User:Mklubeck/Organizational Immaturity

Organizational Immaturity is a state of being that exists when an organization is incapable of enterprise-wide improvement. The keys to this definition are the words “organization” and “enterprise-wide.” Organizational Immaturity is a state of being in which an organization as a whole cannot effectively improve across the entire organization. This malady adds a level to the Capability Maturity Model, basically a level 0, and applies to any kind of organization, not only software developers. Unlike the tongue-in-cheek Capability Immaturity Model, Organizational Immaturity is a serious look at an organization’s inability to change. In “Why Organizations Struggle So Hard To Improve So Little: Overcoming Organizational Immaturity,” authors Klubeck, Langthorne, and Padgett explain the concept in detail.

Culture

"Culture dictates whether the organization, as a living, complex organism, is either capable or incapable of enterprise-wide change.” It is paramount that the culture be taken into account when attempting to change an organization. Culture should not be seen as something to overcome or bypass. The culture defines the very thing to be changed-- the organization is better described by its culture than it can ever be by its products, machinery, or the processes it employs. If the organization is immature, any organization-wide change effort will fail.  For an organization to be able to change, its culture must change.

Risk

The reason Organizational Immaturity is important to identify (the earlier the better) is that it will allow the prediction of success in an organizational change effort. The statistics show that “enterprise-wide improvement efforts are more likely to fail than succeed.” Klubeck And rather than seek out complicated reasons for the failure or point the blame at any particular person, “many times the barrier is simply the inability of the organization to take on the improvement change in the first place.”

From their book, “It is far more likely that an organization’s large-scale, quality-improvement effort will fail. Various researchers found the same disheartening results—the likelihood of failure is well over 50 percent.” And “…total quality management (TQM) efforts tend to fall below expectations—in fact,… “75% of TQM efforts fail to meet expectations.”

So, the concept of Organizational Immaturity brings to light the greatest unspoken risk in implementing Organizational Improvement efforts – the organization may simply be incapable of the changes most methodologies recommend. “It would make sense that, if there is so much at risk, change agents would offer, and leaders would demand, an objective assessment of the likelihood of success before embarking on such a journey. This is a simple first step of determining if the organization has a realistic chance of beating the odds. It is this immaturity that should be addressed before any processes are re-designed, trainings conducted, or structures re-engineered.“

Benefits

If an organization is assessed as suffering from Organizational Immaturity, (“the lack of ability for change throughout the culture of the company” ), the organization can then focus on the first priority of maturing the organization to an acceptable level OR it can find methods which do not require enterprise-wide change. This will help with planning, goal setting, and improvement initiatives. “To move an organization purposefully out of organizational immaturity requires a culture change.”

Traditional change models require the organization to change—not a little bit at a time, not in pockets, but as a whole. And with an organization suffering from Organizational Immaturity, this is tact is doomed to fail. Much money, resources, and time can be saved if the organization is properly diagnosed before trying to implement such a program.