The Roche Vitamins integration eventually brought me to Scotland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By then, the central-control-room concept that had emerged from my Rotterdam experience had become part of the broader transformation of DSM Nutritional Products. At most sites, the local organisation implemented the new approach themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Scotland was different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There I became the implementation project manager<\/strong>, working together with the people responsible for the work-process implementation and with those reorganising the local organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the challenge in Scotland was not simply to install a new control room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was to change the way the plant was operated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Roche Vitamins operating model differed considerably from what I had experienced in DSM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A chemist was responsible for the plant, while the operators and maintenance people were, in effect, his or her “hands”. The chemist would decide what needed to be done, and operators would execute it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This also meant that chemists spent a considerable amount of time in the control room. Even during weekends, they could be called because an operational question might require their decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The DSM Operate Plant Normal<\/strong> work process was based on a different idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We knew how the plant should operate optimally. Operators did not necessarily need to have the detailed chemical background of a chemist to keep the plant in that state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their responsibility was to operate within defined operating windows<\/strong> and to respond appropriately when the process moved outside them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For that, the work process used OCAPs \u2014 Out of Control Action Plans<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An OCAP made explicit what should happen when something moved outside its normal operating range: what the operator should check, what action should be taken and when the situation should be escalated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This meant that knowledge which had previously resided largely with the chemist had to be translated into something that the operating organisation could use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that was an important part of preparing for the reorganisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The chemists increasingly moved towards Improve Plant<\/strong> and production-management responsibilities. At the same time, the shift leaders and operators were given more responsibility for what happened during their shifts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The question was changing from:<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does the chemist want us to do?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n What happened during your shift, and how did you respond?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That was a substantial change in responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The new control room was therefore only the visible part of a much deeper organisational change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also had to learn how to work with the local organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the beginning, a local engineer supported me. I would give him an assignment and he would do it. He never seemed to object. At one point he even described me as a “tough taskmaster.”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n At first I took that positively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But then I started wondering why I wasn’t getting the kind of pushback I was accustomed to in Rotterdam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There, colleagues would challenge me quite openly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why do you want this?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Wouldn’t it be better to do it differently?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t think that will work.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I valued that. It forced me to explain my thinking and sometimes resulted in a better solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Scotland, that kind of challenge did not come naturally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I realised that this was potentially a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If people simply did what I asked, I could easily mistake compliance for agreement<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if we were trying to create an organisation in which operators and other employees were expected to take more responsibility, I could hardly expect them to become empowered simply because the organisation chart said so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I needed to create room for people to question and challenge me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was one of my first personal lessons from Scotland: empowerment is not only something a manager gives; it also depends on people being willing and able to use it.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Another small lesson came from the project action lists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Rotterdam, when I asked about an action, I would quite often get:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Yes, finished.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In Scotland, the answer was much more likely to be:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Ah, we’re getting there.”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The first few times I heard it, I regarded this as a risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An action was either finished or it wasn’t. And “we’re getting there”<\/em> didn’t tell me very much about what remained to be done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes things did indeed become tight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But gradually I discovered that the people saying it were genuinely committed to getting things done. They simply had a different relationship with the path towards the deadline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, most of the time, they did get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had to learn not to confuse a different way of communicating progress with a lack of commitment<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It became an exercise in patience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, more importantly, in trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was another small incident at the beginning of the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An open office had been reserved for the project team. It had one enclosed office, and when I arrived one day I was welcomed to “my new office.”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I was surprised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I asked whether we could instead use the room as a conference room and have me sit in the open office with the rest of the project team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The request seemed rather strange to them, but they accepted it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had learned from experienced project managers earlier in my career that staying connected with the team was an important condition for making a project work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I wanted to hear the conversations, notice problems and be part of the team rather than create distance around my position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a small decision, but for me it was part of the way I wanted to lead the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were, of course, strong differences of opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Plant Manager and I had some fierce debates about the content of the changes<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They were genuinely fierce, but they were not personal. We disagreed about how the organisation should be changed and how the project should be implemented, while continuing to work together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was an important person in the middle of this: the Site Controller<\/strong>, who was the local integration director supporting the DSM\/McKinsey team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He had considerable authority, but what impressed me most was how he used it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When there was a conflict, he would patiently listen to both sides. He did not immediately decide who was right. He helped clarify the arguments and then helped the parties find a way forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His interventions were particularly useful when the Plant Manager and I disagreed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking back, this was another important element of the new way of working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Empowerment does not eliminate conflicting interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If anything, when people have more responsibility, those interests become more visible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You therefore need management that is less about prescribing the answer and more about alignment, mediation and helping people resolve conflicts<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually the new central control room went live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was a landmark event. The physical change was obvious: the operators were now working in a completely different environment, with the new technology and the new organisation around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the opening was not the end of the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The much harder task was embedding the new way of working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Operators and shift leaders had to become comfortable with their new responsibilities. The OCAPs had to become part of normal operation. The work processes had to become part of everyday management rather than something belonging to the implementation project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the organisation had to learn to operate without constantly referring back to the people who had designed the change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I stayed for that phase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gradually the other DSM people involved in the implementation left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually I was the only DSM person left<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My role had therefore changed again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had started as the person responsible for implementing the change. I was now helping the local organisation make the change its own<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That meant discussing problems, questioning whether the new roles were actually working, helping people use the work processes and supporting the transition from project implementation to normal management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, responsibility could be handed over to the permanent organisation, including the continuing implementation and auditing of the work processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The project team had to become unnecessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That was, in a sense, the ultimate test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking back, Scotland gave me several different lessons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I learned that changing an organisation is different from designing one<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I learned that empowerment requires more than giving people responsibility: people need the knowledge, information and confidence to use it \u2014 and managers need to create the conditions for them to challenge and take responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I learned to be more patient with forms of behaviour that initially looked like a lack of urgency or commitment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I learned that even an empowered organisation needs management: not necessarily management that tells people what to do, but management that helps reconcile interests, resolve conflicts and keep the organisation moving in the same direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most importantly, the control-room project made the distinction between implementation and embedding<\/strong> very tangible to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We could define roles, write work processes, create OCAPs and switch on a new control room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But eventually the people in the organisation had to answer a much simpler question for themselves:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “What happened during my shift, and what did I do about it?”<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n That, ultimately, was the real shift in responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it was a shift that could not be achieved by the control room, the organisation chart or the work-process manual alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Roche Vitamins integration eventually brought me to Scotland. By then, the central-control-room concept that had emerged from my Rotterdam experience had become part of the broader transformation of DSM Nutritional Products. At most sites, the local organisation implemented the new approach themselves. Scotland was different. There I became the implementation project manager, working together […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_heusje_archive_order":80,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[19,18,21,23,20],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-career","tag-career","tag-covestro","tag-dsm","tag-english","tag-work-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":382,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heusje.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Changing the operating model<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Learning how to lead the change<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
“We’re getting there”<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Staying close to the team<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Managing the conflicts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The control room was only the beginning<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What Scotland taught me<\/h3>\n\n\n\n