Author: Leandro Benda, PMP

Leandro Benda

“Transformation” refers to an organization achieving a sustainable quantum-leap improvement in performance while transforming the mindsets of employees and thus the culture of the organization”  - Tahirou Assane, MASc, P. Eng., PMP

On Thursday, March 31, 2022 took place our virtual event “Leading a dynamic people-centered transformation” on the "Zoom" platform presented, with great talent, by our VP Sponsors & Partners, Adi Muslic and by our guest Tahirou Assane, MASc, P.Eng., PMP. The event gathered 35 project managers from different sectors such as banking, food processing, IT consulting and more.

Tahirou is the Director Brightline Initiative at PMI and has over 20 years of experience in leadership roles, civil engineering, strategy, transformation, and project management. 

As Director of Brightline at PMI, Tahirou oversees the activities under the three benefit pillars of thought and practice leadership, networking, and capability building.  Tahirou led the development of the Organizational Transformation Series and championed Brightline’s Strategy@Work event.

For having an idea as to how strategic the topic of transformation is, a Wall Street Journal survey found that transformation risk was the #1 concern in 2019 and that 70% of the transformations fail representing a waste of approximately $900 billion on digital transformation efforts. In the meantime, Covid has accelerated transformation generally in organizations.

One of the biggest challenges is to manage the resistance of people to change. Having a flat, adaptable, and cross-functional organizational structure that enables change, communication for having people on-board, empowerment and people engagement are some answers to it.

Positive and relevant roles are also important such as the transformation leader, other tough leaders from across the organization, next generation of leaders, etc., to drive transformation.

Having a clear vision shared with the organization and understanding deeply the customers are key for increasing the chances of success.

Last but not least, here is the tool kit for transformations:

  1. Foundation for understanding how organization’s transform properly
  2. Implementation for doing and getting the return
  3. Orchestration for leading transformation

You will find more information under this link

pmi.org/organizational-transformation

After the presentation, according to our poll, people felt mainly excited, convinced and challenged about transformation, so the participants gained some confidence with this presentation. Congratulations to Stefanie Walt for winning our quiz game.

In conclusion, we can say that transformation is exciting but it’s hard work and some key ingredients to succeed are empathy, passion, courage, and leadership.

Thank you for participating and don’t hesitate to take a look at our events via the link below:

https://pmi-switzerland.ch/index.php/events 

Kind regards,

Leandro Benda