Here is a quick overview on the organizational development cycle. See how it can work for you.
1. Initiation
This initial phase is a necessary part of every Organizational Development project or relationship. This can involve a quick conversation and agreement to move forward or an in-depth needs analysis.
The primary goal is to understand your goals, concerns, and opportunities and to begin the work of understanding the underlying dynamics and individual, group, and organizational forces at work.
The nature of the engagement will depend on your needs and resources and could be a one-time delivery of service, a detailed project scope, or an ongoing relationship. Clarity, comfort, and shared commitment are the keys to success at this stage.
2. Diagnosis
The goals in this stage of the process are to further establish a collaborative relationship, develop and test hypotheses about root causes and opportunities, and to engage key members of your organization in solution definition.
Activities are varied but may include structured interviews, focus groups, surveys, brainstorming sessions, document review, SWOT analysis, observation, and individual assessment. Diagnosis strategies will be agreed upon among the key stakeholders and executed by a combination of consultants and internal resources as appropriate.
Although the initiation stage often begins with defining a problem, one of the primary activities in diagnosis is to understand the strengths and positive behaviors of the organization. These are more often than not the building blocks of a successful, efficient, and lasting intervention.
3. Intervention
With a clear understanding of the current state and a shared vision of the desired future state, the time for focused action has arrived.
In a coaching engagement, this might include things like skills development, “pre-game coaching”, homework, practice and review. In a team-focused engagement, examples could include meeting facilitation, training sessions, management development, and role definition. Although the options for organizational interventions are broad, they might involve new processes or policies, strategic planning sessions, communication plans, change initiatives, and restructuring.
Although they are sometimes discussed as three distinct categories of intervention, most solutions involve operating at the individual, team, and organizational levels. Finding the right balance and order is critical to success.
4. Evaluation
Key metrics will depend on the nature and duration of the intervention; however, defining shared measures of success is an important planning function. The focus should be on a balanced view that links immediate outcomes to organizational goals and sustained impact.
Evaluation may also include a more subjective assessment of satisfaction with the working relationship, review of the accuracy of the diagnosis stage, and discussion of any unexpected organizational barriers.
In an ongoing project, evaluation activities will be scheduled at reasonable intervals and used to inform course corrections if needed. For one-time projects these will most likely occur at wrap-up. The evaluation stage is also a time to look forward and identify next steps, additional opportunities, and necessary follow-up activities. is critical to success.