Panasonic Avionics
Posted on 17th July 2022
Issue
We were approached by this world leader in state-of-the-art in-flight entertainment and communications to help them be better at applying process improvement methods to their projects.
While they had previously assembled a project team to address this issue, our initial conversations suggested to us that the problem lay elsewhere. They had also delivered some training around this subject before, but without noticeable success. We raised this with them, and they agreed that it would make sense to work with us to undertake a full discovery process to really understand whether the issue was a lack of skills that could be addressed by training, or whether other factors were at play.
Action
We undertook a thorough and robust discovery process with the project team and key business stakeholders, as well as conducting a short pulse questionnaire. What we found was that the issue was not a lack of skills or knowledge, but rather that the business’s systems and processes stopped them from using the training that they’d had. Furthermore, the business culture worked against them either attempting to fix the processes or applying their skills.
After we’d fed back our findings to the project lead, we agreed that the necessary culture change must start with the project team. They needed to explore our findings and decide how they could best model the new culture and ways of working that the business needed to adopt.
To help them think differently about the work they did and the ways they worked, we took them to another engineering company, and to a venue – Mercedes Benz World, at the famous Brooklands race track - that showed them how great teams could perform.
Over the course of two days, we worked with the team to:
• Review and explore all the feedback they’d received
• Gain agreement and acceptance of the issues and challenges created by the current culture and processes
• Co-create their vison about how they wanted to work and where they wanted to get to
• Create a detailed, team-owned project plan covering the next six months, which set out what they were going to do to make the change happen (with specific RACSIs)
Impact
Every team member agreed to the vision and made specific personal commitments. An internal communications plan was also developed that engaged the wider business in the journey and took the new ways of working forward. Collaboration soared as they identified and implemented immediate changes in the ways they could work with each other, and both morale and communication flourished.
Tagged as: Creating Inclusive Cultures
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