Final Blog - Closing Thoughts on S-117 Summer 2013

1. The power of an excellent speaker with communication skills is tremendous.  Kristin Von Hoffman was probably the best orator the class saw—which makes sense since she is a politician!  Likewise, in our day to day job as a change agent, we must be able to talk to different stakeholders and be able to understand and address their needs.  Even outside of working as a change agent, good communication is important in every aspect of our lives.

2. The 5 most impactful insights for this course were:

a. The most important, by far, is the big assumption.  We all constantly make assumptions (or mental models) without knowing it and identifying our assumptions will ensure they don’t get in the way.  In fact, identify and then change your assumptions so they benefit you.

b. Everyone has social fears.  Even the senior leaders are worried about keeping their image and saving face.  Everyone has similar fears so don’t let them overwhelm you.  Be fearless.

c. Change agents are salespeople.  It’s all about understanding who the stakeholders are, getting them engaged, and creating a win-win for everyone.

d. To implement change, you must remove people’s risks, instabilities, and fears and make it easy for them to change.

e. Truly open and honest group discussions are both extremely powerful and extremely rare.

3. More group work and group activities.  Anything to get us to engage each other.  Maybe shuffle the groups around in the middle.  People need to get more comfortable talking to other people.

You can try this activity in each 4 person POD: you assign Person A to defend an idea and person B to play devil’s advocate.  Then Persons C and D would give feedback.  This may be like debate class but the idea is how do you convince someone who doesn't agree with you?

Dr. Leighton's E-210 class also runs a big negotiation activity over two full courses.  This would be a great time to implement change agent skills and would be extremely fun in this change agency course.

4. More group work is always good.  The condensed summer schedule also makes this course difficult.  After all, we’re scheduling meetings with organizations during prime vacation time and at times it is very difficult to get the meetings scheduled in the summer.

5. I’m a salesman so every day I’m going to talk to people, find out their needs, and work with them to solve their problems.  Our focus is to get as close to the customer as possibly.  Similarly, as a change agent, we want to get as close to the stakeholders as possible, understand their needs, and use their needs to help you implement change.

6. We need an S-217 or at least more courses by Professor Sharp.  That and more group work. Yes, always more group work.

Project Feedback - Week 5 Blog (3rd blog)

1. Your Final Project Feedback.

Our TA, Maggie, gave me some productive feedback for my project plan. The organization as a whole up to the corporate level is in the transformation phase, but perhaps the local facility is still in the pioneering phase, and I need to approach this local project as a pioneering organization.

My biggest struggle seems to be finding time and resources, and Maggie suggested getting someone’s time formally approved/committed to the project.  Upper management is on board with the project in the “yeah, get this done eventually” sense with the funding to spare, but we want to speed the project up.  If we can get a proper business case up to the higher rungs, the project will move faster.

The recent lecture on July 22 highlighted air quality improvements significantly increasing worker productivity.  We’re going to sell upper management primarily on big increases in productivity and employee morale, with sustainability and energy savings as a cherry on top.  This will definitely help move the air quality system upgrade, and our temperature control and energy saving system will be upgraded at the same time.  I’m taking the action to help put the numbers out there and move this project.

2. Elaborate on two organizational systems that are important to the success of your project. 

a) Decision Making Processes:

1. The key decision is how many energy management upgrades to implement and when to implement them.  If we started from a clean sheet of paper, we’d have designed the system correctly the first time. As is, we’ll have to upgrade different sections in phases.

2. The maintenance manager is one key decision maker as he’s in charge of the project.  There are layers above him that must make additional approvals.  I need to find those decision makers as well, but the maintenance manager does not expect problems getting approvals so finding those decision makers has not been a priority.

3. I need to find out who controls the manpower resources.  Who is going to do the actual work? I may need someone to say, “This project is important.  Get it done NOW.”

4. We’re going to build a business case to upper management, but I really need to identify who these people actually are.  My champion, the maintenance manager, is an important ally it’s his project and getting it done will make him look good.

b) Business and Finance: 

1. I don’t have an exact figure yet, but I am guessing $100,000 to $250,000 for the equipment, upgrades, and installation.  We’re going to walk the details of the facility this coming week with the local engineering firm so we’ll be able to narrow this number down.

Manpower resources will be an issue.  We may have to commit more money to contractors to make up for the lack of manpower.

2. I will try to convince upper management that this project will actually make them money instead of losing them money.  My plan is to dig deeper into the financial aspect this week after we meet with the engineering firm again.

3. Making sure upper management knows the benefits of installing our system.  We’re going to make them more money.

4. Improved employee morale and reduced sickness will improve overall productivity.  I will provide numbers on this data.  Additionally, the reduction in energy use for temperature control will also provide energy savings.  The energy savings can also be used as a success story and green branding as it aligns with our overall green marketing strategies.

5. This project depends on multiple units.  We have a single primary decision maker (maintenance manager), but someone above him needs to also say yes or no.  There are multiple decision makers, but we expect upper management to defer most decisions to the maintenance manager.

Competing Commitments & Thought Partnerships - 2nd blog entry

Competing Commitment

1. I am unsatisfied with the inefficient HVAC system and lighting in our building.
   I am committed to the importance of improving the energy efficiency of the building.
2. After our face to face meeting with the local engineering firm, I wrote a summary e-mail to the relevant stakeholders before last week, but I have been out of town this week.  I have not called our maintenance manager or maintenance technician. Likewise, I have not called the engineering firm to follow up yet either.  I have seen some e-mail communications go back and forth, but have not responded or been engaged.  I am assuming that nothing will get done through phone and e-mail so I want to wait to sit down with the maintenance folks and speak face to face. I feel it’d be more effective in person so perhaps I am using that as an excuse for my inaction.
   I still think my time frame works even if I delay the meeting.  I think 5 minutes of face time is more effective than a 30 minute phone conversation, and I’ll do my best to extract value out of the in person meeting.  I just need to be careful and not allow this to become a recurring excuse for inaction.  I am back in town this week so I know I’ll get this moving along again on Monday!
3. I think others may assume that this project is not important.  Their time is limited and they’d rather spend their time doing something else instead of bothering with this project.  They know it’ll be time consuming so why deal with it now when you can kick the can down the road?
   My role will be to make it easy for the stakeholders and gatekeepers to get their job done.  The easier and simpler I can make the change for them, the more likely they are to follow through.
4. Prove the assumptions otherwise.  It takes time and repetition, but constantly breaking people’s assumptions will change their assumptions.  If someone thinks a task is hard, but I can consistently show them that it’s easy, then I can change their mindsets.

Thought Partnership

1. I read my fair share of self-help and “how to talk to people” books and they always emphasize sincerely asking the right questions to people.  The Thought Partnership exercise was a great opportunity to strengthen personal relationships within our pod.  It also helped generate ideas and action items for each person’s project.
2. The maintenance manager who would do most of our approvals would be a great person to engage with a Thought Partnership.  We’d be leading him with our questions into the direction of energy efficiency, but the ideas generated will all be his, and he’d be more likely to follow through.  He’s also very experienced so anything to get him to start speaking and coming up with ideas would be beneficial.
3. A common trend during the active listening was to get you to look at things from another person’s perspective.  This really helped generate ideas and strategies when we put ourselves in other people’s shoes.  We’d also ask each other for deadlines.  So when are you going to call this person?  What’s your meeting?  What’s your next step?  When we commit to something, we’re much more likely to follow through.

Final Project - Energy Management - Week 2 Blog Assignment

“Energy efficient light bulbs?  Water usage improvements?  Yeah, we did all that last year,” the maintenance manager said.  It’s good to know that we’re ahead of the game, but—yikes—I’d really like to be able to make a difference.  I’m lucky enough to work for a company that does care about the environment, but how am I going to get my class project done?

“What you could help me with though,” he added with a bit of optimism, “is the energy management system.”  My eyes lit up—I didn’t even think about this possibility.  “We’ll have to put a business case together to find out how long the payback is, but we definitely want to move in that direction.”  I was worried about having a work-related project that was too easy, but lucky me, this will be fun!

My background is engineering and I always attack problems from a “will the solution actually work?” perspective.  One of the most overlooked aspects of dealing with the future resource crunches is improving efficiency.  If you’re using fewer resources, then you simply don’t need to produce as much. Even a 1% increase in efficiency for many industries is a massive boon.

I gave a call to a local engineering firm and scheduled a meeting for the upcoming Tuesday.  We’ll do a facility walkthrough and talk about what changes we can add to improve the plant efficiency.  This is neat stuff—cutting edge technology to produce real world benefits.

 Afterwards, we’ll start developing our internal business case.  For typical projects, we’re looking on a return in investment within a few years.  For these types of green projects, however, the company is more lenient and the return on investment time is usually doubled.  The environmental benefits combined with green branding for the company make up for a slower return.

I also had the opportunity to discuss other energy efficiency measurements with the maintenance manager and received some excellent real world insight.  Rooftop Solar panels were rejected early.  The existing roof structure could only support a limited amount of weight, and solar roof panels would require a costly and time-consuming roof remodeling project before we could even sniff the solar panels.  Our land is also very limited, which makes it very difficult or even impossible to install wind turbines or solar panels around the building.

On Tuesday, I’m sure I’ll hear more great insight and some ideas for solutions.  Looking forward to it!  I’ll add more info after we go further down the rabbit hole.

Victor Wei

Be Better