Team Change Management Final Report to Congress

       Your Team Final Report to Congress should include 7 sections:

1) RESISTANCE TO ICASS: Internal (State Department) and External (Federal Agencies). Identify the most important factors in explaining both internal and external resistance to the ICASS organizational change at the U.S. Department of State.

2) LEAN OR LSS FRAMEWORK: Present your Team’s Lean or LSS Framework and Specific Activities at Each Stage.

Apply a specific Lean Management or Lean Six Sigma (LSS) strategy to improve the process by which ICASS works, making sure to address and resolve the problem of resistance to change. 

Choose a specific Lean (Reading #1 above) or specific LSS (Reading #s 2,3, 4 above) strategy to improve the process by which ICASS works.  All of the readings indicate specific stages of the Lean or Lean Six Sigma process. The LSS strategy is more complex and will require more analysis: your Team should decide how much of a challenge to take on. Note that both Lean and LSS integrate VSMs at some point in each strategy. Your starting point will be applying Lean or LSS to the general ICASS process at one of the Embassy examples in the 2004 GAO Report in which federal agencies attached to the Embassy do not use the ICASS system. (Kling, for example, first applies Lean Management without Six Sigma to the entire Cincinnati city government, and then shows how the city government applied the process to specific departments within the city government.  Here you apply Lean or LSS to the ICASS process as a whole, to indicate how ICASS administrators might then use that general strategy to apply it specific Embassy resource allocations). Specifically:

Explain what would happen at each stage of the Lean or LSS framework you use.  See the readings for specific examples of how this is done; make sure to make this part specific to the ICASS case study.

3) LEAN or LSS TEAM COMPOSITION: Determine and explain who (and from which departments) will participate on your Lean or LSS Team: For this, you will have to be familiar with the ICASS Executive Board, the ICASS Working Group, the ICASS Service Center (ISC), State Department Regional Bureaus (Trader-Leigh, 2002, 150), the ICASS Councils  (see my note under Reading #6 above), relevant federal agencies, relevant service providers (State Department and local vendors).

4) CURRENT STATE VALUE STREAM MAP (VSM). Compose an actual process map of the current state of the ICASS process at an Embassy where affiliated federal agencies do not use ICASS.  Identify where waste occurs and where customers believe there to be not enough value to justify using ICASS.  If using LSS, identify where variation in service provision occurs.

5) FUTURE STATE VALUE STREAM MAP (VSM). Compose an actual map of your envisioned flow of the ICASS process at the Embassy you use for your Current State VSM.  Explain how the improved process eliminates waste and adds value ay specific steps.  If using LSS, explain how variation in service provision will be produced.

6) IMPLEMENTATION/CONTROL: Explain what steps need to be taken to implement your future state envisioned process flow and to institutionalize the changes so that there is no fallback to the pre-Lean or LSS problems.

7) OD TO INCREASE STAFF MOTIVATION AND ENGAGEMENT: Explain how you can use Organizational Development (OD) strategies to motivate State Department Embassy staff and Federal Agency staff to permanently participate in the ICASS process in order to eliminate duplication and reduce the costs (and quality variation if using LSS) of State Department service provision.

Apply Organization Development (OD) concepts to your Lean or LSS change management strategy to indicate ways in which OD can help to make your Lean or LSS strategy even more successful. Include a paragraph at the end of your Team Report indicating how OD strategies may make your proposed changes more successful.  Focus on how both your Lean or LSS and OD strategies would lessen internal and external resistance to ICASS changes in order to achieve State Department and U.S. government goals.