Case Study 2: Proposing a Data Gathering Approach at TLG Solutions
Read the TLG Solutions case and consider the following questions: What is the client requesting? What
goal does the client have for this project? What are the presenting problems? What do you think may be
any underlying problems? Which of these underlying problems is most likely, in your view? What data
would illustrate whether these underlying problems are occurring? Which method of data gathering
would you use and why? (Consider using the method of analysis shown in Table 7.2.) Write a proposal
that explains what data you will gather through what means (interview, surveys, focus groups,
observations, and/ or unobtrusive measures). Include any questions you might ask, observations you
would undertake, and/ or documents you would want to gather. What are the advantages and
disadvantages of your data gathering choice( s)? Include a rationale and proposed timeline for your
approach and any details about the data gathering method itself, including possible interview or survey
questions, documents to gather, or observations you would conduct. Finally, ensure that your proposal
addresses any additional contracting needs you may have in your relationship with Michelle.
1. “I’m glad you’re here, and I have something important to discuss with you. Have a seat.” Seth
Burke had been called to Michelle Greenfield’s office. Just 18 months ago, Michelle had
accepted the role of chief learning officer at TLG Solutions, a fast-growing provider of global
human resources software for Fortune 1000 companies. Seth and Michelle had worked
together in a previous company, and now that Seth was working as an independent external
organization development consultant, Michelle was anxious to make use of his skills. “Hey, I
was really glad to get your call. It’s been too long,” Seth exclaimed as he took a seat at a round
table in Michelle’s office while Michelle closed the door. TLG Solutions headquarters was
located in a six-story building just outside of downtown in a suburban area for expanding
technology companies. Michelle’s office had a panoramic view of the lake. “What great
scenery,” Seth added. “How long has the company been in this location?” “Just 6 months,”
Michelle admitted. “We’ve been expanding so rapidly we outgrew the small office space that
we had rented on the east side of town. Now that we are among the tech companies in this
hub area on this side of town, we have a solid presence in the community and are showing
that we are here to stay.” “And how have things been going in your new role?” Seth asked,
transitioning to the reason for his visit. “It’s been crazy. The rapid growth means great things,
but it’s also stressful sometimes. It’s really different from what we knew back with our old
company. You and I were part of a very hierarchical, controlled, consistent, static company in a
pretty stable industry. Everyone followed the process and the plan. A big change was when
they replaced the carpet in the lobby. But here it feels like it’s just the opposite. It’s all about
visionary innovation, constant change, reinvention. No 2 days are the same, and you get used
to feeling like you’re on a roller coaster. Just yesterday our CEO announced publicly that we
would use our expertise in HR to create new products for marketers. And our product groups
didn’t even know that announcement was coming,” Michelle pointed out. “Yes, that does
sound very different from the experience we shared a few years back,” Seth laughed. “The
thing is, from my perspective we have changed things so fast, I don’t think we have created the
ideal organization to help launch us into the next phase. I’ve definitely learned a lot managing
this department, and I think there may be some opportunities for improvement,” Michelle
said. “Basically, this training organization is a mess, and our chief HR officer, Vivienne, has told
me that if I can’t get it cleaned up soon she’ll find someone who will. We are spending a ton of
money on training and yet it’s not getting us the improvement we need. But I should back up.
I’m getting ahead of myself.” “Yes, maybe start at the beginning. Tell me a little more about
TLG Solutions,” Seth asked. “Well, the company was essentially founded on our flagship
product, NewHireScan, a software program that can scan thousands of résumés for key
indicators and predict whether the new hire will be successful in the job. Our proprietary big
data approach means that we can save companies tons of money by hiring the best person for
the job the first time, which we can tell by a number of data points. In the last few years, we
have added or expanded products every few months so that we now have hundreds of
products and variations on them for different industries. Since I’ve been here, revenue has
almost doubled, if that tells you anything, and we are growing at a rate that is easily twice that
of our nearest competitors. We just got a fantastic write-up in an industry-leading publication,
and our CEO was just on the front page of the Wall Street Journal,” Michelle stated. “I saw that
article,” Seth added. “That was really impressive and had a lot of people talking. I bet that did a
lot for employee morale as well.” “It sure did. People around here are very motivated, driven,
and work a ton of hours. It’s a competitive environment, and they pour themselves into their
work,” Michelle said. “We are adding a lot of products to our portfolio over the next year since
our goal is to expand into other areas of HR technology beyond hiring, and apparently we have
this new marketing focus coming. Everyone seems to feel the urgency, and we all want to see
it succeed. But the clouds are forming in our sunny skies. It’s like the theme from Jaws is
always playing in the background. We have competitors that are ready to take us out, and we
can all see that our cost models are not sustainable. Investors are getting nervous. We are
looking to the next year or two and we know that we must be successful getting our new
products to market quickly. We probably need to reduce costs as well. It’s not a crisis, but the
leadership team is paying careful attention to the financials, as you would expect.” “Sure, that
makes sense in your industry,” Seth said. “Tell me more about where you think problems
might exist on the horizon.” “I’ll give you a list from my point of view, because there are a lot
of them,” Michelle said. “We have many loyal customers and excellent customer relationships.
Some of them have been with us since the beginning. But lately we are starting Salespeople
are promising one thing and not delivering. I’ve even heard situations where salespeople have
promised features outright that we never intended to put in the product just to make a sale.
I’ve heard that sales reps can’t even demo the products accurately. The service department is
getting complaints because they can’t accurately pinpoint the root cause of the problems the
customer is experiencing. Those are common problems in many organizations, but we’ve done
some investigating and it seems that time and time again the problem is training. Our
salespeople and service reps don’t know enough about the products. Customer service
technicians lack some of the foundational problem-solving knowledge to help them
troubleshoot. And training, as you know, is my responsibility, so I am under a lot of pressure to
get this right.” “Tell me more about your department,” Seth asked. “Let me give you the
training organization chart and I can walk through it,” Michelle added, and handed Seth a
piece of paper. “This is the org chart for the training organization. I manage the global training
teams that are responsible for needs assessment, training curriculum design, training
technology design, rollout, and operations. Their focus is on the different populations they
serve, so I have a group that designs training for our salespeople, a group that offers training
to our external customers, and a group that focuses on developing training for service
technicians. We serve a population numbering in the tens of thousands globally. To do this, I
have about 65 people who work in these divisions, with the bulk of them in sales training and
customer training, where there are 25 people equally divided in those two groups. Another 10
work in service training. The last group has about five employees in our learning technology
and operations division. This is the group that creates online learning, video-based learning,
and virtual training programs to supplement any of the courses that get developed, including
refresher courses. They also run the operations of the group, such as deciding on the training
schedule, communicating to participants, and interfacing with the trainers.” “It’s pretty
impressive that you can train tens of thousands of employees around the world with just these
65 people,” Seth concluded. “We can’t, and actually we don’t,” Michelle corrected. “I should
be more specific. While we sometimes deliver training directly to our customers, where we
charge a fee for those classes, all internal training delivery for sales and service happens in the
regions, and that’s what the right-hand side of this chart represents. We have four regions:
North America, Europe, Asia/ Pacific, and Latin America. The regional HR leaders have their
own training resources, in addition to their other work with human resources representatives,
recruiting, employee relations, compensation and benefits, payroll, and some other areas.
Compared to mine, some of these departments are huge, like in Europe where there are 85
trainers, and some are small, like in Japan where there are only two people who do training for
all customers, sales, and service. So all of the regional training resources report up to my
peers, who are the heads of HR in each region. And like I said, for them, training is just one
part of their job, in addition to everything else that regional HR is supposed to do.” “You told
me that most of your people work in sales and customer training. Tell me more about what
they do,” Seth asked quizzically. “Our products are very complicated. We need to invest as a
company in our salespeople so they know how our products work and how our customers use
them. Our sales and customer training curriculum designers are really the subject matter
experts on our products. Whenever I hire a curriculum designer, they need to not only know all
of the best practices with respect to adult learning and training design, they need technical
product knowledge so that they can include it in their courses. My sales group, for example,
develops sales training in areas such as communicating with customers, influencing the sale, or
understanding a value proposition, but they also need to incorporate the newest product
release information into product update training for sales. Service training is about providing
technicians with the knowledge to fix products when they break. It’s a little like my curriculum
designers are the translators who understand how to explain the products to different
audiences,” Michelle said. “And training technology? Seth asked. “Similarly, our training
technology group gets assigned to work on projects in the other groups on an as-needed basis,
so if we want to create an online module for our customers, we will assign someone from that
group to work with the customer training group,” Michelle summarized. “So how does your
group work with these other HR groups?” Seth asked. “Do you want the ideal or the reality?
The way the model is supposed to work is that we design the training and they deliver it. We
produce everything from the training handbooks to the lecture notes and slides shown in
class,” Michelle began. “It’s really designed to be an efficient model, so that we have one
centralized global group doing all training design that can be used by the regions. That way we
don’t duplicate resources developing the same thing in different regions. And it makes no
sense for us to fly people around the world teaching classes when they could have someone
do it locally.” “From your perspective, how is this model working?” Seth asked.
“Well, the best way to put it is that we are all frustrated. My team spends months creating
world-class training programs, using their expertise to design well-crafted courses that are
intended to meet the needs of the various audiences that get training. I mean, I have seven
PhDs in adult learning and instructional design in my department. We have designed pretests
and posttests to confirm that students have learned the material, and then we have a manager
observation program that occurs 3 months after the course to demonstrate that employees
are using the knowledge on the job. We can also measure the return on investment of our
training to demonstrate that the training pays for itself in sales many times over. These are
some of the most sophisticated learning packages I have ever seen. And do you know what
happens? They gather dust. The regions just do their own thing,” Michelle said, exasperated.
“Can you give me an example?” Seth asked. “Yes. We found out recently that our Asia-Pacific
region didn’t even use the most recent sales module we developed on how to conduct a
customer demonstration of our new ZBS software product after we spent 6 months designing
it. Instead, they developed their own and said that the program we developed ‘wouldn’t work’
for their employees, even though it has worked for everyone else in the world. And in Europe,
they taught less than half of the service technician program and ran it as a half-day course,
completely omitting a huge portion of the material that is absolutely critical for the technicians
to learn. My team feels like their efforts are wasted, and they complain to me that the regions
are developing shadow training organizations with their own resources. I think we have at
least three different customer programs that have never been offered in Latin America, but in
North America they have been offered successfully on quite a few occasions. I’ve been
unsuccessful in getting our team’s solutions adopted with global consistency, and no one else
so far has stopped the regions from doing things their way, even as inefficient as that is. The
regions get high marks from customers, sales, and service about their programs,” Michelle
said. “Why don’t the regions want to use the programs that you have developed?” Seth asked.
“The politics here are unlike anything I’ve seen before. Seriously, that’s a good question, and I
don’t have a consistent answer. I honestly think that several of the HR leaders are competing
for a promotion to VP and they are trying to show that they could do this training job, too. In
this company, the HR regions get a lot of power to do what they need to do locally, and they
want to outdo each other. I sometimes hear complaints from them that the training programs
didn’t meet their needs, or they didn’t have time, or some other generic reason. But I’ve seen
their stuff. They have no proof that learning has occurred, and almost no metrics of success.
The company gives a lot of control to the regions to manage as they see fit instead of directing
everything from corporate,” Michelle said. “And the regions love having their own local
training resources.” “So in summary, it’s less efficient and sometimes frustrating for your
central team, but on the other hand, the regions have the opportunity to customize what they
need. How much do the regions really think there is a problem that needs to be solved?” Seth
inquired. “I don’t know if they do, but the other day Vivienne, our chief human resources
officer, was looking at our budget and the number of people in HR globally who are involved in
training in some way. She was astonished and demanded to know what all of these training
people do. I tried along with my peers to explain how we divide up the various roles and
responsibilities in training, but I don’t know how successful we were. She was unconvinced
that we have the right model here, and based on how it’s working in practice, I think she may
be right. Reading between the lines, I think a budget cut is coming. So far, no one has come up
with any alternatives, and that’s where I’m hoping to get your support. I personally think I
should own the whole thing. We should have all of the regional training resources report into
my team. But I haven’t been able to convince Vivienne.” Michelle looked expectantly at Seth.
“So that’s where we are. Any ideas about how we can move forward?” Seth thought for a
minute. “Tell me, Michelle. You have a robust and sophisticated HR organization here, from
what you’re telling me. It sounds like you have some ideas about what you want to do. Why
not use one of your own internal OD consultants to manage this project?” Seth asked. Michelle
paused. “I’m afraid that all of our internal consultants are too loyal to the existing system, and
they report to the leaders who are involved in this problem. I need an outside partner who has
no special stake in the outcome to provide an objective voice.” “OK. I understand. You’ve given
me some excellent background here. I have a good sense of your perspective about how the
model ought to be working and how you see it working in reality. I also think I want to get
more information and multiple perspectives on the situation. I’d like to come back to you with
a proposal to gather additional data so I can learn more,” Seth concluded. Michelle was
relieved. “I knew that you’d have an idea about what to do next. I will anxiously await your
proposal.”
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