Changing Cultural Behaviors

The organizational barriers to meaningful change in the test environment in aerospace and defense companies can be prevalent and powerful. So much so, in fact, that one study suggests that people-related factors account for 46% of the organizational impediments to improved productivity.

Organizations are complex systems that evolve to their current state through a complex set of formal and informal incentives, individual and organizational identities, historical practices and tools and much more. In this framework – the test environment and how it fits into the larger organization – well-meaning test practitioners and managers labor to produce good results for themselves and their companies. But the organization – through no one's purposeful design – often makes it very difficult to excel in certain areas.

Breaking Down Barriers to Successful Test Equipment Management

The impact of impediments to change is especially evident in the typical test environment, where:

• End users stash and hoard equipment and / or schedules because they believe – with plenty of proof – that it's the only way to guarantee they'll have what they need when they need it.
• Project teams, departments and businesses organize their actions based on their own finite resources – producing agendas that conflict with their counterparts in the broader enterprise.
• Non-standard equipment inventories and processes drive up costs and produce schedule delays as they make it difficult for managers to manage capacity and costs or end users to share knowledge, methodologies, best practices and, ultimately, test equipment.
• A host of people and groups oversee an array of test-related functions, all focused on their own functional responsibilities (rather than on seeing how to improve the overall test-related business performance).
• The failures of previous "silver bullet" approaches – new databases, equipment cribs, 5S initiatives that don't optimize, etc. – have created skepticism toward new test-related change initiatives.

The success of a solution ultimately comes down to whether people begin thinking and acting differently, which they will only do if there is a reason for them to think and act differently. Test engineers must trust that a new solution will make their jobs easier – that they'll consistently get the equipment they need when they need it – so that they can fulfill their job requirements and their ambitions.

That's why, at the core of Sente's solutions, our Accountability Practices identify and provide focus for the necessary interventions to drive change. They are integrated with every module so that known barriers (such as hoarding by users or poor/untrustworthy performance by TRM practitioners) are measured and intervened with as necessary.

We have a strong record of helping customers secure end user and management acceptance of test-related change initiatives. Rigorous metrics allow us to measure the integration of TRM practices as they become a part of your culture, guiding us in maturing the TRM practices that impact your culture positively. By measuring culture, we take the mystery out of cultural change.