One of the biggest challenges facing new CEOs today is setting and implementing an agenda for sustainable change and improved performance. Booz Allen Hamilton has partnered with Australia's Centre for Organisational Innovation (COI), the developers of an innovative tool called OEP, to help organizations measure, analyze, improve, and maintain their effectiveness.

"OEP can be used to monitor comprehensive cost reduction programs or to drive one-off change initiatives," explained Sydney-based Booz Allen Local Director Marion Skulley. "New team leaders frequently use OEP to quickly engage their teams to design the 100-day change agenda and to support the execution and follow through of team action plans." She added that OEP has also been used to highlight anomalies in resource allocation across divisions or business units, to drive and track cultural change during post merger integration situations, and to identify incompatible processes within merged business units or shared back-office systems.

Effectiveness Measurement

The OEP Tool is based on a three-stage process: effectiveness measurement, effectiveness improvement, and effectiveness maintenance. The 19 drivers of organizational effectiveness measured by the OEP process during the first stage are clustered into the following three core categories:

• Strategic Intent — To what extent are the strategic direction, vision, strategy, and plans well understood and internalized by all employees?



• Business Processes — How effective are the underlying business processes — determined through systems, procedures, knowledge transfer, metrics, and reporting — as an enabler for strategy execution?



• Culture — To what extent is the culture — expressed in values, leadership, teamwork, empowerment, and communication — successfully harnessed as a facilitator for enduring business success by the respective business units?

OEP distinguishes itself from similar processes by its ability to look across all three of these areas to unlock key causal relationships. "Cultural symptoms are not necessarily caused by cultural issues, they may be caused by poor strategic direction, systems, and processes," said Skulley. "Without a holistic approach to measurement across these three key areas, these causal relationships are often impossible to identify."

Effectiveness Improvement

Stage two involves developing an effectiveness improvement plan prioritized by impact and ease of implementation. The OEP drills down from the symptoms identified to address the underlying root causes of an organization's problems using a structured five-step data analysis process. "If an organization really wants to drive change, we must start with a clear understanding about what is causing the problems," said COI Director Lanning Bennett. "Organizational initiatives often fail because the underlying causes of problems have not been correctly identified; they're only addressing the symptoms. OEP focuses very heavily on causal analysis."

Effectiveness Maintenance

In keeping with its foundation in principles of continuous improvement, OEP emphasizes steps to ensure the organization can maintain and build on the increased effectiveness it has achieved. The final stage of the process ensures that the effectiveness improvement plans are properly resourced and that the project is managed to completion.

For More Information

For more information on OEP or to organize a complimentary trial for your client, please contact Sydney-based Marion Skulley.

To view an interview with Lanning Bennett, click on the link below.

story posted February 9, 2004