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change2Initiatives aimed at improving performance are often launched with great uproar, costing an organization significant investments.  Such initiatives necessitate extensive changes in the Organizational Culture and the way the enterprise systems and processes function.

However, most initiatives fall short of realizing success.  Decades of scholarly research on Change Management reveals that the issues that contribute the most to the failure of strategic initiatives are:

  • Incompetence in sustaining process improvement.
  • Lack of trust on senior leadership.
  • Failure to embrace new ways of doing business.
  • Performance relapse.
  • Inability of the initiative to produce any positive financial returns.
  • Skepticism towards the desired behaviors and return of impractical employee behaviors.

Researchers have carried out scores of studies to isolate the drivers of lasting change.  Research published in MIT SMR in 2005 discusses how leadership can design and execute Transformation initiatives that bring lasting changes in the organization.  The study entailed in-depth analysis of the strategic Customer Service Enhancement (CSE) initiative undertaken by a large clothing retailer, having franchises in multiple geographic locations.

The researchers conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with leaders, in-store operations and support function managers.  Detailed notes of the interviews were shared amongst the researchers alongside an exhaustive literature review.  A case study of the initiative was prepared using independent research to have an unprejudiced viewpoint, free from any bias.  Feedback from the organization’s management was gathered and incorporated throughout the study to seek clarifications or corrections.  Data analysis was carried out employing a coding scheme developed using Atlas.ti tool.  Comparative analysis was conducted and similarities and differences in conclusions were discussed.

The study brought to light 4 key processes necessary for change to stick in an organization.   These key processes assist in laying the foundation for successful institutionalization of change initiatives by creating a company-wide culture that encourages enduring change:

  1. Chartering
  2. Learning
  3. Mobilizing
  4. Realigning

Let’s delve deeper into the first 2 processes.

Chartering

Chartering is a process through which an enterprise classifies the purpose, scope, and the way people interact with each other on a strategic initiative.  Clear delineation of project boundaries, resources, responsibilities, and reporting lines are the elements integral for the success of a change initiative.

The Chartering process entails 2 critical components:

  • Boundary Setting
  • Team Design

Boundary Setting involves the key steps a team takes for accurate definition of change initiative’s scope.

The project team should clearly outline the problem(s) that the project is, and isn’t, going to tackle.  Ideally, while designing and executing a change initiative, the focus of the engagement should be on confronting the most crucial problem area.  The leadership should ensure not to confuse the core team by eyeing too many priorities to deal with through the strategic initiative.

The Team Design element of Chartering involves ascertaining the roles, accountabilities, and guiding principles for team’s collaboration.  Team design entails creating ground rules for team members to interact, devising mechanisms to manage conflicts.  The leadership needs to not only maintain diversity of the project team’s expertise, but also ensure they complement each other, and inculcate a standardized approach to decision making in project teams.  There needs to be fostered a culture of positive discourse and testing ideas amongst the team members.  Incorporating these guidelines helps spark thinking, learning, and decision making.

Learning

Learning aids in anticipating and dealing with hurdles during implementation of Transformation initiatives.  Learning enables the managers to improve the quality of the new processes.  it is a process through which managers develop, test, and refine ideas before full-scale implementation.  The process entails 2 critical components:

  • Discovery
  • Experimentation
For more information on Learning and Development and how to elevate your organization into a Learning Organization, check out the frameworks and tools on Flevy here: https://flevy.com/business-toolkit/learning-organization

The discovery element involves gathering data to identify the objectives of the change initiative and outlining ways to achieve those objectives.  Before rolling out a complete implementation of a change initiative, testing and refining the individual elements of the initiative immensely assists in the success of the initiative.  Gathering adequate information relevant to the initiative, setting up baseline metrics to measure performance, and identifying issues hampering customer satisfactions are the key aspects of this phase.  The team should learn from the failures of prior initiatives, introduce change in a systemic fashion rather than piecemeal, and encourage people to change rationally as well as emotionally.

Interested in learning more about the other processes critical for change to stick?  You can download an editable PowerPoint on 4 Processes of Sustainable Change here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

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microscope-analysisIdentifying what the market wants is a critical issue for most executives.  Likewise, the decision on how much to charge for a product is also crucial for planners.  This is where Market Research comes to rescue.

One of the Marketing Research methods that researchers most commonly employ is the Conjoint (Trade-off) Analysis.  Conjoint Analysis helps in identifying product features that consumers prefer, discerning the impact of price changes on demand, and estimating the probability of product acceptance in the market.

In contrast to directly inquiring from the respondents about the most important feature in a product, Conjoint Analysis makes the survey participants assess product profiles.  These product profiles comprise various linked—or conjoined—product features, therefore the analysis is termed “Conjoint Analysis.”  Conjoint Analysis simulates real-world buying situations where the researchers statistically determine the product attributes—that carry the most impact and are attractive to the participants—by substituting the features and recording the participants’ responses.

The Conjoint Analysis Approach

The Conjoint Analysis is useful in creating market models to estimate market share, revenue, or profitability.  The Conjoint Analysis is widely used in marketing, product management, and operations research.  The Conjoint Analysis approach entails the following key steps:

  1. Determine the Study Type
  2. Identify Relevant Features
  3. Establish Values for Each Feature
  4. Design Questionnaire
  5. Collect Data
  6. Analyze Data

1. Determine the Study Type

The first step of the Conjoint Analysis involves ascertaining and selecting from a number of different types of Conjoint Analysis methods available.  This should be determined based on the individual requirements of the organization.

2. Identify Relevant Features

The next step of the Conjoint Analysis entails categorizing the key features or relevant attributes of a product.  For instance, setting the main product attributes in terms of size, appearance, price.

3. Establish Values for Each Feature

After selecting the key features of the product, the next step in Conjoint Analysis is to choose some values for each of the itemized features that have to be enumerated.  A combination of features in different forms should be chosen to present to the participants.  The presentation could be written notes describing the products or in the form of pictorial descriptions.

4. Design Questionnaire

The basic forms of Conjoint Analysis—practiced in the past—encompassed a set of product features (4 to 5) used to create profiles, displayed to the respondents on individual cards for ranking.  These days, different design techniques and automated tools are used to reduce the number of profiles while maintaining enough data availability for analysis.  The questionnaire length depends on the number of features to be evaluated and the Conjoint Analysis type employed.

5. Collect Data

A statistically viable sample size and accuracy should be considered while planning a Conjoint Analysis survey.  It is up to the senior management to decide how they want to gather the responses—by taking the responses from each individual and analyzing them individually, collecting all the responses into a single utility function, or dividing the respondents into segments and recording their preferences.

6. Analyze Data

Various econometric and statistical methods are utilized to analyze the data gathered through the Conjoint exercise.  This includes linear programming techniques for earlier Conjoint types, linear regression to rate Full-Profile Tasks, and Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) for Choice-based Conjoint.

Types of Conjoint Analysis

There are a number of Conjoint Analysis types available for the marketing researchers to choose from, including:

  1. Two-Attribute Tradeoff Analysis
  2. Full-Profile Conjoint Analysis
  3. Adaptive Conjoint Analysis
  4. Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis
  5. Self-Explicated Conjoint Analysis
  6. Max-Diff Conjoint Analysis
  7. Hierarchical Bayes Analysis (HB)

Interested in learning more about Conjoint Analysis?  You can download an editable PowerPoint on Conjoint Analysis Primer here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

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