped them onto the organizational change model, as Figure 2 shows (FR-381, p. 10).

Figure 2. Detail of a Heatmap for the Organizational Change Model

To add more fidelity and understand the DNA of this model, the team surveyed 61 respondents from owner, contractor, service provider capital project organizations. The findings showed how capital project organizations can position themselves for successful change.

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RT-381 developed the Organizational Change Adaptability Tool (OCAT), which is part of Final Report 381 (FR-381, p. 31). OCAT was built in Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic for Applications. The tool helps owner and contractor organizations prepare for and adapt to organizational changes, with specific help for each type of organizational change studied during this research. In this way, OCAT users will have context to learn about a particular change, plan how to implement it, and modify the plan to match unfolding events.

Figure 3. Organizational Change Types Covered by the OCAT