The implementation of some projects initially appears much simpler than it ultimately is - with disastrous consequences for duration, quality and budget. Cultural differences and other subtleties that only seem obvious at first glance are often underestimated - even when experienced managers are involved. Bernd Ettelbrück, TCI partner and contributing author in the new anthology "Mastering transformation projects with the Enterprise Transformation Cycle"(edited by Peter Steinhoff and Mario Pfannstiel) takes a closer look at these challenges in the following interview with the TCI editorial team. The project described is a post-merger integration (PMI) project across the border between Austria and Switzerland. Find out now what unforeseen complications arose and how they were ultimately resolved.

Preliminary note from the TCI editorial team: Part two of the following interview is expected to be published on Wednesday, November 04, 2020, here on tci-partners.com under Articles.

Initial situation: For every solution there was a problem - technical, cultural, organizational

Beate Greisel: Hello Mr. Ettelbrück, thank you very much for taking the time for this interview. Your article in the second volume of ETC is about a post-merger integration (PMI) project that found itself in a difficult environment in the meantime. What were the biggest challenges at the beginning of your work on the project?

Bernd Ettelbrück: Thank you very much for your interest. Regarding your question: If you take the determinants of a project: budget, duration and quality, or rather the results, the program was still at the beginning after more than a year. A lot of money had been spent and a new start was attempted after each quarter, which then failed. With each restart, the program manager was also replaced, which damaged the reputation of the program, its goals and the newcomer.

In addition to these technical issues, there were also cultural challenges. In a nutshell, I would say that the German language is the only thing that Switzerland and Austria have in common. Culturally, in terms of attitude and working methods, the two nations are fundamentally different.

We often fall into the complexity trap in our day-to-day work. One of our customers' employees described it aptly. With "one of a million cases", the program is always slowed down and never picks up speed. This means that for every solution approach, every idea, an exceptional case was quickly constructed that was theoretically possible but never occurred in practice - and we worked on this instead of developing solutions for the majority of cases and looking at exceptions in the second step.

Communication as a fundamental - and underestimated - challenge

BG: A fundamental aspect of the post-merger integration project was the range of products for the target market. To what extent has the company's product portfolio changed as a result - and with it the competitive landscape?

BE: That's a very good question that I should have asked myself much earlier in the projects. The Swiss company serves almost exclusively commercial customers, i.e. it does B2B business, while the Austrian company is almost entirely aimed at private end customers (B2C). Unfortunately, the same terms are also used, to a large extent for products that are sold in both countries. The provision of the products, their setup, i.e. the entire processes and billing, are completely different.

Nevertheless - as it was at the beginning - the experts sit around the table, talk about end customers, provisioning and billing, everyone nods and then it turns out that agreements and next steps are not even feasible. This is also not something that only happens in this project - nobody wants to embarrass themselves and ask an inappropriate question, such as "what do you mean by end customer?" or "how do you provide the customer with a broadband connection?". And that also applied to me as the fifth external program manager, who preferred not to ask questions in order to avoid being seen as incompetent.

The focus also shifted to completely different competitors: "low-cost players" in the eyes of the Swiss were of central importance for Austria. We learned a lot together, because with all due respect to Switzerland, it is a very isolated high-price market with extreme margins, at least in telecommunications; while Austria is still below the highly competitive German market in terms of price, even with Eastern European providers. Switzerland could learn a lot from the future competition.

BG: What influence did the subsequent changes have on the company's internal structures?

BE: This was of a fundamental nature - the separation of countries was replaced by a separation of business. Once we understood this, we structured the project completely differently, staffed the teams differently and adapted the processes to the business requirements and no longer to the country and organizational requirements.

ETC: Successful project management through a fundamentally different method

BG: You then got the PMI project off to a successful start with the help of the Enterprise Transformation Cycle, or ETC for short. What were the main challenges that were to be solved with the ETC?

BE: The main challenges to be solved with the new methodological approach were the same as those outlined above: Less talk about managers, positions, powers and peculiarities of the country organization. It should no longer be a question of who had supposedly done their business better, i.e. with the higher margin, and derived from this the right to dictate to the other how "it" could be done better. This is also quite typical in PMI projects. Fear and uncertainty characterize everyday life and people fall back on the tried and tested, which is very human.

With the ETC, we did what was logical. I didn't talk about the ETC and try to sell the method, but we asked ourselves: What do we want? What goals do we want to achieve? What products do we want to sell? This also means which products and services need to be produced, provided, set up, billed and then maintained and kept in good condition?

As you can see, the question of the What and the How implies a lot and then doesn't leave as many degrees of freedom. That was my approach: if we want this, we have to do this and this. We then prepared and calculated at least two alternatives as a team and presented them for a decision. All of a sudden, the management meetings became decision-making meetings. Previously, they tended to be discussion rounds and staking out the terrain. Both companies have a great deal of experience in the question of how to organize processes and how to find the right personnel, and were very experienced and professional. It was the approach with the ETC and the new, perhaps unfamiliar order of talking about goals and processes first, and only then about the organization and personnel.

BG: Dear Mr. Ettelbrück, thank you very much for these very interesting insights! We will continue the conversation in a second part of the article.

The interview with Bernd Ettelbrück was conducted by Beate Greisel for the TCI editorial team.

Read part two of the interview: This is expected to be published on Wednesday, November 04, 2020, here on tci-partners.com under Articles.

"Mastering transformation projects with the Enterprise Transformation Cycle" - published August 2020

The Transformation Consulting International has been supporting national and international transformation projects in companies for many years. Based on this extensive wealth of experience in practical implementation, the second volume, entitled "The Enterprise Transformation Cycle", has been published after the first. "Mastering transformation projects with the Enterprise Transformation Cycle: successfully planning, implementing and completing projects" published by the renowned Springer-Verlag. As a continuation of the first volume, this one takes into account further wishes and suggestions from readers and presents concrete transformation projects and situations of action by TCI experts in their daily application of the ETC. This second volume was also edited by Mario A. Pfannstiel and Peter F.-J. Steinhoff and comprises a good 500 pages. In it you will find Numerous theoretical-conceptual contributions and case studies from practice on the "Enterprise Transformation Cycle".

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