Organization development (OD) is a deliberately planned, organization-wide effort to increase an organization's effectiveness and/or efficiency and/or to enable the organization to achieve its strategic goals. The primary purpose of OD is to develop the organization, not to train or develop the staff.
“Interventions” are principal learning processes in the “action” stage of organizational development. Interventions are structured activities used individually or in combination by the members of a client system to improve their social or task performance. They may be introduced by a change agent as part of an improvement program, or they may be used by the client following a program to check on the state of the organization's health, or to effect necessary changes in its own behavior.

TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES (TCS)

* About the company
Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS) is an IT services, business solutions and outsourcing organization that delivers real results to global businesses, with a high level of certainty. TCS offers a consulting-led, complete and integrated portfolio of IT and IT-enabled services delivered through its unique Global Network Delivery Model, recognized as the benchmark of excellence in software development.

* Intervention I: PROPEL- CULTURE BUILDING AT TCS (Human Process Intervention)

PROPEL was introduced as a revolutionary intervention with the dual objectives of facilitating the exchange of ideas and helping in immediate problem solving, while also encouraging bonding and self-development among and within teams.
As the organization and its relationships grew, it brought its own challenges, whereas change remained a constant. PROPEL was introduced as a platform and a tool to help bring about this change, in consonance with the TCS belief of “Let us make it a joy for all our stakeholders”. Promoting continuous improvement at a cross-functional level was one of the envisaged objectives. Change management was enabled through alignment with growth strategy; by creating platforms for dialogue on the current and emerging experience of the organization.
PROPEL has helped the organization build a culture of collaboration, creativity and also networks of relationships through its two modes:
1. Confluences: Listening to the voice of the employee in a team scenario, by creating a platform for open sharing of thoughts on a relevant theme. This is achieved through a balance of fun, introspection and interaction, while evoking commitment to self development.

2. Camps: Platform for problem solving, focus on the Quality, Cost and Delivery measures of throughput resulting in transfer and adoption of best practices within and amongst relationships in the organization.

Team Alignment through PROPEL framework

Team alignment was a PROPEL application initiated for members of this large relationship, to reflect on its own state, to build a coherent statement of current realities and to channel potent restlessness and dissatisfactions within the relationship, into a convergent blueprint of responsiveness and new levels of maturity. It looked at redefining desirable role behaviors, and hence conveyed responsibility for movement at the collective as well as individual levels, for the team. This was brought about through the following stages:

1. Initiation: The Spiral dynamics framework was used to map the relationship in terms of its evolution. Tools were administered to a group of Project Managers to identify the gaps between where the team is (current state) and where it should be (desired state) and the steps to be taken to bridge this gap. Spiral Dynamics posits that the evolution of human consciousness can best be represented by a dynamic, upward spiraling structure that charts our evolving thinking systems as they are higher and higher through levels of increasing complexity.

2. Awareness sessions & Workshops: Overviews on Spiral Dynamics and its application to achieve team alignment was shared with the team. In Jan 2012, a workshop was organized with the team to discuss the findings based on the analysis of data. A few key observations were: * Differential perceptions of current reality by leadership and the rest of the team * Need to make a few critical role shifts * Need to align the broad directions and future steps
This workshop allowed the team to clearly discuss their perceptions of the team’s current situation and the following observations were agreed upon: * Need to negotiate expectations and sufficiently understand interdependence * Reluctance to confront and bring issues to a head * Stress * Results and task oriented disposition

These results were then compared to the leadership’s expectations from the team. Greater the convergence and alignment between leadership and the team on the current state and the directions for movement, greater is the power of focused deployment of energies, empowered, autonomous decisions and actions within the team. Gaps were identified, developmental areas were prioritized and broken down and categories identified to pinpoint where the greatest impact from team development efforts will be achieved.
3. Gap analysis: This was done to enhance understanding of the different roles for each job position, identify the ones suitable for the different job positions and come up with action items to address the themes agreed upon. As a next step, each member had to identify the gaps based on the role selected. For e.g.: The below roles were identified for a team member job position:

* Self-developer * Team Player * Craftsperson
The roles would vary depending on the location as well. Onsite members would have roles that require higher customer interaction.

4. Implementing improvement plan: Follow-up meetings were held at 6-8 week intervals to monitor progress made as well as to identify areas of improvement using Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. The Team Alignment tool was created in September 2005 with an aim of cascading the team alignment concept to the team member level in a shorter span of time.

5. Next steps: The team now has a 30, 60, 90 day implementation plan for the same. Incorporation of the three high priority action items arising from the team alignment exercise, as goals in the team were contemplated. Additionally a PROPEL camp was planned, to agree upon the steps to be taken to close the action items for each of the roles.

* PROPEL framework * Intervention II: DARPAN (Human Resource Intervention)

The company’s HR practices include a strong HR model that talks about alignment, assignment, engagement, empowerment and pride of the workforce. The annual employee engagement survey — Darpan — has been designed around the HR model.
Associate satisfaction survey for large groups- DARPAN seeks to capture the feedback of associates with the help of a questionnaire. The questionnaire measures satisfaction level in terms of career and job, communication, culture and pride, leadership, supervisor. With aggressive expansion and dispersion of ever growing associate strength in the relationship, communication or the lack of it, had emerged as one of the biggest bottlenecks in employee motivation and managerial decision making. In this context, an associate satisfaction survey at relationship level, christened DARPAN was initiated with the objective to “Reflect and Improve” at the relationship level through a better understanding of the explicit and implicit expectations of associates.
Other interventions used by the company include- In Touch, Let’s Talk, Open House, etc.

CONCLUSION
OD interventions have been instrumental in terms of enhancing value to the customer and employees at TCS. PROPEL as an organization wide intervention encouraged sharing of ownership and empowerment to change, as also the sharing of success stories and best practices across the organization. Valuing of employees was institutionalized through establishing processes that enable and enhance individual performance and lead to empowered project teams. Issue based mentoring was facilitated with camps and confluences as enabling frameworks. While confluences invested in personal transformation for the employees, camps invested in improving the workspace. DARPAN and other interventions were also used.
In a nutshell, the OD interventions at TCS have helped build a culture of fostering systems thinking and creating forums for dialogue, while encouraging leadership at all levels. For the organization at large, OD helped to reiterate the merits of valuing enquiry, expressing differences and constantly generating new knowledge.
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