Discussion response to 2 colleagues

Respond to two or more of your colleagues in one or more of the following ways:

· Compare the examples of the effectiveness of promoting a process-oriented culture in your organization with those presented by your colleague.

· Offer your insights on how to gain buy-in from different departments within an organization on processes that are necessary for the implementation of enterprise-wide business information systems.

· Expand on the ideas shared by your colleague, providing additional insights or information that will help your colleague more fully consider the issues surrounding organizational structure, information systems/technology alignment, and the manager's role in the process.

· Describe how you might use the insights and information shared by your colleague to improve your organization.

Please remember to use citations and references to support your responses, as necessary.

1st Colleague to respond to:

Challenges in creating a process-oriented organization:

Brown faced several challenges when returning to Pinnacle West after being away for over a decade and creating a process-oriented organization.

1. APS needed to have plans that correctly addressed the rapid growth. As mentioned by Raghu (2010), “Arizona’s projected growth posed unique challenges for APS. Given the environmental concerns, APS had to continuously improve the reliability of its power generation and distribution capabilities.” (p.2) This can be seen as a driving factor for implementing a process-oriented organization, but at the same time, it creates a challenge as well. You are making this transformational change during a time of increased stress, and rapid response needed. Any re-organization of resources and impactful changes can potentially decrease throughput rates.

2. The next item creating a challenge was the mention of an aging distribution infrastructure (Raghu, 2010). These grids are vital to disbursements of power and create even more stress on current resources as growth is required in tandem.

3. As written in the case study by Raghu (2010), “APS found it challenging to keep up with the commodity price and increasing fuel cost.” (p.2) Outside of the raw material costs, growth creates the need to expand operations and inherently involves additional input costs. When Brown decided to create an “enabler” team to utilize best practices, this potentially increased employee budget but offered a great way to provide a dedicated resource to ensure the organization moved the needle towards process orientation.

4. The last item I would like to call our is that the business model had not changed within APS for over 100 years (Raghu, 2010). The need to change was apparent, but the road to do it was not. The simple term “it’s always been done like this” likely created some disparity and resistance to change as they implemented this new model.

Creating a process-oriented culture, pros, and cons of a full company rollout vs. a smaller subset, and where could APS Improve:

To accurately convey the requirements needed to create a process orientated culture, I would first like to define the term. As written by Peter Willaert et al., (2007), “Business Process Orientation of an organisation is the level at which an organisation pays attention to its relevant (core) processes” (end-to-end view across the borders of departments, organisations, countries, etc.) The definition implies that people in the organisation develop a process-driven mindset.” (p.3) When I think of the requirement to create a process-oriented culture, I go back to the term “mindset,” which implies more than just a leader saying, “this is the new direction we are going to take, go get it done.”

Process orientated culture requires several vital facets to be successful. These include but are not limited to; transparency, the priority of work or projects, continuous feedback, iterative plans and schedules, continuous feedback/improvement, and alignment across the business, IT, and leadership. Understanding the end-to-end scale of the work being done (per process) by core business units and IT allows for flexibility to quickly improve those processes in an agile format.

I believe APS could have improved by increase transparency with other business units across the organization. I’m making a bit of an assumption here, but it felt like Brown created an enabler team, which itself somewhat became a dependency on improving other teams and departments. This silo could, by itself, be seen as a blocker to moving quickly to improve. My recommendation would be to incorporate some of the skillsets within this team across the other spaces and units so that increased t-shaped employees could be empowered to make impactful business decisions faster. It’s easier to start with a structure and a focused class verse pushing a new mindset. Small iterative improvements sometimes create significant wins. In my opinion, and professional experience having alignment across the entire company will always offer increased value as a new operating model is introduced, but being mindful of the implementation is equally important.

Lessons learned/could be applied, other improvement suggestions, and examples:

The first lesson I learned was the importance of IT resources that can identify and drive forward organizational priorities. As priorities shift by the company, key project initiatives and resources need to be supportive of the integration of service-oriented architecture in design and innovation ideation. (Raghu, 2010) This is at the core of what all companies are striving for, driving business hand in hand with technology. My only suggestion on this topic would be to increase the empowerment of the IT development teams and continue to make the business units partners in project planning, development, and delivery. For example, this will create constant feedback that helps ensure the IT teams are developing the business value that the organization needs and reduces the risk of rebuilds or feature pivoting.

References:

Raghu, T. S. (2010). Creating a process-oriented enterprise at Pinnacle West (Ivey © 2019 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 10 of 12  Publishing Case Study No. 9B10E002).

Willaert, Peter & Bergh, Joachim & Willems, Jurgen & Deschoolmeester, Dirk. (2007). The Process-Oriented Organisation: A Holistic View Developing a Framework for Business Process Orientation Maturity. 1-15. 10.1007/978-3-540-75183-0_1.

2nd Colleague to respond to:

Denny Brown was assigned the task of creating a process-orientated organization at Pinnacle West. He wanted to change from a functional model to a process model but had 50 years of culture in the IT department to overcome. He started by creating a clear vision for information services and developed an implementation strategy to address issues. He focused on business process transformation, which supported building process change skills, methods, and tools to support operations. Brown developed an information services initiative, which laid the foundation for developing projects and professional development. He also focused on strategies that supported budget management, security, and service performance. According to (Thamhain, 2011), company resources used to enhance leadership training, talent acquisition, tools, and techniques can create environments linked to team performance. Brown faced additional challenges with the maintenance organization based on feedback after their fire. They took this time to have a team come in to analyze the maintenance practices and make recommendations. They implemented process owners for each of the milestones and created a schedule for proactive maintenance on equipment. Several innovative ideas began to emerge. They developed TOAN-transformer oil analysis and notification system. This system monitored transformer data on a steady basis to prevent any significant failures. These initiatives earned high honors. According to Hashjeen, Shoghi, & Eisapourchalanbar (2013), organizations are required to grow and adapt to changes to be sustainable; if they remain stagnant with no innovation or creativity, they will decline and not prosper. Another challenge faced was with Palo Verde nuclear generating station. They had dropped in performance over the years due to the lack of identifying problems before they arose and determining the reasons why. A member of Browns team lead the process improvement efforts. He created a steering committee for overseeing process changes. This helped Palo Verde drive change from the top down and was one of the fastest recoveries on record. Brown was slowly overcoming his obstacles and building a process-orientated organization.

Pinnacle West did an excellent job of addressing all the challenges that Brown identified. The organization was committed to the process improvement initiatives set forth. They started with identifying a vision for information services. They focused on developing their IT personnel, helping them to identify strategic initiatives in business processes, and how to act on them. He created a Center for Process Excellence (CPE). Their purpose was to align business units with IT centered projects; they engaged the clients early on. This team would set up an engagement review, define a charter for the scope of work, and then decide if they want to continue with the project. They communicated well with key stakeholders all of its efforts to enhance change. This gained their feedback and buy-in, which is crucial to success. According to (Thamhain, 2011), management should provide an infrastructure that can support cross-functional teamwork and technology transfer. I did not find that they were lacking in creating a process orientated enterprise. I found that they addressed the requirements and made significant changes to the infrastructure at Pinnacle. They ranked in the top 10 in U.S. companies for innovation, had one of the fastest turnarounds, and were able to benchmark their processes against other nuclear power plants.

Brown needed to push the process-orientated culture to the entire company, and especially from the top down. They need to collaborate between groups; leaders should be able to talk to one another and brainstorm to find the best solutions. Spreading this throughout the company helped tie in the organizational perspective and knowledge to help point out the critical aspects of the change initiatives. The Site program identified the need to manage from the top down. They developed a process where the bottom-up process improvements had a top-down management strategy. According to Hashjeen, Shoghi, & Eisapourchalanbar (2013), organizations can enhance their performance and efficiencies by changing its structure and increasing innovation within. Pinnacle West was able to drive value from business information systems by creating process-orientated initiatives.

One lesson I learned from the Pinnacle West case was the creation of the Center for Process Excellence. This team was involved with reviewing the requests for help. They would create a charter, decide if the project was in scope, and kept the findings to a high level. This group developed a certification program based on the principles of Lean Six Sigma. The Peri-Operative service requires leaders who have to understand process improvement initiatives, and can carry out strategic plans. The OR is run like a business, and multiple process improvement initiatives are happening at the same time, primarily focused on metrics. My current team has not had any leadership courses on PI work or lean six sigma. I am in the process of setting up a serious of classes for them to learn the basics in change management, and a high-level view of lean six sigma so they can begin to be able to manage cross-training of staff to other areas. They are struggling to develop a plan on how to train other individuals to cases within their services. I gave them some guiding principles, but need them to understand how to achieve this goal. The second lesson learned is that data can drive results and make changes if you know how to read it. In the case of Palo Verde, they tracked their performance. They were able to show that their initiatives worked by the decrease in the number of corrective actions. In my current role, I am looking at the number of times we place OR’s on hold from the PACU and how many times we send a patient over to same day to recover from seeing if we need to expand our operations in that unit. The nurse managers of those units could not articulate the number of delays per day/week, average length, and the number of times pts. went to same day. I have encouraged them to reach out to our data analytics employees to retrieve the data we need to create a business case.  Developing performance indicators is a way to assess what processes you want to improve upon.

                                                            References

Hashjeen, T. Shoghi, B., Shafizadeh, R., & Eisapourchalanbar, H. (2013). The relationship between organizational structure and employee creativity. Australian Journal of Basic & Applied Sciences, 7(2), 237-242.

Thamhain, H. (2011). Critical Success Factors for Managing Technology-Intensive Teams in the Global Enterprise. Engineering Management Journal, 23(3), 30-36.