MCA Awards 2003
Highly Commended: Organisational Development Category
PA Consulting Group; client - Orange
The mobile phone industry is one of the fastest-moving business areas in the world, and being unable to get hold of the right people or right equipment in time to launch new services or products can have disastrous effects.
So when the UK team at Orange - the mobile phone network owned by France Telecom - realised they had suffered a series of what they call resource bottlenecks, they called in outside help. PA Consulting Group took on the role of strategic engineer, with a three-stage plan implemented by a core team consisting of equal numbers of consultants and Orange employees.
First, the team analysed Orange's problem and realised that smarter use of resources could bring cost benefits to Orange of Pounds 30m a year. Further gains were also a distinct possibility as a better-run organisation would also be able to deal with more throughput.
The next step was to pinpoint specific work groups and help them to identify where improvements could be made that would increase their productivity. Initially, five groups were chosen, but as the programme progressed that number was increased to nine.
There was obviously some suspicion among these targeted groups, but Orange's leaders adopted a constructive "no blame" approach and that helped secure acceptance of the core team. The core team worked with local managers to help them deliver results.
The targeted groups were helped to eliminate tasks and behaviours that added little or no value and helped to implement management practices that minimised wastage of effort. Solutions were tailored to each individual target group and changes were implemented in well thought-out steps.
Progress was tracked against weekly targets and showed that overall work capacity in the groups increased by between 20% and 30% within nine months. This increase was equivalent to having 72 more people working for the business.
All along the way it was important for the PA Consulting team to help Orange develop its own capabilities to deal with bottlenecks once the consultants had left. In the end PA Consulting helped create a change team capable of maintaining the programme's momentum.
The total value of the improvements from the first five pilot groups - which accounted for just 4% of the project delivery community - was equivalent to Pounds 1.3m a year.
Armed with the successful pilot programme, Orange's own in-house team took over the controls and very quickly saw similar benefits as new teams were brought into the programme
