CNH Global

Implementing Matrix Organisation & Management

It's always a good idea to undertake an audit before you introduce any change in your business - especially when the change is to bring about a matrix organisation and More on Matrix click here

Organisational Culture Change

You have to focus on hard and soft measures, so as well as looking as productivity and costing, responsiveness etc You have to focus on attitudes and behaviour - which is something many businesses fail to assess.

Pilot Projects in Matrix Organisation

It is a good idea to run a pilot in a discrete area of the business to see what works for you and your people. A huge mistake is to commit to a matrix business as 'the business model without creating a very specific plan for implementation.

Case Study: Matrix Organisation

I was consulting with a large $6 billion manufacturing business in  Illinois where a specific prototyping Plant wanted to introduce Matrix organisation. This Plant had a very important prototyping role in this Agri-Construction - Auto business - it was the Plant which was used as the test bed for manufacturing  and production capability  so that other plants to assemble all of the company's products worldwide.

Changing from Functional to Matrix Organisation

Their work was focused on production possibilities and the actual techniques and assessment of how best to manufacture the product from goods inwards to despatching their orders. In this Plant, carefully defined processes would be designed in terms of manufacturing capability.

Reasons for adopting Matrix Organisation

Accuracy and error were not an issue. The performance levels had to be 100% right first time, with no margin for error or quality corrections after the event.

The ideas, methodology, processes and manufacturing capability plans that flowed from this plant had to be accurate - so as to be made to work on the other side of the globe from Australia to Uzbekistan.

Although the group had a huge prototyping responsibility the only way they could cope with their immense work flow was to go Matrix.

Advanced Engineering and Matrix Organisation

Advanced Engineering professionals would have to work across functional boundaries and really get to grips with the technical expertise of other professional engineers and scientists.

This was serious stuff. These people had MSc's and PhD's, post doctoral work in advanced engineering.

Nasa forerunner of Matrix 

I likened the approach taken to how NASA set up probably the first matrix organisation. There were lots of clever people around who questioned everything, which I found a fantastically enjoyable challenge. If I could win these guys over I was very happy!

Fool-Proofing the Process

As you can imagine, we set a process in place which was repeatable and error free, working on small projects at first, learning from them and incorporating our learning into our next session.

By working on small projects, we were able to understand the challenges and set up fool-proofing techniques designed to prevent errors arising in ther future.

10 S's Cultural Assessment

From this early work we undertook a rigorous analysis of the organisation using our 10 S's cultural assessment that measured the readiness forchange from Strategy to Systems and Symbols to Skills.

Gap Analysis

From the very early days, every progress meeting in the Plant had an agenda item -" What does this mean for how we progress Matrix organisation?" Any matters arising had to be actioned and every action had a time frame and an owner for reporting back on issues resolved.

Team Development Critical for Matrix Organisation

At this early stage we won the commitment of the top team and their resilience under fire from those who resisted the change and sterner critics was excellent.. The critics were the old school of engineers, who were comfortable with their functional silos, who did not want to change.

Eventually,we won them over through  individual coaching using, amongst other things,  abaility testing, psychometric profiling.  We aimed to restore the confidence of the staff so that they could deal with the issues they would comfront whilst on this journey.  We enabled individual managers to understand their strengths and areas for development and improvement.

The programme worked because we measured soft and hard data. We worked on attitudes to change as well as process measures, rework and other standard measures. From this we had a baseline measure from which we could measure progress.

More on Matrix click here

Should you have any questions about our approach email me direct at Philip@philipatkinson.com