A Little Kicking and Screaming
Change can be scary for anyone, especially during an upheaval of an entire 400-person IS department. Cooper changed the jobs of 50 percent of her staffers within six months, yet no one left or was let go. Some took on new responsibilities; others took on expanded or completely new roles. Cooper says some mid- and upper-level staffers were initially uncomfortable with their new roles, but she says she spent a lot of time fostering a new attitude about the change.
"I dragged them into the conversations kicking and screaming," Cooper says. "But I said to them: 'Unless you think of what it means to change on this level, you will never make it happen'."
Similarly, IS senior management held a town-hall meeting to announce the changes and deal with questions. Staff members did express some concerns at that meeting and subsequent monthly staff meetings.
"With any big change, the unknown is always a concern. And it was harder around the areas [of IS] where people had worked for a long time," says Zack Hicks, national business administration manager in IS. "People wanted to know more information about what was going to happen to them. They wanted to know the specifics of their new positions or the changes to their current positions."
The key, Cooper and Hicks say, is that all IS staffers were brought into the development of the new organization early on. Indeed, most IS staffers had played some part in the Total Value Action Program. "We didn't go off into a corner and pop out with a new org chart," Hicks says.
Cooper says the organizational structure today is "almost unrecognizable" to the IS employees she inherited when she first arrived in 1996. Yet there has been very little turnover (Hicks says less than 3 percent a year). One key element was rotating IS people into other parts of the company and bringing businesspeople into IS. Hicks, for one, came to IS from the business side.
For the first time, Cooper also tied part of the senior IS managers' bonuses to their success in meeting the goals of each of their annual plans. These managers are judged on 10 areas and on how well they meet the objectives in those areas - for example, meeting project-based goals (whether the project was done on time, on budget) and operational goals (implementing new governance and portfolio management processes).
To further strengthen the IS-business bond, Cooper chartered the executive steering committee, or ESC, to approve all major IT projects. The committee consists of Cooper; Cooper's boss, senior vice president and planning and administrative officer Dave Illingworth; senior vice president and Treasurer Mikihiro Mori; and senior vice president and coordinating officer Masanao Tomozoe. By exposing IT's inner workings to the business side at Toyota Motor Sales, Cooper hoped that this new transparency would lessen IS's role on IT project vetting and monitoring, and increase business's responsibility.
"Barbra shouldn't be asked to make value judgments about whether or not a project is worth it to the company," Daly says. Project sponsors (with their DIO at their side) have to come back at set intervals, and provide status updates on how each project is doing.
The executive steering committee now controls all of the project funds in one pool of cash, and it releases funds for each project as each phase of the project's goals are achieved. Everyone in the company can look at which dollars were (and were not) going to be spent, the pool's administrators can sweep unused funds out, and other projects can go after those funds. And there are no more spending swings; projects are regularly paced throughout the year.
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