Page 39 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 2 ■ Organization structures: choice and leadership
■ An organizational climate can be created which supports experiment and risk
taking (see below).
■ Participation may be increased in planning, both generally and by specific
approaches such as quality circles.
■ Innovation should always be on agendas for strategic planning, management
development activities and workshops/conferences.
■ Project groups can be established to resolve specific tasks and problems. Such
groups should be recruited from all the departments involved, creating broader
perspectives and quicker acceptance of new ideas.
■ Product champions should be identified, along with organizational champi-
ons whose task is to create resources and time for new activities to be proved
and to integrate the emerging new products/services or systems with existing
corporate strategy.
In various ways these ideas are designed to open up the way in which we think
about our organization. They aim at helping people to take a broader and more
flexible look at what they do and at what they might do. Adaptability and inno-
vation are reinforced by making them an explicit part of the work people do. Of
course, it is not easy to do these things. Moreover, we need to act within a coher-
ent framework of management strategy. For the moment we leave these ideas as
a starting point. I return to them later in the book and within a broader strategy
for change.

Professionals versus line management

The fourth dilemma is the extent to which organizations rely on professional
expertise or the ‘street-wise’ approach of the line manager. The professional brings
the technical input and ideas which have been applied in other situations. The
line manager has knowledge of the specific local circumstances. With the ever-
increasing specialization within occupations, combined with the growth of organ-
izations, we often either employ specialists and/or contract for their services with
outside organizations (e.g. management consulting firms, universities, etc.).

Take information technology as an example. Can or should development be in
the hands of professional information technology staff or of line managers? The
former understand the technology, the latter understand the business and local
needs. This is a simplification of course, but the plain fact is that many large
organizations appear to have gone through at least three phases of development,
partly to do with this dilemma and partly to do with technological factors. The
first phase saw the introduction of computers under the control of data process-
ing specialists. Systems development took time and often users found the results
were elaborate, unwieldy and not particularly helpful. The development of
smaller computers (desktops, personal computers, etc.) led many users to develop
their own local systems. These often proved to be useful locally but were inca-
pable of integration into broader organization-wide systems and databases. Thus
information technology specialists attempt to re-establish their influence by pro-
viding advice and support to users. In the third phase, projects are explicitly proj-
ect managed, often by users and not specialists.

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