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The aim of DWT Consulting is to help achieve the desired change at customers. Our approach is geared to (1) getting people and organisations moving and (2) anchoring the change in the organisation, processes and IT systems. That is why this ‘action consulting’ approach is based on three main drivers: ‘Appreciative Inquiry’, ‘DEMO’ and ‘Enterprise Engineering’.
Appreciative Inquiry
The goal of appreciative inquiry is to create positive energy by identifying what works and what could be done differently, in an instructive, supportive way. That’s the key to accelerating a change process.
The question we put to employees is formulated in such as way as to generate positive energy. If we were to ask them about the failings we would generate negative emotions and resistance. Negativity uses up a lot of energy and employees will not be encouraged to change.
Appreciative inquiry helps us work with the organisation’s strong points, so that we are able to distil the positive core of an organisation, partnership or process and identify where there is room for improvement, but in a supportive way. As a result, we generate positive emotions and motivation that release the mobilising energy needed to initiate change.
Appreciative Inquiry is based on an approach in which we try to create broad-based support to achieve change. In practice, a lot of workshops and workgroups are used, as partnership is a central theme in the change process.
DEMO
DEMO is short for Design & Engineering Methodology for Organizations. DEMO has been developed at TU Delft (Netherlands) over the past 15 years in response to the challenges inherent to improving how organisations, corporate processes and IT systems are geared to each other.
Due to the combination of strong scientific underpinning and numerous practical applications DEMO is a proven, pragmatic methodology for quickly gaining insight and achieving results when the material is complex.
DEMO enables you to create a compact model of the corporate processes, transactions and actors in your organisation that are ‘independent of specific software, notation systems, products and so on’.
This type of compact overview model provides systematic insight into how your corporate processes are or could be structured and constitutes a strong basis for tackling numerous organisational and IT issues:
- More effectively preparing ICT application purchasing and implementation (functional analysis & IT architecture)
- Mapping and, where possible, simplification of your essential corporate processes (BPR)
- Better organising the division of duties, powers and responsibilities among the various parts of the organisation (enterprise engineering)
- In consensus, amalgamating parts of the organisation, based on shared insight into agreements and differences between integrating parties (mergers and integrations)
- Redesigning organisations and their processes to prepare major changes in the corporate environment (strategic redesign)
Practical cases are available in all of these domains, proving DEMO’s credentials as a fast, result-oriented methodology.
Due to ties with academia, DEMO is a methodology supported by extensive literature, research and other material. That means you can adopt DEMO within your organisation and build up expertise in-house.
Enterprise Engineering
Companies are complex heterogeneous systems, built from subsystems of divergent nature, such as the social subsystem and the technological subsystem.
Companies have a purpose by definition and they are deliberately built up by people. In other words, they are purposively organised. In our Western mechanical approach to organising, we think of cogs that fit each other correctly and so produce a predictable result. However, the complexity of companies makes this impossible, because the large number of independent factors does not allow the result of an uncoordinated change in one of the subsystems to be precisely predicted.
The fledgling science of Enterprise Engineering explicitly works to build up the necessary knowledge and skills to design and/or change companies on the basis of formal theory and associated methods.
Engineering is the first response to the demand to control the complexity, in other words, the design of the company largely determines the future controllability and changeability.
DEMO offers a compact model of the essence of the company, independent of the existing or future implementation. That is why the DEMO model is so interesting from the point of view of the designer of the organisation. It provides a compact picture of ‘what’ the organisation has to be to achieve its goals.
Architecture offers us a set of directive principles that help us and steer the design and implementation, so we can build up the company as a cohesive and integrated whole. By also taking account of the areas requiring the company’s attention when setting up the architecture the principles give us a good idea of how the company has to be built.
The ontological model (DEMO) and the architecture are the building blocks of Enterprise Engineering. We use both in our organisational change approach.
Action Consulting
As part of action consulting, DWT Consulting puts its advice into practice together with the client.
Like other consultants, we start by identifying and analysing the situation. This results in a report. We will schedule workshops where possible to accelerate or deepen the process in the analysis phase.
The report is not the most important deliverable in the change support process, however, because it is just a fairly static snapshot. The consultant as driver and change agent has a much great impact on getting organisation moving.
However, we are convinced that proper use of scientifically underpinned methods is the key to starting the organisational change and maintaining that change. Letting go of mistaken mental models as an organisation and accepting new and better models in a targeted way cannot be achieved through an approach with activities that are put together haphazardly. No, they are the result of the well thought-out application of methods that we can be very sure of producing the right result. |
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