The Question: “How to improve the speed of identifying and implementing best practices across the world and maintaining that position.”

The Client:

A global organization in the petrochemical industry

The Challenge:

In a mature industry where cost containment is an essential part of maintaining competitiveness, and where markets have operated with considerable freedom, we were challenged to find best practices and spread them fast – even though they “weren’t invented here.”

GLA’s Role:

Our role was to work with a global project team to set them up for success. Over a period of five years, the team’s role changed from discovering best practices in a particular area of the business, through designing a common practice that could be implemented globally, to becoming primarily maintenance and updating skill centre. To add to the challenge, the team had a changing membership drawn from many different countries and often based in more than one country at a time.

Our initial brief was to set them up for success. We ran an upfront intervention to:

• Synthesize the perspectives of Sponsor and Stakeholders
• Create a team charter, covering internal processes of decision making, objective setting, work monitoring, communications, conflict resolution, giving feedback and celebrating success
• Clarify expectations between team members and their leader
• Agree to a team development follow through process. Follow through plans included meeting every six months to review not only task progress, but also team dynamics and learning. It also allowed for a complete review every time there was a fundamental purpose change and every time there was a change in Team Leader.

Results:

• A team that delivered throughout the period. It still exists as a Skill Centre some five years on. Several others that did not experience this kind of maintenance were short lived.
• Higher capability to deal with remote working, including a better understanding of cultural differences.
• Faster and more productive problem solving.
• Several Team Leaders have gone on to run bigger projects in the organization.