It worked there, so it should work here: Sustaining change while improving product development processes

• Published date: 01 April 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/joom.1010
• Date: 01 April 2019
• Author: Tyson R. Browning,Shawn T. Collins

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

It worked there, so it should work here: Sustaining change while

improving product development processes

Shawn T. Collins

1

| Tyson R. Browning

2

1

Department of Technology Leadership and

Communication, Indiana University—

Purdue University, Indianapolis, Indiana

2

Department of Information Systems and

Supply Chain Management, Neeley School

of Business, Texas Christian University,

Fort Worth, Texas

Correspondence

Shawn T. Collins, Department of

Technology Leadership and

Communication, Indiana University—

Purdue University, Indianapolis, IN 46202.

Email: shawn.collins@alumni.purdue.edu

Handling Editor: Mikko Ketokivi

Abstract

Organizations operate under ongoing pressure to conduct product development

(PD) in ways that reduce errors, improve product designs, and increase speed and

efficiency. Often,managers are expected to respond to this pressure byimplementing

process improvem ent programs (PIPs) based on best practices elsewhere (e.g., in

another part of their organization or in another industrial context). Successful PIP

implementation depends on two criteria: (a) demonstrating (symbolic) success by

meeting externally imposed deadlines and producing mandated artifacts and

(b) sustaining the expected (substantive) changes in their employees' underlying

beliefs and practices. Given the mixed success of PIPsin nonmanufacturing contexts,

identifying factors that contribute to both symbolic and substantive implementation

is important to both researchers and practitioners. We explore this challenge through

an in-depth field study at a PD company (DevCo) that implemented a PIP across its

11 PD projects. We examine DevCo's change message to implement the PIP, how

DevCo's engineers experienced it, factors that impeded implementation, and factors

that could improve substantive success. Along with this empirical evidence, we

leverage organizational change concepts to facilitate effective PIP implementation in

new contexts such as PD. We distill our findings into eight propositions that expand

theory about effectively transferring PIPs across contexts.

KEYWORDS

clinical research, organizational change, process improvement, product development

1|INTRODUCTION

Process improvement programs (PIPs) are organizational ini-

tiatives intended to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and

consistency of work—such as improving product designs,

reducing errors, and decreasing requirements for time, money,

and other resources. Given constant pressure for better results

in their organizations, PIPs are a fact of life for many managers

in a variety of contexts, such as manufacturing, service opera-

tions, health care, and product development (PD) (Linderman,

Schroeder, Zaheer, and Choo (2003); Schroeder, Linderman,

Liedtke, and Choo (2008); Zu, Fredendall, and Douglas

(2008)). Practitioners make substantial investments in PIPs

(e.g., Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, and Scrum) to transfer existing

ones across national cultures (e.g., implementing Japanese

manufacturing practices in U.S. assembly plants) and functional

or operational domains (e.g., applying Lean or Six Sigma in

service operations, health care, and PD). Many claim that PIP

principles and best practices are generic and thus transferable

across contexts (Browning & Heath, 2009).

Despite such claims, the desired benefits of PIPs are incon-

sistently realized in practice (Arlbjørn & Vagn Freytag, 2013;

Hackman & Wageman, 1995; Hines, Holweg, & Rich, 2004;

Jadhav, Mantha, & Rane, 2014; Repenning, 2000; Staats,

Received: 31 July 2017 Accepted: 20 January 2019

DOI: 10.1002/joom.1010

216 © 2019 Association for Supply Chain Management, Inc. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joom J Oper Manag. 2019;65:216–241.

Brunner, & Upton, 2011; Swink & Jacobs, 2012; Victor,

Boynton, & Stephens-Jahng, 2000). According to Netland

(2016), two out of every three change initiatives do not

achieve their desired results, only one in four manufacturing

plants that employed Lean production in the United States

was satisfied with the results, and many organizations struggle

to sustain momentum beyond initial implementation of their

Lean practices. (Findings by Danese, Romano, and Boscari

(2017) that Lean requires similar efforts to sustain as it does

to implement echo the previous statement.) These findings

highlight a nontrivial challenge for the operations manage-

ment (OM) community. Numerous PIP practices exist with

evidence that they (occasionally) work. Furthermore, man-

agers are expected to implement those practices under the pre-

mise that what worked in one place will bring the same

positive results elsewhere. However, few have studied the

question of how to reliably implement PIPs when the princi-

ples are applied in new contexts (an issue noted by Lillrank

(1995) and explored by Staats et al. (2011)).

This paper seeks to improve our understanding of such sit-

uations in three ways that are relevant to OM theory and prac-

tice. First, this paper addresses PIP implementation that is

mandatory instead of voluntary. When a PIP is successfully

implemented elsewhere, a manager may be expected to imple-

ment the same practices in their own organization. The prior-

ity is often for the manager to mobilize resources within his or

her organizationin order to comply with the imposed expecta-

tions (symbolic success). Such expectations often leave man-

agers with limited flexibility for their employees to develop

solutions that address their specific operational challenges and

embed sustainably altered behaviors (substantive success). It

is possible, as in the case of Six Sigma at 3M, for a mandatory

PIP to evolve over time in ways t hat increase its substantive

success (Canato & Ravasi, 2014; Canato, Ravasi, & Phillips,

2013). However, bothscholars and practitioners shouldunder-

stand how to proactively evolve a mandatory PIP implementa-

tion. Improved understanding of how th ese situations affect

PIPs in practice is crucial for building sound theory

(Handfield & Melnyk, 1998; Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, &

Van de Ven, 2013) and helping organizations to navigate the

landscape of externally imposed mandates.

Second, our understanding of what PIPs are exceeds our

understanding of how to implement them (e.g., Anand,

Ward, & Tatikonda, 2010; Black & Porter, 1996; Jones,

Mellat Parast, & Adams, 2010; Schroeder, Linderman, &

Zhang, 2005; Zhang, Hill, & Gilbreath, 2011). In the pres-

ence of expectations to replicate PIP best practices that

“worked there,”many organizations implement PIPs without

substantively changing their employees' underlying patterns

of action: They espouse change without verifying that they

have actually achieved it (Hackman & Wageman, 1995;

Pentland & Feldman, 2008; Zbaracki, 1998). When this

happens, they implement a PIP without a solid understand-

ing of the causal paths from metrics to desired behavioral

outcomes (Melnyk, Hanson, & Calantone, 2010) or potential

sources of variation as PIP practices diffuse into their organi-

zations (Ansari, Fiss, & Zajac, 2010).

Third, OM researchers and practitioners must articulate

the characteristics and underlying causal factors of a suc-

cessful PIP across multiple contexts. This is important

when organizations seek to expand on successful PIP expe-

riences by replicating them elsewhere (Danese et al., 2017;

Lillrank, 1995). Many organizations use PIPs to character-

ize and control technical knowledge (Bohn, 1994) across

the entire product lifecycle, thus extending their scope

upstream from standardized production to the innovation

work of designing and developing new products and ser-

vices (Browning & Sanders, 2012; Davenport, Jarvenpaa, &

Beers, 1996; McManus, Haggerty, & Murman, 2007; Murman

et al., 2002; Staats et al., 2011).

We combine empirical evidence from a 24-month, in-

depth, clinical research study (Schein, 1987, 1993) at a PD

company (DevCo) with multiple streams of literature—

including process improvement, organizational change, and

organizational behavior—to expand theory about transfer-

ring PIPs and sustaining their implementation. Our research

was problem-solving-oriented (LaGanga, 2011; Lok & De

Rond, 2013; Mathieu, 2016; Staats et al., 2011; Van

Oorschot, Akkermans, Sengupta, & Van Wassenhove, 2013)

in that we examined part of DevCo's “system health”(Schein,

1987: p. 40) in terms of how effectively it implemented a PIP

across the 11 PD projects in its Engineering department.

DevCo's PIP implementation experienced gaps between its

symbolic and substantive success (Hackman & Wageman,

1995; Sousa & Voss, 2002, 2008) and thus failed to achieve

the desired outcome of sustained implementation. By

exploring DevCo's PIP implementation in light of existing

theory about organizational change, we contribute to OM

theory (Ketokivi & Choi, 2014) about successfully transfer-

ring PIPs to new contexts.

We explore relationships between (a) the priorities of the

PIP's steering committee (who defined its principles and

practices) and DevCo's senior leadership (who defined the

change message) and (b) the dynamics of DevCo's working-

level engineers (who responded to the PIP). We identify

three internal factors—conflicting environmental interpreta-

tions, inadequate PIP tools, and problematic metaphors—

that reduced the efficacy of DevCo's PIP implementation,

thereby limiting the desired outcome of new, shared beliefs

and behaviors in the Engineering department. We also iden-

tify three negative factors—distant benefits, empty milestone

compliance, and overreliance on grassroots adoption—that

increased the gap between symbolic and substantive change.

Finally, we identify two positive factors—flexible routines

COLLINS AND BROWNING 217