Assessing Impact of Organizational Change for a Systems Approach to Quality

Abstract

This paper explains what leaders of a change initiative for a new systems approach to Quality did and how they assessed the impact of their work within a large US construction management and general contracting company. All three of the authors were engaged directly or indirectly in the initiative. The research question is to understand what the organizational change agents did to measure the impact of the work contemporaneously and overall. The ideas of three well-known organizational change thought leaders influenced the work of these agents. This paper describes the iterative development of the change initiative over seven years and how leaders used data in combination with participant feedback to assess the impact of the work. Key findings are: the systems approach to Quality was applicable in all five of the organization's core markets, and onethird of all projects by revenue in the five years of data studied attempted to implement the approach.