Introduction

The Client is a relatively big family-owned business which supplies mainly power transformers to utility companies, in Italy and in foreign countries: EMEA, LATAM and North America regions. The company designs, produces and instals its products on the base of customer contracts and specifications. From an engineering science perspective, the product technology is traditional (static electromechanical machines), but their design is anyway complex, considering the challenges increasingly generated by the customers’ application requirements.

The company is growing due to the expansion and technological evolution of the energy markets, and its business perspectives are very positives for the coming years. To deal with the complexity of the sustained growth, two interim management projects has been activated in two crucial areas: HR and Supply Chain. Main goal of both projects was the implementation of tools, models, organization design and the knowledge transfer to less senior people in the organization for the long term. These projects were within the perimeter of a frame partnership agreement that Temporary Management & Capital Advisors has with a major Italian energy group. The cases have been also studied in a thesis degree at Florence University.

The Challenge

In the 2023, the company identified some part of the organization in need for further development and innovation. One of them was the people management area and the Executive Board recognized that they lacked the knowledge to fully address the topic.
As a consequence, they decided to select and engage a HR Temporary Manager, to the purpose to assess the current situation, identify and analyse the business and employee needs and propose the priorities for further action.
The first part of my engagement with the company was then consisting in an Organizational Assessment with focus on people practices & needs coherent with business strategy and plans.

The Approach

The structure of the assessment was inspired to some of the EFQM 2013 Model’s Criteria (Figure 1), because particularly focused on the main themes to be tested as Leadership (criteria #1), People Management processes (criteria #3) and their related Results (criteria #7).

Figure 1 – The 2013 EFQM Model

In addition, the assessment structure was designed also to carefully looking into the company business model and its related key business processes (see some examples in the process description window): what they are; how effective they are; what are the main current issues and the perspective risks, considering the acting main business trends. Indeed, the employee life cycle management need to be interpreted as a system strictly related to the specific business it is part of. You can’t identify and design the “right” HR processes if you don’t correctly understand how a business is functioning and how it can improve thanks of them, becoming more effective or efficient or both.

Process Description window – Representation of some effective customer process description developed during the organizational assessment, at three detail levels

The information required to complete the assessment was gathered mainly through structured individual interviews with the employees, at every responsibility level from managers till blue collars, involving also some employee representative of the Trade Unions. The questions inquired about various subjects such as: individual job activities, personal perceptions and informed professional opinions about the business and how it was operated. Documentation regarding people management practices, and results when available, where also considered.

The assumption behind the privilege reserved to the employee interviews as information sources is that, generally in the organizations: people know better how things are really working and how they can be improved. The limits to this assumption are mainly two:
• the level of employee engagement into the company scope & activities,
• the professional level of each of them in their specific job.

As a consequence, these two dimensions too must be evaluated during the assessment, to validate the information base it provides to the assessor. The assessment report was discussed with the Executive Board and the second part of my engagement with the customer initiated, with the purpose to implement the identified and agreed priority actions.

The article’s scope isn’t to enter in the overall action plan. Its purpose instead will be to show how a light & focused organizational assessment format, in practical terms a diagnostic tool, could be applied at different scales, to quickly win benefits like, just to mention some of them: recognize performance risks, identify possible issue causes and related likely solutions, gain advise how to address specific topics, outline opportunity for improvement if not innovation.

Due to the limited space deserved to this article, only one specific lower scale application case (at function level) will be presented. Other applications cases could be presented in the future.

The Case: Risks & Opportunities in the Engineering department
The application case for a light organizational assessment at function level here presented is related to the Engineering department of the customer organization. The activity was commissioned to the HR Advisor due to a planned job rotation of an engineering team senior coordinator. This senior professional supported the Head of Engineering in many other coordination activities for the overall department, interfacing both internal and external stakeholders and assuring a certain level of homogeneity for the people management practices in the department.

In the intention of the assessor, this job rotation became also an opportunity to do a general review of the department’s goals, roles & responsibilities, technical and soft skills.

At a lower scale (single department) the same mechanic of the initial organizational assessment was applied, adapting it to have a greater focus on two dimensions:
• better understanding the local processes (strengths and bugs/ risks embedded in the activity flows);
• clear evaluation for the level of technical competency owned by single contributors and specialized teams (the department was articulated in four specialized engineering teams).

Regarding the second dimension: evaluation of the technical competency, a specific Power Transformer Engineering Body of Knowledge (BoK), and the related evaluation metric, were developed with the support of the department Head and team Coordinators (see Figure 2 for a typical structure of a profession’s BoK).

Figure 2 – Typical profession’s Body of Knowledge structure

Each of the Engineering employees was then evaluated against the own job relevant BoK section. Instead, the convolution of the individual evaluations for each engineering team highlighted at team level the possible gaps or vulnerabilities. In addition, a metric to evaluate the design complexity of the machines was defined. This additional metric was used to map the autonomy and proficiency levels of each of the engineers against machines’ design complexity. This approach aloud to identify possible bottlenecks in the design capacity of the department, related to the know how level of the individual contributors and his/her redundancies.

The personnel interviews were mainly used to: (i) clarify the effective activity flows and the related bugs or opportunities for improvement or innovation; (ii) the expectations related to the future professional development; (iii) a self-evaluation against key design competency and autonomy/ proficiency vs machines’ design complexity level.

The analysis and interpretation of all this set of information, contributed to formulate an overall proposal for the department reorganization. The proposal not only addressed how to manage the impacts of the career evolution of the senior team coordinator, at the same time was intended:
• to propose to innovate the way how to manage the non-technical activity burden and to increase the internal level of standardization (regarding parts and design rules);
• to enhance the R&D company capacity, about perspective possible techs and application trends (in a five hear horizon);
• to close the knowledge gaps, or eliminate the bottlenecks in a two years horizon, for example through internal programs & incentives for knowledge transfer, and a plan for new hirings.

A roadmap for all the actions was proposed and the first set of actions is already in place and under testing.

Organizational and competence assessments – Near Future Evolution
The organizational assessment practices are based on knowledge by experience and a method to apply the knowledge to the specific business case (the driving skill is the business savviness, or acumen). A third element is the feedback, provided by the action plan implementation results, to check the quality level of the assessment and the proposed action plan.

The iteration of this practice on differentiated cases build-up an important knowledge-base, that in a continuous way dramatically improve the same practice effectiveness. In my understanding, this cycle could be an interesting area to test an AI support, for example “on the job” breaking in an IA agent, during the assessor activity. A further enhancement would be to train the AI agent involving a differentiated set of assessors, specialized in different business areas. A possible project having this goal could be awarded by a powerful diagnostic, continuously observing the organization’s operations, detecting its risks and vulnerabilities, commenting on its performance improvement and innovation opportunities. Not to mention that, also regarding the employees’ competency portfolio, an AI application could really help to lay the foundations to build up a knowledge base for an effective competency-driven organization.

Would be that an extinctive threat for interim managers, consultants and generally professionals, at least in the people management arena? I’m convinced of the opposite, imagining the augmented power of the coupled human-AI practitioner, due to the augmentation coming from the possible mix of the different abilities and provided that there isn’t an exclusive focus on short term efficiency/cost gains (unlikely enough, still today the main reason to adopt the new technologies by large seems to be only the search for efficiency).

Text of the case study by the Interim Manager who led the project, Domenico Famà