Consultancy Services

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Peter Senge, in his work, The Fifth Discipline, defines the "learning organization" as an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create it own future. It's learning that goes well belong maintenance of technical competencies and survival skills. It's a generative form of learning gained from a systematic perspective, with an eye toward allowing the organization to become more than the sum of its parts.

Most employees in contemporary organizations learn individually and are driven in that need by ambition, discomfort or fear: ambition to get ahead; discomfort induced by management's mandates for change or improvement; or fear of job loss if they don't learn. This type of motivation results in what Senge calls "skilled incompetence", because it destroys the spirit, commitment, and collective vision necessary for team learning to occur.

Since teams, not individuals, are widely recognized as the fundamental learning unit of all modern organizations, an institutional culture which cultivates learning teams, and encourages them to shift from from seeing parts to seeing wholes, allows them to grow from helpless reactors to external influences, to becoming active participants in shaping their and their organization's reality.

The area of organizational development is multi-dimensional and somewhat defies a nice tight definition of service delivery. Inherent to any organizational development service, however, is the need to consider the organization or organizational unit as a system within the context of the larger operating environment. In a nutshell, it involves what Dr. W. Edward Deming called "systems thinking".

The Director of Human Resources is available to assist any department which has an interest in integrating specific organizational development strategies or tactical management initiatives. Three prime exercises are :

* identification and selection of organizational performance management indicators. This requires agreeing on baseline operational definitions, developing critical success indicators, and capturing objective measures which can be used on an ongoing basis to gauge the success of the organization or organizational unit in carrying out its mission.

* facilitation of cross-constituency process management and team-based reengineering exercises designed to improve efficiencies and customer services, or streamline approaches.

This usually involves a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of an organizational structure or process rather than merely "rubbing on" them. Conventional TQM vehicles such as continuous improvement groups, benchmarking activities, and customer input devices are important to successful outcomes.

* change management is always difficult, but it can be managed effectively if approached in a sensitive and planned way. Whether the requirement is leadership transition, structural, operational or cultural, change can always be managed effectively.

TQM Resources Guide on the Internet

A site which features TQM publications and literature as well as products and services. The site also discusses TQM experiences in higher education institutions.

The Fifth Discipline  A review of The Fifth Discipline and the learning organizations.

Six Values of a Quality Culture  A site which discusses building a culture to develop committed employees, delighted customers, and continued improvement.

DPT Refocus Initiative  Commonwealth of Virginia's initiative on business process engineering.