An organizational change management experiment integrating Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) systems

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1 Ce papier a fait l objet d une communication dans le cadre de la : 12 th International Conference on Management of Technology : IAMOT, May 2003, Nancy - France An organizational change management experiment integrating Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) systems Almamy FALL, Samuel GOMES, Jean-Claude SAGOT Equipe de recherche en ERgonomie et en Conception des Systèmes (ERCOS) Laboratoire Systèmes et Transport (SeT) Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard Rue du Château, Belfort Cedex [almamy.fall / samuel.gomes / jean-claude.sagot]@utbm.fr RÉSUMÉ Nowadays projects management problems are increasingly large-scale due to the diversification of groupware tools and consumer needs. Researchers have underlined the importance of the strategy used to deploy these new forms of technology. The development of a new organization is a way to answer the pressure that an external environment firm may experience. We also identify the need to help people for change adaptation. All of our proposals are coming from a work in a research laboratory : "Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Matériaux les Plasmas et les Surface (LERMPS)" which, as its name indicates it focuses on "Thermal Spraying" technology. In this study, methodologies deploying a CSCW tool called "Atelier Coopératif de Suivi de Projet" (ACSP) into a research laboratory, are constructed and experimented. MOTS-CLÉS CSCW, Experimental approach, Organizational change management, Project management. 1 INTRODUCTION The rapid evolution of Information Systems (IS) and new potentials for communication between people has been a great help to the success of most organizations. All functional disciplines associated with computer sciences have shown a scientific interest in CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) and groupware technology (Bannon and Hughes, 1993). This functional disciplines diversity is essential to consider the growing complexity of product requirements and global manufacturing constraints. In front of this challenge, companies more and more invest in software tools and network infrastructures, such as basic databases or Product Data Management (PDM), to better manage their projects. We cannot develop the numerous definitions of the change notion so much the subject is vast and the bibliography is important. However, we wish to be located in front of the various approaches of the Organizational Change Management proposed in the literature. According to Grouard (Grouard and Meston, 1998), two theories are confronted today : the change by break and the change par progressive deformation i.e. by continues improvement. The partisans of this type of change base their arguments on the continuous capacity of learning of the organization. This continuous evolution allows avoiding the breaks and the internal crises according to Grudin (Grudin, 1998), "can stimulate the change but have a strong social and human cost". Nilakant (Nilakant and Ramnarayan, 1998) observes that the majority of the changes in the organizations result neither from process or extraordinary forces, nor of an imagination, an obstinacy or a special ability, but on various practices connecting the organization to their partners. These approaches of Organizational Change Management are in no way exclusive but can live and strengthen each other. In this study we are positioned neither on a vision of the change imposed by the managers, nor on a vision of the change like a simple response of the organization to an external pressure. But, we propose a third way by showing how the change procedures reflect processes of organisational learning. In this context, we have developed an evolving prototype of Computer 10 ième Séminaire CONFERE, 3-4 Juillet 2003, Belfort France, pp

2 Supported Cooperative Workshop in Design (CSCWD) called "Atelier Coopératif de Suivi de Projet (ACSP)". This tool is focused on cooperation between design actors involved in the same projects, by providing a global feedback about the project, the product, the process, etc., data, according to the project planning system. Thus, through the experimentation of the ACSP tool in a current organization (a research laboratory opened to industrial activities), we try to analyse the influence of this tool family in such an organization. The originality of this work consists on a Groupware deployment method that can be able to incorporate organizational change management when integrating a CSCW system in a current organization. Thus, a real accompanying of the actors is necessary for the appropriation of a new organization. 2 OUR EXPERIMENTAL FIELD Our experimental field is a French laboratory focused on "Thermal Spraying" : LERMPS ("Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Matériaux les Plasmas et les Surfaces"). Thanks to his heavy means of thermal spaying devices, characterization machines, etc., this laboratory manages projects in partnership with various companies. Although managing successfully more than fifty projects per year, the majority of the daily working tasks are masked to the manager s laboratory. For example, the execution of some daily tasks can be performed with an important delay. This gap is due to the other activities led by the several laboratory members (conferences, missions abroad, etc.). Thus, this can generate many delays on the signature of certain documents. Time and money spent by the laboratory is completely disproportionate because of paper workflows (Levan, 1999). These processes, which seem so simple, that nobody imagines what they really cost, are repeated several times within the various projects. There are several other similar processes susceptible to consume more and more resources in this laboratory. Aware of these difficulties, we have decided to promote a much more transparent management of the projects using the ACSP tool and an accompanying change method. 3 THE ACSP CURRENT VERSION ACSP is a web-based environment, which employs an object-oriented methodology and manages the co-operative activities of the design actors (Gomes, 2000). Structured as a client-server architecture available for heterogeneous environments (NT, Unix, Mac, etc.), this software environment uses an Internet server connected to a relational database and exploits multimedia documents linked with a project planning system. The ACSP exploitation module is divided into four main sub-modules managing data from the project, product, process and activity design domains. Each design domain includes various design data describing functional, structural and dynamic aspects. For example, various types of data integrated into the ACSP environment can be displayed: - project data, such as human and material resources (structural aspect) or task planning (dynamic aspect) (Figure 1), - product data, such as product assembly including the different product elements (structural aspect) linked to CAD files (geometrical aspect) or functional specifications (functional aspect) available in different situations in the product s life cycle, - process data, such as process architecture including the different machines (structural aspect) linked to CAD files (geometrical aspect) or process dynamic sequences describing various manufacturing, maintenance, recycling (dynamic aspects). 304

3 Figure 1 : ACSP interface describing a model of task planning. Ideally, the company process embodied in these software systems should be understandable by non-experts, configurable by non-programmers and easily changed without compromising the integrity of work currently in progress. 4 ACSP DEPLOYMENT IN THE LERMPS LABORATORY The initial ACSP version was not exactly adapted for the research laboratory activities. The first identified difficulty, resulting from the suggestions formulated by the actors, is bound to the traceability. The traceability is defined by the ability to follow any element from two different points situated in the same workflow. Indeed, the laboratory has an important quantity of information, but it is very difficult for each actor to find the good information at the right moment. The ACSP integrates a stabilized project planning system and a workflow procedure (Figure 2) allowing end-users to get a traceability of all data linked to the project, product, process and the know-how management. Figure 2 : Example of data architecture and documents workflow available in ACSP current version. Beside, the deployment of the ACSP system in the research laboratory several steps among which training period, follow-up and assistance to the actors on experimental projects, in link with the main partners of the laboratory (manufacturers), have been required. Experts in each engineering division use their specialized knowledge to construct concrete design solutions that attempt to realize the endusers requests. 305

4 A Designer Activity Analyser Module (DAAM) has been defined to collect traces of the actor s activities. This advanced features of the ACSP allowed us to have statistical data relative to the cooperation and to the projects. For example, the following diagram (Figure 3) proposes a time evolution over a period of 18 weeks of the number of actions on data (creating, modifying, and deleting actions) compared to the number of pages visited by actors. These data, from our point of view seem to be rather representative of the design actor s activities on the projects Starting number of visited pages to the projects number of actions on the data Breakdown Resumption weeks Figure 3 : Evolution of designer s actions on data (creates, modify and delete / project, product and process data) compared to the number of visited pages to the projects. Through this diagram describing our first quantitative results of the ACSP deployment into the research laboratory, we can notice a familiarization step, during which the actors discover at the same time the specificity of CSCW concept and the detailed ACSP functionalities. This step can be considered as a Starting period (weeks 1 to 7) where we granted the actors, guidance on the concepts of projects management, concurrent engineering and documents management. This step can be considered as a period of intensive activity where designers contribute to filling the ACSP database. This intense activity period also introduces a significant number of actions on the data (creation and modification activities), but still a low percentage compared with the number of connection. The second response observed was the arrival of breakdown period (weeks 7 to 11). For landing these changes incidence upon the actors, we proposed several improvements both on the deployment method used and on the ACSP functionalities. In fact, people also resist to the change process because of vested interests, lack of trust or misunderstanding, differences in assessment of the situation, limited resources, and internal organizational agreements. These improvements consist to introduce in the research laboratory the concept of "Projects reports" which is particularly useful for the processes of thermal spraying, in terms of analysis protocols, diagnosis and optimisation. These documents will allow to generate automatic pre-reports and analysis protocols of following detailed, complete or personalized visions and so to ease the boring period which the researchers dedicated to information collection and draft industrial reports. Theses improvements, in our point of view constitute a creation of important value susceptible to be perceived by every actor. ACSP deployment method is designed to help new users quickly become proficient with groupware possibilities. Topside reliable resumption of confidence period (weeks 11 to 18) was observed in the dayside after breakdown period. Conditions similar appropriation of new behaviour, translates an important result before the event re-established themselves : the resumption of activity which is made in the 13th week further to a period of "starting up" and "breakdown" according to our improvement actions evoked previously. Therefore, the difficulty for all partners is to find the proper balance between good planning and a flexibility level (Williams and al., 2002). This second peak situated in 18th week marks the typically ACSP deployment. 306

5 5 CONCLUSION Our work recognizes the importance of groupware in harnessing corporate projects management. At this point in time, this approach cannot be considered as definitive. It is important to reflect whether this model can be applicable to other organizations and companies, as a generalisation from one single case study. Scientific facts are rarely based on single experiments and theory extension must be based on a multiple set of experiments, which have replicated the same phenomenon under different conditions. Further studies are required to establish whether the ACSP model is applicable in other case. These various difficulties open interesting research perspectives that we have already begun to investigate. It is a question, for example, the interest of developing more reactive tools by endowing them with Multi-agent System (MAS), for example, to alert some involved project actors in case of delay of their task-planning, or to consult among agents assistants to realize concerted actions. 6 BIBLIOGRAPHIE Bannon, L. and Hughes, J. (1993) The Context of CSCW. In : Developing CSCW Systems: Design Concepts (K. Schmidt ed.), pp Gomes, S. and Sagot, J.C. (2000). A concurrent engineering experience based on a cooperative and object oriented design methodology. In : Mechanical Engineering (3rd International Conference on Integrated Design and Manufacturing, IDMME 2000), pp , Montréal. Grouard, B. et Meston F. (1998). L entreprise en mouvement. Conduire et réussir le Changement. 336p, Dunod, Paris, Grudin, J. (1998). Why CSCW Applications Fail: Problems in the Design and Evaluation of Organizational Interfaces. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 88), New York. Nilakant, V. and Ramnarayan, S. (1998). Managing Organisational Change. (Sage ed.), 380 p, New Delhi. Serge, K. L. (1999). Le projet Workflow : Concepts et outils au service des organisations. (Eyrolles ed.), 283 p, Paris. Williams, A.P.O., Woodward, S., Dobson, P. and Williams, A.M. (2002) Managing change successfully : using theory and experience to implement change. International Thomson Business Press, 355 p, London. 307