[OSList] Rescue a project in crisis with OST

Tue Mar 6 10:38:39 PST 2012

Thanks for the inside of the story, Peggy.

And thanks Peggy, Harold and the US Open Space Institute, for putting this marvelous video in public access.

Artur

________________________________
 From: Peggy Holman <peggy at peggyholman.com>
To: World wide Open Space Technology email list <oslist at lists.openspacetech.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, March 6, 2012 5:14 PM
Subject: Re: [OSList] Rescue a project in crisis with OST

How about another telecommunications company story?  It was my first real experience of Open Space.  The company was US WEST and the year was 1995.  There had been floods in Arizona and serious outages.  It was also a time of transition to high bandwidth technologies so little investment in the old copper phone lines had been made.  The system was in bad shape as a result.  And to complicate matters further, union contracts were being negotiated behind the scenes.  

A union rep, Bill Mahoney, who also worked with Open Space, convinced the head of the state organization to try Open Space.  I was part of a corporate group and got involved.  We contacted Harrison and ran a 2.5 day Open Space called "Discovering Priorities".  It was a wild event!  The majority of the participants were network technicians -- the people who climb telephone poles.  (When they were made of wood and people still climbed them.)  They had a colorful vocabulary, with more 4 letter words (curse words) than I'd ever heard before!

The outcome: people not only worked out how to deal with the aging technology and get back to reliable service (a high value for the company and among the many veteran employees), but long-time broken relationships between groups were mended.  My favorite example:

People from two departments who were always fighting met with each other.  They discovered that their performance goals were written in a way that by definition put them in conflict.  They worked out a manager swap, where they'd have first-line supervisors trade jobs to learn about each other's businesses.  And of course, renegotiate goals that supported the success of both groups.

Another favorite moment: about a week after the Open Space, a meeting about next steps occurred.  Rather than just managers, it was opened to anyone who wanted to participate.  A number of the union people -- network technicians -- were there.  One of them said, "let's hire contract workers (non-union labor) to handle the daily stuff while we rehabilitate the basic plant."  This would have gotten him shot before the Open Space!  What had happened during the OS was people had a chance to learn more about how everything worked so rather than making decisions from a narrow perspective, this suggestion was based in having an understanding of the whole system.

This is the event where I fell in love with Open Space because I saw the needs of individuals and the whole both met.

And I'm happy to report that it is on video.  It's still my favorite video about Open Space all these years later.  The Open Space Institute US, through Harold Shinsato, put it on Vimeo about 8 months ago:
http://vimeo.com/25251316

Peggy

_________________________________
Peggy Holman
peggy at peggyholman.com

15347 SE 49th Place
Bellevue, WA  98006
425-746-6274
www.peggyholman.com
www.journalismthatmatters.org

Enjoy the award winning Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity

"An angel told me that the only way to step into the fire and not get burnt, is to become 
the fire".
  -- Drew Dellinger

On Mar 6, 2012, at 7:32 AM, Harrison Owen wrote:

Rescue? Ah yes! My favorite on one occurred almost 20 years ago. The Venezuelan Cell phone company – TELCEL – was just launched and they were about to fail. The problem  was that the business was much, much, too good. In a word the company had massively underestimated the public demand for cell phones. In fact TELCEL had sold more phones in the first 6 months of operation than they expected to sell in the first several years. With demand like that the system was in massive overload. It wasn’t just the individual phones, but all the infrastructure – towers, switchers, and all the rest. They were about ready to go down the tubes. My client owned the company and knew about Open Space because we had used it many times before with his other businesses – but this was a big one.
> 
>When a company gets into trouble like this, one of the first things to go is the ability (time) to communicate with all parties. So busy there was no time to talk. So -- a bad situation was getting progressively worse.
> 
>We did an Open Space for everybody (350 people, I recall). Essentially shut down the company, save for a skeleton crew. We only had a day, but that was all they needed because the folks were energetic, bright, and very motivated. By the end of the day, channels of communication were open again, plans were made, problems identified and on the way to solution. The biggest learning, I think, was articulated by one person who said – “We didn’t just do an Open Space – we live in Open Space. This is our world!” One result was that Open Space became the “go-to” approach whenever real difficulties or opportunities presented.
> 
>Harrison
> 
>Harrison Owen
>7808 River Falls Dr.
>Potomac, MD 20854
>USA
> 
>189 Beaucaire Ave. (summer)
>Camden, Maine 20854
> 
>Phone 301-365-2093
>(summer)  207-763-3261
> 
>www.openspaceworld.com
>www.ho-image.com (Personal Website)
>To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of OSLIST Go to:http://lists.openspacetech.org/listinfo.cgi/oslist-openspacetech.org
> 
>From: oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org [mailto:oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org] On Behalf Of Csaba Lengyel
>Sent: Monday, March 05, 2012 5:29 PM
>To: oslist at lists.openspacetech.org
>Subject: [OSList] Rescue a project in crisis with OST
> 
>Hi all,
> 
> 
>I have had a discussion with the sponsor of a really troubled big IT investment and business transformation project.
> 
>They have go-live date in 4 month and in reality the project is so much behind schedule they have hardly any chance to meet the deadline.
> 
>There is a lot of conflict within the project, the task is almost impossible, time is short – well I thought it’s quite a typical situation calling for OST.
>I mentioned it and the guy has shown interest, however he’s had too many bad experience with miraculous techniques and solutions, he was a bit sceptical. So he asked if OST has ever been used for project turnaround.
> 
>I’m sure the answer is yes (and I also know OST always works), but I have only used OST for kicking-off projects and not for rescuing them.
> 
>So I decided to ask the community. Do you have any experience with OST in rescuing projects? If yes, please help me sharing it!
> 
> 
>BR,
> 
>Csaba Lengyel
> 
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