10 TRENDS

Text: Jordi Recasens

JoRdi Recasens
... is a team leader at TOPdesk Consultancy and has years of experience in implementing process flows within organizations.

ColouR-CoDED pRojECTS!
You have probably already experienced a project that did not go according to plan, even though everything was organized to a T: a good team, thorough preparation and a dedicated management team. In this article, I will explain how colour-coding can offer a solution when determining the best change strategies for your projects.

recently found myself in the midst of it again: a large process implementation with impressive goals and even better

a new IT infrastructure or renovating a location. When changing supporting services, and by that I mean people, it becomes a bit more tricky.

Colour-coding as a basis for managing change

The colour code (see below), created by change experts De Caluwe and Vermaak [1] offers a solution for the problem described above. According to the colour code,

planning. We set to work with much enthusiasm, led by an external party. We thought out the various processes, involved employees from different project teams, provided ample opportunity for feedback and processed every last comment. But time flew by, and we did not meet our deadline. We encountered a lot of resistance and just couldnt finish the procedures. We eventually completed the project, but it was much more demanding than we had anticipated. So why did this happen?

A more important role for supporting services

Supporting services such as IT, Facilities and HR are becoming more and more important for operational management and are becoming more professional as a result. This means not just more employees, but also different employees performing different tasks. Your employees will also have to keep in closer contact with customers and must therefore be communicative and customer-friendly. In

people should ask themselves a number of questions when planning a change. In what type of organization will the change take place? What is the corporate culture like? Which people will be involved in or affected by the change? With such questions in mind, we can discern five different methods of approaching the situation. Each of these five approaches has been allocated a different colour (see below). Depending on your personal qualities and preferences, you can choose the colour that best matches your project and organization.

Not everything is controllable

What is it that makes one project succeed and another fail? People are used to everything being controllable - that is to say, projects and results being predictable. This works as long as you are changing

practice, the way people actually approach projects does not change much throughout this process. People often make extensive project plans that rely too much on controlable factors and results.

Thats where it went wrong!

At the start of this article I mentioned a process implementation where I got caught

things, for example when introducing

Photography: Ted erkkila

TRENDS 11
Yellow Concern and power are paramount. It is crucial that you adopt a stance and ensure that all your employees are on the same wavelength. Negotiating is an important tool needed to achieve your objectives. Blue Everything revolves around planning; making a blueprint of how to reach your goals. All factors must be as quantifiable as possible, so that you can adjust plans should you need to. The basic principle is think first, act later. Red Its all about your people. Developing talent is important for you to attain your goals. You do this by using rewards and penalties to stimulate your employees. Green Your motto is learning through experience and taking it step by step. You motivate people to try new things and give feedback. This is also characteristic of a learning organization. White White contains all colours. The pillars of this approach are allowing people to fulfil their ambitions by removing barriers, inspiring them and providing freedom. Taking the initiative is encouraged and individual organization is important.

up in an overly-extensive plan. When I look at the colour code now, I realize what went wrong. We assumed that we could use the procedures to control the outcome and create a blueprint of all possible situations. It shouldnt have come as a surprise that the procedures were neither set in place nor approved. I now realize that we were far too concerned with all the blue.

After studying the colour scheme I have come to the conclusion that TOPdesk is quite green. We take on internal projects in steps and continue to learn while remaining critical. You can observe this in the way we arrange projects at our customers [2], such as process or software implementations: Think big, start small Dont try to lay out everything beforehand Work together and be open to feedback

Go greener!
To speak in terms of the colour code, you can often make a project a lot less blue. At TOPdesk our approaches are already fairly green. This approach also works very well during projects with our customers. When starting a project, think critically about which approach best fits your organization. The colour code can help you with this. My advice is to consider the green approach. At first sight it may seem to take longer, but in the long run you get better results and the project will run a lot more efficiently.

Which colour is Topdesk?

Inspired by the colour code, I thought it would be interesting to examine TOPdesks colour. So I took a look at my own organization, the corporate culture and the people who work here. In 18 years, TOPdesk grew from a twoman student club into a professional, international organization with almost 400 employees. Despite this, the corporate culture has not changed much. TOPdesk employees are still young, eager to learn, critical, open to new things, and really enjoy their work. Colleagues often take the initiative and start projects from personal interest. They are given the freedom to gradually achieve their goal. In addition, the organizational hierarchy remains relatively flat with very little power distance.

DEPENDING ON YOUR PERSONAL QUALITIES AND PREFERENCES, YOU CAN CHOOSE THE COLOUR THAT BEST MATCHES YOUR PROJECT
Jordi Recasens - TOPdesk

This green approach is one of the biggest success factors in our projects, both internally and at our customers. It is not an artificially thought-up approach, but a logical result of our corporate culture. Our approach has resulted in more than 5,000 successful software and process implementations.

[1] Learning to Change, A Guide for Organization Change Agents ; Leon de Caluwe and Hans Vermaak. [2] See the article Taking your organizations maturity to the next level in TOPdesk Magazine of May 2011