Case Studies from the Learning Group

This page is an outgrowth of our June 29, 2005 meeting on "Case Studies: You Be the Consultant". To provide for ongoing follow up learning and to allow "virtual" participation by those who could not attend the program, we are providing this means for you to acquire, develop or display consulting skill!

First read the case and then send in your diagnosis and recommendation, as indicated below. Once everyone has had a chance to contribute these we will move on to the next cycle of learning. Upon member request, we can also post new cases and consider other ways to provide ongoing learning via case studies.

Case 1
"Boston Recovery House"
Issues: Morale and motivation; communication

This case is based on a consultation by our Consulting Alliance Team One. Team members Nicole Collette, Todd Harris, Bruce Hoppe. and Susanna Siu presented it at the meeting.

Boston Recovery House (BRH) displays many of the problems common in nonprofit organizations. One the oldest and largest such programs in Massachusetts, with an annual budget of $10 million, it has a staff of twenty, supplemented by dozens of volunteers.

The world of nonprofits has changed greatly in recent years, particularly as decreased government funding has forced such organizations to become more entrepreneurial. The heavy emphasis on fund raising at BRH has become a source of employee dissatisfaction; many feel pressured to contribute to these efforts. One employee was awarded for good performance by having a room named after her, but she has been grumbling that she thinks this was really done because she has rich relatives and the director expects that they will donate money to BRH.

Employees also think that those involved in raising money are receiving more attention than those who do the work that BRH was founded for. They note that the director seems to spend more time on money issues than client care and more time with the Board of Trustees than with staff. It is common for employees to say they don’t see the director, that he seems interested in people only when they fail to perform correctly, and that his management style is too hard and patronizing.

Employees generally deal only with their immediate supervisor. There is ill feeling over the perception that management spends all its time “upstairs” on the top floor.

Communication at BRH is big issue. Many people complain about the volume of e-mail and say that it is used to convey negative feelings. People seem to spend much time spreading rumors and complaining about one another. The Director feels that employees don’t bring matters to his attention and are not telling him what they really think. He also feels that some employees are too sensitive, some resorting to crying when criticized.

Meetings at BRH are much criticized. One manager says that he would rather stick pins in her arm than go a meeting; she has even been known to fall asleep on such occasions.

Morale and motivation are clearly problematic. Senior management feels that no matter what they do to help employees they get complaints instead of thanks. Recently, the director spent many hours of work planning a move to their new building; no one expressed gratitude and almost everyone complained. For example, instead of appreciating their new furniture employees griped that the money should have been spent on raises (which was not true because the furniture was donated). Employees get a cake on their birthday, but people say similar things about that. The last straw was when the director decided on a morale-building boat cruise, only to have employees grumble about the food.

The senior management team, which consists of the director, the associate director, and the CFO, is known not to get along. Relations between the director and one other member are so bad that there has been talk about getting a mediator. The director has hired a coach – a fact he does not want the others to know about.

BRH has had various consultants, all of the volunteer type. One was doing consulting pro bono as part of his probation; another was someone who had worked on a contract basis on training issues. Senior management felt that their recommendations were OK, but there was no time to do what was proposed.

Still, the director is feeling that there is a crisis. Unless things get better, BHR will never be able to live with new government mandates that require it to change is operations. With the agreement of the other two senior managements, the ODLG Consulting Alliance has been called in.

Your client is the senior management team. These are as follows:

Donald has been director for ten years. A recovering alcoholic himself, he understands clients but has a harder time with management issues. He sees himself at times as a benevolent father but he also wants to be a “strong leader”. He feels that people are so sensitive that he has to “walk on eggshells”. In particular, he is hesitant to criticize Natalie because he fears she may quit. And he hates being typecast as “the bad boss” (with Natalie being the “good boss” to whom people take their problems).

Natalie is associate director and has been at BRH four years. She has much management experience and feels she is “the only one who know how to get things done around here”. But she has to spend a lot of time teaching the new CFO, who is not familiar with nonprofits. She does not get along with Donald and thinks he is biased in favor of hiring other recovering alcoholics. Natalie is indeed seriously thinking about leaving BRH.

Carrie is chief financial offer and has a background in accounting. She was hired two years ago from an auditing firm that had done some work for BRH because Natalie was overburdened in this area. She does not feel trusted and sees the organizational reporting structure as dysfunctional. For example, program managers who report to Natalie won’t give her information she needs.

The case was presented via a dramatic presentation. To read the script of this drama, click here.

Your task is as follows: 

(1)   Determine what the underlying “real” issues are at BRH.

(2)   Develop recommendations that will solve these underlying problems and be accepted by the client.

Respond to: cases@learninggroup.org

To compare your recommendations to those actually made by the Consulting Alliance team, click here.

Case 2
"Company Z"
Issues: Involving stakeholders in change management

This case comes from the files of Lorri Lofvers, who presented it at the meeting.

Overview: Driven by pressing customer and field management needs, Company Z, a large professional services organization with offices nationwide prepares to implement new financial and accounting systems and re-engineer the related business processes.  The project was initiated by executive and senior managers who recognized the need for these changes during a formal strategic problem solving session focused on revenue management issues. With limited project staff, and aggressive timetables for this mandated change, and a dependence on cooperation throughout the organization, this case faces the issue of when and how to involve the many diverse internal stakeholder groups that will be impacted.

Organization Structure: "Company Z" has largely grown through acquisition over past decade. As long as certain measures and targets are met, these divisions are given significant autonomy. The case is set in one of those divisions, the "SI Division", a successful organization, whose services and target market is distinct from other divisions. SI is comprised of ten geographically distributed field offices and a headquarters group. To get the work done, a temporary project team is formed from capable employees across the division who are experienced in accomplishing this type of work. In general, other resources will fill in for them while they are working on the project.

Management Roles: The President heads an executive management team. Each field office is run by a Managing Director. He or she is assisted by an Operations Manager and an Administrative Manger. Each of these managers participates in management committees that report to executive management. Service delivery staff is divided into industry groupings and each customer is tied to one industry grouping. The Director of Finance, who is part of the executive management team reports to headquarters and has responsibility for Finance and Accounting, Payroll, and Information Services (IS). The Finance Director has been with SI less than a year. 

Culture: The SI Division has grown from a small organization that operated effectively by relying on the expertise and the historical memory of a number of senior managers and staff members that helped found and launch this division, originally as an independent company. Informal communication was often preferred over formal communication. This operating model was supported by a culture of employees who are intelligent and hard working. Many long term managers and staff question the need to allocate or "divert" time and resources to this effort, which they do not see as making their jobs easier. 

Scope of Change: This project will replace the existing accounting systems and databases (Accounts Receivable, General Ledger, and Accounts Payable); add new business processes, procedures, reports, and controls, change roles and responsibilities at headquarters and for staff throughout the organization. Information coming from these systems will be used as part of the formula for measuring business success for the division and these numbers will affect financial compensation for many managers across SI. Externally, invoicing and collection changes will be visible to the customers. The project team needs to make sure to adequately identify all of the requirements, including variations among the geographic offices, and anticipate any issues, procedural, logistical, or staff-related that could be important to implementing and sustaining the new system and processes.

Stakeholders: The Finance Director was designated the Project Sponsor. Information Services is charged with gathering requirements, selecting and installing the new system, rolling it out, and operating and maintaining it. Accounting will be a major user, as they have division level responsibility for payables, receivables, and maintaining the general ledger.

At the field offices, senior management, administrative management and staff, as well as industry group managers and their project managers will all be impacted. Broad participation will be needed in all phases of the project to ensure that the requirements are correct and that everyone is ready to use the system upon implementation.

The Buy-in Challenges: At the geographic offices, administrative and accounting work activities take time away from service delivery and therefore do not typically get high priority. People across SI are comfortable with the old way. In the past, operational changes have been implemented at a slower, more incremental pace. Geographic distribution makes it hard for the project team to have formal face to face communication. By nature, the employees are analytical and some resistance shows when they question various aspects of the project with people in their informal networks.

Implementation Requirements: The stakes are high and the project needs to be carefully managed. To implement effectively, support for the changes will be needed in each geographic office and at headquarters. There will be software selection, package customization, system integration, testing, training, skill development, and report design. New processes, policies, and roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined and ready to be implemented seamlessly.

Case Study Discussion Questions:

What are the key issues that need to be addressed to align stakeholders around the project goals and direction? What are the risks if this does not happen? If you were part of the SI Division project team, what strategies and approaches would you use to foster buy-in? What would you recommend to the senior management team? Where would you begin?

Respond to: cases@learninggroup.org

What do you think the project team actually did?

Case 3
"GOLD"
Issues: Maintaining core value during organizational growth

This case comes from the Learning Group archives.

GOLD (Grand Order of Leaders and Directors) was formed eight years ago as a spin-off from GBOND (Great Big Organization of New Dimensions). Originally composed of some dozens of members, it has in the past two years grown from one hundred to two hundreds. The difference in size has led to various organizational cultural changes, and GOLD is struggling to maintain its core values of openness, equality, informality, and fluidity of structure as conditions change.

GOLD holds monthly program meetings. As membership and visibility have increased, the number of RSVP’s has risen in the past few years from about 40 to about 100. Since its meeting locations generally can accommodate only 50 to 75 people, it is now compelled to turn people away from its meetings.

In addition, because GOLD does not charge its members a meeting fee, there is an economic problem. Unless there are sufficient nonmembers at meetings, revenue targets can’t be met. But because the meetings are selling out, a situation may be developing whereby members RSVP for all the spaces before nonmembers learn about the meeting.

Another set of issues concerning larger meeting sizes has to do with the conduct of meetings. With so many more people attending, the free-flowing nature of the discussion, whereby those present are free to speak up, slows down the meetings so much that presentations don’t end on time and presenters are forced to omit some material because they allow so many questions and statements from the floor.

Recent program evaluations have cited dissatisfaction with the fact some people interrupt the presentations, sometimes repeatedly. There are also complaints that with the larger numbers presenters often cannot be heard.

GOLD has had many consultants who have made many recommendations on these issues. In every case, however, naysayers in the leadership have shot down the proposals of the consultants.

Financial issues

Consultants: Find larger meeting venues.

Naysayers: We offer people a year’s free membership if they can get us a suitable meeting space but people aren’t getting us the larger spaces we need.

Consultants: Offer members incentives if they bring (paying) guest to meetings or get people to join.

Naysayers: We already did that, but it has not worked. Members aren’t doing it.

Consultants: Change members a meeting fee.

Naysayers: That would undo our best marketing tactic, as we tell people that paying dues saves them money because they then won’t have to pay a meeting fee; so we would probably lose rather than gain money if we did it. Besides, since we’ve made that promise, we would have to phase in such a change over a year’s period, an administrative nightmare.

Consultants: Raise the dues.

Naysayers: You try collecting the money! It is hard enough to get members to renew now; if the dues were higher, we might lose instead of gain since fewer members would renew or join.

Consultants: Hold bad meetings in inconvenient locations so that fewer members will want to attend.

Naysayers: We’ve done that inadvertently a few times, but the RSVP’s still keeping growing.

Meeting norms 

Consultants: Require presenters to follow a standard timed outline.

Naysayers: We are doing that, but presenters usually promise and then renege since they can’t bear to omit material or to cut off discussion from the floor.

Consultants: Ban or restrict PowerPoint since it aggravates the time problem.

Naysayers: Taking PowerPoint from presenters is like taking guns from NRA members. 

Consultants: Do not allow questions or comments during the explication part of the presentation, telling people to save them for small group or other later segments.

Naysayers: The people who make these interruptions for the most part are our core members and we don’t want to offend them. 

Consultants: Get the people attending a meeting to develop meeting norms, which could include allowing only one question or statement per person per meeting, having a timekeeper, or other ground rules that recognize the changed state of meetings.

Naysayers: Every time we try to use meetings for such purposes some people complain. 

Consultants: Get contact microphones so that presenters can be heard.

Naysayers: Our presenters don’t know how to use such technology. Besides, what would it cost and who would take care of it?

Your task is as follows: 

(1) develop new recommendations such that the naysayers cannot dispute them 

or (2) reframe the recommendations to overcome the naysayers’ objections.

Respond to: cases@learninggroup.org