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(The name of the partnership and other situations are disguised due to a confidentiality agreement. The actual client approved this case study.)
AEPM, a Midwestern architecture, engineering, and project management firm founded in 1910, established the stretch objective of becoming the company of choice in its markets. The managing partners had concluded that "our lack of a clearly defined culture is holding us back...we have competition between disciplines and locations because everyone has their own idea of what the firm is about."
Moravec and Associates was selected to work with a cross-disciplinary task force charged to create "shared values and institutionalized practices to promote exceptional performance." The Associates worked shoulder to shoulder with the task force, sharing expertise and lessons learned from comparable assignments.
Before the journey began, the task force imagined what they would like to accomplish. The consultants identified the predictable stages forward, and from these stages the task force created a map to get where they were going, listing the resources available at each stage to support the journey.
The task force decided to examine where the firm had come from and how it earned its success and reputation. Task force members and consultants partnered to ask long-service employees, engineers, and stakeholders to tell their favorite stories about AEPM-including results, since AEPM had historically been driven by innovation and successful accomplishments. The stories were then compiled into a history that included personal vignettes, awards, personality sketches, and excerpts from media coverage. One story: the founder had, in the mid-20th century, invented and used computerized network analysis on the firm's growing backlog of worldwide architecture and civil projects. Today project managers continue to benefit from the principles and tools he pioneered. They can manage the entire project while leaving the details of how work gets done under local control.
This personal learning journey reinforced, in the minds of task force members, AEPM's shared background and work ethic. Next the task force presented the map to groups of 40-50 employees, mostly from technical areas, to develop a shared vision for the future. Moravec and Associates deployed exercises to bring people together from the different disciplines, projects, and shared services who had never worked together before.
The lineage, expressed values, and guiding vision aligned the disciplines and various personalities. The task force did experience some emotional group dynamics and disappointments along the way. However, techniques employed by Moravec and Associates helped them to persevere and to accept the fact that several technically talented professionals preferred to remain unengaged while still contributing individually.
Annually, a group of line managers and technical professionals conduct an audit, designed for them by Moravec and Associates, that starts with: "Provide examples of how the business culture and values guided your professional and business decision making." Clients from various parts of the globe are also interviewed to determine how AEPM's business culture, values, and practices add value to projects.
In the three years after the cross-functional task force began its work, revenues doubled. Audits reveal that technical and non-technical people still communicate from a position of pride in their mutual history and success.