Change Management Interview
Casey Jackman
October 2, 2008
Interviewee: Anne Grange
COMPANY BACKGROUND:
Lumiport Inc. creates medicinal solutions and therapeutic products. Lumiport focuses most of its
resources on light therapy. The companies’ flagship product is a portable light therapy device designed
to combat acne with the use of intensive rays of concentrated LED light. From a research and
development perspective, Lumiport juggles the responsibilities of technical research, user testing,
medical red tape, and general product modifications.
Lumiport is a relatively small company that employs workers from various backgrounds, both in
academics and experience. Eliot Jacobsen, co-founder of Lumiport, completed his undergraduate work
at BYU studying Finance and management. He then attended graduate school at Harvard University
where he received a Masters in Business Administration. After nearly 10 years at Bain Consulting, he left
to work for eBay in operations and strategy. In 2004 Jacobsen joined Steve Powell to start the now
successful Lumiport. Powell studied at BYU but did not a finish his degree.
Anne Grange, director at Lumiport, studied exercise science at BYU and joined Lumiport in 2006. Anne
has been instrumental in preparing Lumiport for the growing success and the high demand for its
products. Anne’s roles at Lumiport vary from general management to strategic decision making. Among
other responsibilities, Anne supervises employees and has ownership of the companies Standard
Operating Procedures (SOP).
Most of the other employees at the Lumiport are involved in areas of research and development. New
products are constantly being tested and documented. Currently, a device is being researched that
behaves as a “Natural Light Alarm Clock” that mimics manipulates a standard bedroom light to mimic
the rising sun, gradually becomes brighter and brighter.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT O VERVIEW :
The culture at Lumiport lends itself to innovations. As explained the pervious section (Company
Background), employees spend time investigating new technology and are rewarded for bright ideas.
The corporate culture at Lumiport is set from the top. Both Steve Powell and Eliot Jacobsen pride
themselves in being a forward-thinking company striving to always be ahead of the curve.
Anne explains that because the Powell and Jacobsen reward innovation, the company is constantly
changing it practices to align with the current popular trends of management. The expectation of Anne
is to continually be investigation better practices for employees and superior technical solutions to
problems.
CORPORATE CULTURE :
The culture at Lumiport relates to the “tone at the top”. Lumiport generates gain from its innovative
products, and it is assumed that because this has been so successful in their in product development, it
should be equally successful in management and operating procedures. In many ways Lumiport is not
reluctant to change, almost to point of embracing new concepts and ideas in areas that may already be
functioning well.
The constant desire to optimize operating procedures is most apparent in matters of Information
Technology because of the radical, timely, and expensive nature of IT changes.
Anne explains that it seems like every week a new idea is presented for how employee should operate
and how technology can best assist the workers. Each time an idea is presented, Anne is required to
immerse herself in the new technology and determine how to best implement it in the organization.
Even if the returns seem weak or diminishing. The latest flavor of the week… “Cloud Computing.”
Because of the constant changes, the group of engineers who might be expected to embrace the
changes is becoming disenfranchised with constant modifications and some even fear the impact. The
Price Waterhouse Integration Teams offers the following insight into the fear of change:
“There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to
manage, than to initiate a new order of things. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by
the preservation of the old system, and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the
new one.” (Better Change, page 79)
In the case of Lumiport, those supporting the change are on the top of the organizational ladder, so the
changes are made rather quickly. But what is often missing in these changes are the basic key levers and
strategies for change. Changes are abrupt without offering notice and comfort surrounding the change.
Often times, the necessary support and training are absent before and during the migration.
CYNICISM AND SKEPTICISM
This narrative begs the question of whether or not the changes are actually bringing an advantage to the
new users. Anne explains that roughly half the changes may simply create more work and headaches for
employees. Cleary, Anne attitude towards the changes (whether it is accurate or not) will be reflected as
she assists in implementing them.
A negative attitude from middle management can be devastating to other employees. Most employees
will give up on the change before they have even had an opportunity to test it. The employees have
become skeptical of the constant change because of the “real loss of faith in the leaders of change”
which was their “response to a history of change attempts that [were] not entirely or clearly successful”
(Understanding and Managing Cynicism about Organization Change, Reiches).
MAGIC BULLETS:
Anne illustrates the type of constant technological changes at Lumiport that seems to offer diminishing
returns. As the number of Lumiport employees continued to grow, matters of data accessibility grew
along with a great focus on data retention. At the time, a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device was
used to backup documents from each computer node on the network to local repository found on the
NAS drive. The drive was labeled and mapped to every workers computer and backups were scheduled
incrementally during the week.
The advantage of the NAS drive was the simplicity of a single repository for all data and the automated
nature of the backups. Employees had the simple instructions to copy all files into their respective
mapped folder and windows would automate the rest.
After a few incidents where employees were unable to access the drive because of internet
complications, it was determined that a change was needed. After a survey of upset employees and an
open suggestion session, many elegant solutions were proposed. The “Time and Distance Effect” was
observed as those participating in the group think quickly lost their roles as users and became part of
the bloated IT solution. It was decided by upper management that more money needed to be allocated
to “ensure that all data was readily available to all employees all the time.” The solution: upgrading all
computers to similar operating systems and installing a full-blown Windows Active Directory Server with
LDAP authentication and separate accounts and backup partitions for each employee. Because of the
complicated nature of the new system, each employee would be required to manually backup files and
store them in a personal folder.
Management was confident that with such an expensive solution, utilizing the latest version of desktop
operations systems and windows server that the solution would be seamless. Most employees resisted
the change. It caused extreme challenges for employees to manually monitor and backup information
and an unforeseen consequence negated the success of the change. The knowledge sharing via
document collaboration, that was very accessible with the previous NAS drive, was nearly impossible
with the new system. Employees found themselves neglecting the new upgraded backup system and
operating procedures to instead email documents between one another making minor changes. Soon,
so many versions of ‘spec sheets’ and ‘testing docs’ existed that old versions of documents were being
submitted with erroneous data.
Management’s magic bullet that was intended to fix a simple problem created more confusion and had
poor results. Instead, a simple remedy to fix the working system should have been considered. In this
case, it would have been more successful to consider changing the behavior of those using the
technology, then changing the technology they were using.