Clearly communicated, user-focused goal setting

Evidence from all ten cases on pilot goal setting revealed a variety of different strategies for goal setting (Table 20).

In the cases where the initiatives were more highly adopted, two of the global project leaders cited that it was particularly important to carefully communicate the goal aspirations of the pilot to the global steering team and the pilot managers/ local TMT upfront before the pilot got underway. For instance, the CRX global project leader commented:-

If you don’t provide clear rules of what should be the expectation of this pilot and what are the deliverables you risk that you cannot draw a clear conclusion or that your pilot will continue indefinitely.- Global project leader

In other words this global project leader was saying that it would be hard for the global steering team to judge the feasibility of the CRX pilot without agreed and commonly understood goals.

Or as the ITX global project leader said:-

I think that one of the smart things we did as well was, we put the right metric in place for this particular one to measure after we did the go-live.

And we have continued to follow those metrics. – Pilot manager

Table 20: Pilot goal setting SI Nature of goal setting Specific goals

employed

Quotes on performance goals Basis for numerical goal setting

Without them the pilot would not participate” – Global project leader

Inter-company benchmarking

OPX Pilot project completion On time & on budget N “After the pilot we defined what KPIs we should measure and how they should be measured” –

“In two months you cannot really measure anything” – Global NKX Pilot project completion On time & on budget N “We did it afterwards, not that we

haven’t known that we needed

“It was too short a timeframe to have any kind of credible measure of the operational improvement” – Global steering member

na

SI Nature of goal setting we saw that they didn’t give us the focus that we wanted” – could” – Global project leader

Tentative

Y “They were the types of criteria that allowed us to say that at this certain point in time the system was working reliability enough.” – as formally as for the project overall.” – Global team member

N “There was not a performance-measurable output” – Global steering member

na

Data from the cases suggests that managing and communicating pilot aspirations during the pilot preparation phase is critical because the feasibility of the pilot will be judged by the global steering team based on those aspirations. If aspirational goals are not clearly set then steering committee members and subsidiary managers will create their own individual aspirations determined by their own mental models²⁰ of the strategic initiative. It is also consistent with project management literature where clear realistic objectives are commonly regarded as a key success factor (Fortune & White, 2006).

In addition setting short-term, non-economic pilot outcomes, based on user adoption rates or user satisfaction measures, allowed the global team to manage aspirations about the nature of the positive performance feedback. The CRX global project leader said,

But at the same time we did not commit to economic goals which were not achievable in the timeframe, instead preferring to set clear non-economic outcomes.- Global project leader

In the case of CRX the goals were not based on attaining specific measures but only on improvement trends. The global project leader said:-

What we wanted to measure is much more the trend, to see if more and more people among the 130 users were using the tool day-by-day, or if it was stable, or decreasing. – Global project leader

This was important because global project leaders explained that it was not possible to demonstrate economic benefits of the pilot during the planned pilot duration e.g. revenue increases or cost decreases or efficiency improvements, because these results would take longer to generate than the planned pilot duration. As the CRX global project leader explained:-

At the beginning of the pilot some people want to measure if you get business benefit. But this is not possible in one year because introducing the CRM may put the organization under stress and so it might have another effect to decrease the sales before increasing the sales. If you want to measure the benefit then you have to take 2 years.

- Global project leader

It was these user-focused goals that were then used by the global steering team in their decision to rollout the initiative (see Section 5.2.6).

In three of the cases of the less highly adopted initiatives, the global teams set goals which incorporated targets for process-specific improvement or economic improvements. Some of these goals were either not measurable during the short duration of the pilot or not attainable or were replaced at a late stage in the pilot by other measures. Also in two of these cases these goals were not used as a basis of the adoption decision (FTX ASC) and in the other case the pilot was not

20 Defined as a mechanism whereby humans generate descriptions of system purpose and form, explanations of system functioning and observed system states, and predictions of future system states (Rouse & Morris, 1986).

completed at the time of the case data collection (KCX). As a result it is unclear how the feasibility of these pilots could be judged (see Section 5.2.6).

In the fourth case (EDX), it was acknowledged that there were no specific pilot process performance goals other than just making sure that the routines could be implemented. One of the EDX steering members commented:-

I think… the way I would answer… not in a performance-measurable output, which I believe was a problem – there was expectation on "Can we execute the flow? Can we do all of the steps in there?" And if and only when we go all the way through the flow, it would be considered successful. …. But the adoption rate of anything like that, as far as I know, was never taken into the KPIs for measurement. It was more

"Yes, this is the way we want to work, this must be a value – let's make it work". And the whole effort was around getting it to work, end-to-end.

– Steering member

In this case there was also evidence for a lack of goal consensus at the level of the global steering team from the outset of the initiative:-

There was not an alignment with the stakeholder about what should be the criteria to judge the project...so sales management were saying that this is a key customer tool, and supply chain were saying that this is a cost optimization or reduction tool. – Steering member

5.2.4 Resolution of informational inadequacies during the duration of the pilot

During the case analysis informational inadequacy experienced by the global team during the pilot emerged as an important construct. Here I define information inadequacy as “learning surprises” during the pilot where the global team received new information on which they recognized there was a necessity to act, whether or not they were able to actually take affective action because of project complexity.

Informational inadequacy can arise both from project ambiguity and project complexity (Pich et al., 2002). Project ambiguity is a lack of awareness of the project team about certain states of the world or causal relationships. Causal ambiguity refers to a lack of awareness of the project team about certain states of the world or casual relationships (Schrader, Riggs & Smith, 1993). The organizational information environment is ambiguous when there are low amounts of information with low or high ambiguity or high amounts of information with high ambiguity (Forbes, 2007). The casual ambiguity encountered by the global team may have been knowable before piloting was underway (Type 4 causal ambiguity – see Mozakowski, 1997) but overlooked because not all decision makers possessed a complete picture of the causal relationships and inputs before the pilot was started. Or causal ambiguity may have occurred because causal relationships were simply unknowable before the pilot started or even after the pilot was completed (Types 1-3 causal ambiguity – see Mozakowski, 1997). Project complexity means that many different actions and states of the world parameters interact so the effect of actions is difficult to assess (Simon, 1969).

Case evidence showed that information inadequacy experienced by the global team had three different origins (Table 21). It could be pilot location-specific (e.g.

language, culture, regulatory) or it could be pilot-organization-specific related to the nature of the local subsidiary organization (e.g. skills of employees, local management, organization structures, pilot relationships) or it could be template-specific, related to the routines embedded in the template and global interrelationships (e.g. technical issues, functional co-ordination issues at a global level).

Table 21:

Recorded incidents of informational inadequacy during pilot(s)

SI Co Informational inadequacy encountered during pilot by global team

Pilot location-specific Pilot organization-specific Template-specific

ITX B - -  Organization and reporting

relationships

 Expansion of scope to cover additional equipment

OFX B -  Some difficulties in convincing pilot to

accept global template

 Need to use standard equipment trees across factories

 Need for more cross-functional collaboration

CRX A -  Organizational structure and roles in

pilot in Holland

-

NKX A - -  Technical issues for website system

 Need for more cross-functional collaboration

ASX A  Language issues

 Local tax issues

 Lack of local mgmt support

 Lack of capabilities in local team

 Lack of local HR engagement

 Cultural & language issues

 Special localized deals

 Process integration issues

KCX A  Local laws and regulations

 Difficult relationship with local telecom service provider

 Insistence of pilot for localization of template

 Major technical issues

 Need for technical upgrades

 Software installation requiring site visits

SI Co Informational inadequacy encountered during pilot by global team

Pilot location-specific Pilot organization-specific Template-specific FTX B  Local banking system  Non-standard nature of financial

processes

 Geographical distance with outsourcing centre in China

 Technology issues for connectivity with outsourced service centre

 Connection to other global strategic initiatives

 Issues with the outsourcer

EDX B - -  Major technical issues for system

procedures and system speed

 Customer processes different from expected

Italics=information inadequacy leading to replicability issues Plain text = information inadequacy leading to feasibility issues

In the cases of the more highly adopted initiatives the incidents of informational inadequacy were fewer in number and the global team was able to act to resolve these incidents during the duration of the pilot. For instance, the OFX global project leader said:-

We thought that this was a simple solution, but we underestimated the effort that it takes to get all the integration in place with other functions.

That is of course the main process. That was a struggle. Otherwise I mean, we stuck to our deadlines, even if we spent a lot of time in overtime and extra work more than normal. - Global project leader

The ability to resolve the informational inadequacies when they did occur was linked to the learning speed of the combined global and local team, given that the pilots all had a pre-determined duration. For instance, the ITX global project leader said:-

But you know we start off with something, then we review it, then we improve it, then we review it, then we improve it – so what you are seeing is the result of having worked together and met a few challenges and discussed them, and, you know, come up with way, better way, of doing it. – Global project leader

In the cases of the less highly adopted initiatives the incidents of informational inadequacy were much higher in number.

These incidents threatened the feasibility of the project. For instance, one of the FTX pilot managers explained that they discovered during the pilot that the order of the global initiatives was wrong and that another strategic initiative should have been completed in the pilot before FTX started:-

So you know the ordering here was bad. You needed XXX before you have FTX and we didn’t have this. …If we had done those in the right order. – Pilot manager

In addition, the global team was unable to resolve these incidents of informational inadequacy during the duration of the pilot. For instance, the FTX pilot manager said:-

We got to the point where it was pretty obvious to us – probably three or four months before we even went live – that this was going to be an issue…it wasn’t something that we were going to do in three or four months. - Pilot manager

In many cases the global team maintained that some of these issues could not have been foreseen during the planning phase. For instance, one of the FTX global team members commented:-

One of the big learnings was actually that, you know, you can do as much pre preparation and questionnaires as you like, but until you get

there actually hands-on, you aren’t actually going to see the realities of what is happening. – Global team member

As a result of the global teams’ inability to deal with the informational inadequacy the scope of the templates in these initiatives ran out of control. The global teams were unable to demonstrate the feasibility of the pilot during the pre-determined pilot duration. As an EDX steering member said:-

Because they didn't know exactly how to do it in the beginning; and the project leader saw and learned stuff every day and tried to build it into the solution as we went. Which meant that we had never-ending overruns and never-ending additional scope. – Steering member

As another example, a KCX global steering member commented:-

I think that is the very big learning – because the scope was just so much bigger than we could ever anticipate, I think. – Steering member

Impact of pilot selection on informational inadequacies

Significantly in the more highly adopted cases, I also found that relatively few of these incidents were pilot-location specific or pilot-organization specific (see Table 21) but were largely confined to information inadequacy related to developing the global template. For instance, in the case of ITX, the only two areas of learning during the pilot implementation was related to i) transferring specific local staff with certain job functions into the global functional organization, ii) expanding the scope of the pilot to cover additional types of IT equipment. Neither of these were particularly specific local issues. So, in other words, the global team experienced relatively few distractions in building the template from issues related to the country location or the pilot organization.

In the less highly adopted cases, some of the incidents of informational inadequacy that related to the pilot location or pilot organization created issues that impacted the replicability of the template. For instance, the ASX global team member commented:-

The fact that they have a lot of “special deals” with the customers – so things like the marketing invoice of the year mustn’t have a date on it.

So yes, we came up with quite a few surprises along the way! – Global team member

While it is hard to judge as an outsider, it seems that some of these issues might have been knowable by the global team before the initiative and might have been avoided by selecting a different pilot location with fewer local eccentricities.

Impact of subsidiary involvement in theoretical template design on resolving informal inadequacies

There was anecdotal evidence that participation in the initial creation of the theoretical template created a more detailed theoretical template design with an

increased degree of richness of task-related detail for the new practice implementation. For instance, a global team member said:-

We conducted eight different sessions where we all met and thrashed out what the new processes would look like. – Global team member

This explanation would concur with participation studies which have shown that participation in decision-making may be especially helpful on complex tasks where the selected task strategy can have a powerful effect on performance (Locke & Latham, 1990). Also, widespread discussions with subsidiary managers may have enabled the global team to reach a better understanding of cause-effect ambiguity during pilot implementation.

5.2.5 Exercise of template control

In the more highly adopted cases the template there is evidence to suggest that the global team was exercising a high degree of control over the template.

Template control is defined as the actions taken by the global team to ensure that changes were not taken to excessively adapt global sections of the template to the local environment in the pilot(s) subsidiary.

In all the cases the need for template control by the global team was certainly evident, given that in eight out of the ten cases one of the prime motivators for volunteering to act as the pilot was for the local pilot managers to attempt exercise an ability to shape the template design. For instance, as the FTX pilot manager commented:-

You know, I think that before we started along the process, I think we liked that (piloting) because when you are the first one, you can try to influence some things. – Pilot manager

The more highly adopted cases demonstrated several ways in which the global teams retained template control. First, the global team retained control by convincing the pilot managers of the need for a certain global template design that maintained higher replicability (and incidentally higher feasibility). As the OPX global team member said:-

It was, I mean, quite a struggle, I can tell you; because with one thing it took us like three months to convince them that it didn't… well, it was some small details, but small details that could affect it later on. And it took us three months to convince them which way to go. And then they accepted. – Global team member

Second, the global team clearly delineated the areas of the template that would remain global and the areas that could be localized. As the NKX global team member said:-

We have this blueprint site, which has the global content that is copied for other countries, and they can either localize the master content or add their content. – Global team member

Third, one of the actions that the global team took to exercise template control was by simply refusing to make changes requested by pilot managers. As a CRX steering member explained,

So the project leader said to them, ‘I am not listening to you because this has already been decided; and I am willing to take your feedback and comments after you have used the tool for six months.’ – Steering member

Fourth, two of the global project leaders of the highly adopted initiatives explained that the secret to maintaining the replicability of the template was to hold out on important template features that absolutely needed to be kept the same across location but to be willing to compromise on less important ones.

Fourth, two of the global project leaders of the highly adopted initiatives explained that the secret to maintaining the replicability of the template was to hold out on important template features that absolutely needed to be kept the same across location but to be willing to compromise on less important ones.

Dans le document Adoption of intended strategic initiatives in MNCs: role of piloting (Page 158-0)