Summary
To ensure coordination and effectiveness of a major organizational restructuring effort, the client company sponsored a series of Rapid Transition Ready Workshops.  These workshops organized the transition of back-office functions from 105 offices-many with unique processes-to five Regional Service Centers.  A key feature of this transition was making these changes transparent to the customer.

Company Background
National telecommunications company providing cellular paging and messaging services. Considered one of the world's largest paging services with more than 10 million subscribers. Operates from five regions across the United States. Able to reach 90% of the U.S. population along with subscribers in Canada, Brazil, Spain, U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

Project Overview
In February, 1998 the company announced it had lost $104 million, or $1.02 per share, in fiscal 1997. The company engaged the help of a well known strategic management consulting firm, who helped provide a diagnosis that the company was maintaining a large pool of relatively unprofitable customers. The consulting firm recommended the reduction of the customer base to focus on high end, high profit customers and evolution from a paging service to a wireless information provider with a broader array of services. The firm also recommended a variety of restructuring and cost cutting measures, along with the automation of back office systems. The resulting restructuring plan involved a major consolidation of the telecommunications company's 105 local offices and the elimination of approximately 30% of the 1998 workforce.

Our team was hired to facilitate this transition using rapid change methodology. It was our assessment that the automation project for the back office systems was not addressing the substantial amount of manual work that would continue to be required in order to deliver services to the client's customers. We also pointed out that the nature of this work would be changed considerably by the introduction of the automated systems themselves. As a result, there was a need to re-design the work that would be done by people (rather than computers) in each of the back office functions. The objective of the redesign should be to make the manual component of the work consistent with both the automated systems and the planned consolidation of the operating structure (i.e., moving from local office to large regional service centers). Finally, it was our view that the company's transition goals would not be met unless the needs of the customer were more actively considered in the design and implementation of the change plan. After making the strategic decision to change, the company's focus had largely been on the necessary steps to automate the back office systems and transition to the new structure. Unless the change process gave equal time to managing the customer experience and working to keep the targeted customers throughout the transition, the company risked losing critical market share and further eroding its margins. In order to achieve its full potential, the company's transition must be recast from a relatively commonplace office automation / restructuring project to a strategic initiative designed to preserve and build the organization's preferred customer base. 

Methodology
Our focus was to re-design the manual back office processes to mimic (and support) the post automation environment. The goal was to improve, standardize and implement work processes, with 30 - 50% fewer employees, before activation of the automated systems. Once implemented these systems would be so similar to the way the back office functions would operate in the post automation world, that transition to the automated environment would be completely transparent to customers. This would allow the firm to maintain or improve its customer service, even as the transition progressed.

We used a workshop methodology to drive the work process redesign. Each back office function was redesigned in a weeklong workshop and piloted in a local office. We also documented the redesign in a process manual, providing the client with rapid turnaround. The redesigned functional processes were then deployed in all the local offices nationwide. Once all of the back office operations had been redesigned and deployed in this manner, consolidation and automation could occur without disruption to service or customer satisfaction. The theme of this process came to be called, “Transition to Condition for Conversion” and the workshops quickly took on the name “Rapid Transition Ready” (RTR) Workshops.

Project Team & Scope
In early July 1998, we assigned a lead consultant to the project. She immediately began working on a transition plan, using a collaborative process that included the five Regional Presidents, selected technical staff and the transition General Manager. The finalized plan deployed a rapid transition approach that included the following elements:

• Identification of 9 processes (5 core processes and 4 support processes) that would be the focus of the redesign efforts.
• A plan and schedule for the RTR Workshops, including the offices which would pilot each of the redesigned processes.
• A procedure for creating and rapidly deploying the new process documentation.
• Policy and procedures for handling layoffs and other personnel issues.
• A phased communications plan.

Project Implementation
Our consultants began workshop planning in mid-July. By the middle of November, ten RTR Workshops had been completed, documentation had been generated for each of the nine processes, each process had been implemented in a pilot office, and all nine were in the process of being deployed in the client's offices nationwide. 

Each of the RTR Workshops had a similar structure. The consultant began by meeting with the end-state process designers to plan the workshop. The consultant would then have a similar meeting (or conference call) with the regional staff where the pilot office was located. Finally the process designers, regional staff and the consultant would get together for a two-day end-state design review to make sure the process design was ready for implementation. The finalized process design, once approved, became an input to the workshop.

The purpose of the workshop was to implement the end-state process design in the pilot office. This included making any needed adjustments, developing documentation (i.e., an implementation guide) that could be used to implement the new process across the country, and finishing the week with the process up and operating in the pilot office. Workshop participants included frontline staff from the pilot office and regional representatives who would be responsible for implementing the new process in their regions. The week following the workshop, we published the Implementation Guide to the pilot site for their use. The pilot site used this guide for a full week and documented any further revisions that were needed. The following week (no later than three weeks after the workshop), we issued the final Implementation Guideline to the five regions for implementation of the new process nationwide.

Results
Using this process of developing an end-state design, testing and modifying it in an RTR Workshop, developing an Implementation Guide based on the workshop experience, and quickly distributing the guide to designated implementers in the field, allowed the client to become “transition ready” in 105 local offices before the end of 1998. The transition General Manager estimated this approach had saved his firm approximately $15 million in implementation costs, while making the transition itself painless for the customer.

Lessons Learned
The change methodology used in this engagement demonstrated the flexibility of the Workshop approach and the role of Workshops in large-scale change initiatives. The process for rapidly creating, testing and distributing a process implementation guide created tremendous value for the client in this engagement. It also confirmed the applicability of this approach to other large-scale change initiatives, especially those where speed is of the essence. Lastly, refocusing the effort to include emphasis on customer retention was critical to the success of the project.

Rowney Consulting 10910 S. Bremer Road Canby, OR 97013-6705 Phone: 503-266-5492 Fax: 503-266-3610 Cell: 503-989-1897 Email: mike@rowneyconsulting.com