Arup, famous for designing the iconic Sydney Opera House, among other stellar international projects, is a world leader in design, engineering and consulting in the built environment.
Originally a collection of independent practices worldwide, Sir Ove Arup founded the business in 1946 on defining principles of being an ethically balanced, people-centric organisation that is fuelled by ideas rather than profits. In the last 20 years, Arup has been coming closer together as one global organisation, bringing with it a host of technology integration challenges.
Glassdoor voted Arup as number nine in its top ten of best UK places to work. Diane Thornhill, UKIMEA Region People Leader, said: "Our company culture is unique and this is enabled by our employee owned structure." Tell me about Arup’s culture.
‘Arup is built on a set of values from the 1970s which are still relevant today. Things like social responsibility, reasonable prosperity, quality of work, being a humane organisation and having straight and honourable dealings are what attracted me to joining.
‘As an organisation, our membership has open debates about the ethics of the work we do. It's an organisation that's never targeted growth; it's grown organically based on client need and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. It is a truly ethically driven firm, whose mission is to “shape a better world” - and it is genuinely trying to do that.
‘Arup’s greatest strengths are the autonomy and innovation of its people. These also give rise to one of our biggest challenges - with autonomy comes a lot of creativity and ambiguity. This permeates our technology and creates both IT risks to be managed but also opportunities to explore and iterate different solutions.’
After a long and varied CIO career, your role at Arup, among other things, was to initiate a digital transformation. How did that play out in the Arup culture?
‘The architectural engineering consultancy sector is probably one of the last to really be subject to aggressive digital disruption. The margins are typically low within these businesses. Also, it is a highly regulated business and that regulation differs from country to country. You're designing life structures such as bridges and tunnels; health and safety is clearly an absolute priority. It's quite difficult for digital disruptors to penetrate - but not impossible.
‘When I joined, there were originally eight very independent IT teams across the world. In April 2018, we combined those eight teams into a single team called Digital Technology. The same people, doing by-and-large the same jobs, but we’d set out our intent and with any business transformation, being clear on where you’re headed is absolutely critical.
‘The big challenge was then delivering against that intent. In any transformation there are changes to systems, tools and processes but the area which perhaps is most overlooked is the need to bring your people along with you.
'As technologists, it’s easy to assume we are all used to change because our industry is always changing with the technology, but the importance of the human factor is still all too often overlooked. We spent a lot of time and energy getting the team to think very differently about what their role was in the organisation and how they could deliver differently to add greater value in the future.
‘Beyond the Technology team, in the wider organisation we created a digital executive to lead the change across a global firm of 17,000 people. Such large-scale change is not an undertaking for a single leader, so we were careful to select a mix of leaders who were digital experts; leaders who had deep knowledge of the core work of the firm, as well as broad geographical and therefore cultural representation.’
Was it a “top down” effort, or was it a two-way transformation?
‘We set out, very deliberately, to make sure the IT team (which was 392 people at the time) were firmly in the driving seat of their own destiny.
‘We ran self-facilitated workshops, designed to be cathartic and empowering. We asked people to think about and write down what things would they like to stop. The classic things came up, like timesheets, but we also started to hear about legacy, technical debt, processes, culture and people - the things that presented barriers to change.
‘We asked, what would you like to improve? What would you like to do if you had the time? The capacity? The resources? And what new things would you like to try? Then, putting that all together, we asked them what skills or resources they would need to achieve their goals. Ultimately, this led to a conversation about accountability, autonomy, structure, resourcing, co-ordinating with each other in the right way to do the right things, that kind of collective support.
‘Then we presented a straw man of how our future shape might look. We started running weekly Skype chats with employee reps to take on more feedback and to give them information about the process.
’Where did the process lead you?
‘It led to a target-operated model being built, followed by a formal consultation process, where we matched existing roles to the future organisational model. The team very much influenced the shape - there were new jobs, different responsibilities and, for the first time, everybody had job descriptions that articulated not only the ‘what’ (tasks) but also the ‘how’ (behaviours).
‘I think some people take the opportunities given to them and I think traditionally, people often look straight forward or they look straight up. They go, "That's where I want to go." Actually, what we try to encourage people to do now is look left and right and behind them as well and say, "What is really going to fulfil me?”
‘Some people said: "Just tell me what you want me to do." We didn't want to do that because it was really important that we created an environment where everyone had a sense of owning their career direction. That meant allowing anyone to apply for any role and we saw a number of people put their hand up to do something completely different. In that sense, I think a lot of people found the process liberating.’
‘We deliberately avoided creating the target operating model behind closed doors, it was genuinely shaped by the whole team and led by their engagement. Some leaders found the uncertainty of this approach uncomfortable, but the results were much better. On reflection, that sense of inevitable uncertainty was shared and with it came a certain amount of shared equity in the process.
‘We also purposefully avoided the trap of building an organisation chart with reporting lines and boxes, instead preferring to talk about where people offered value and where they wanted to make a contribution to the strategy. We did present an organisation chart at the end, but as a digital, interactive one.
‘We're now in a world where, to be successful, we need to encourage people and support everyone to be proactive. I was impressed by the people who stepped up and said, "actually, I think I can do this. I've got this skillset and experience to do that, I can lead this.” It helped people to really shine.’
Why did you partner with BCS on our Organisational Membership Scheme for your staff?
‘BCS has affiliates globally and we are a global company with big epicentres of IT talent in Toronto, Hyderabad (India), London, Newcastle, Brisbane and Hong Kong. We needed a professional membership that worked across all of those boundaries, otherwise you lose people along the way.
‘BCS has its own flavour of SFIA and we used some of their online tools to help support our process. I've never worked with so many chartered IT professionals as at Arup, so we already had a good base to build on via BCS.’
When recruiting, do you always ask for professional certification?
‘One of the challenges within the IT / digital technology sector, is that we've not fully matured as an industry yet. By that, I mean the industry in general or its clients do not demand or require these types of qualifications. Sometimes you see it in job adverts and it definitely helps to show that your competency and capability levels are of a standard.
‘In other sectors, people have to be qualified architects, qualified electrical engineers or qualified mechanical engineers to be able to work unsupervised. I think this ultimately needs to happen in IT, too.
‘We often recruit globally, so we will often say that a professional qualification is desirable rather than specifically asking for a chartered IT professional (CITP). That said, as an employer, CITP goes a long way and it is certainly something every senior IT professional should have.’
How did you build a sense of momentum?
‘It’s about instilling a sense of confidence in stakeholders that you’re serious about making changes. We started in the IT space with quite small wins - mini projects. There were things like getting better usage of Yammer, giving people a choice of which browsers to use on their desktop, simple stuff. This helps lay the foundations to introduce more complex digital tools in the future.
‘So, we asked, "okay, who wants to lead these things?" It was quite interesting to see who came forward as it wasn't always our leaders. A number of people put up their hands up and ran with different initiatives, freeing up time for the leadership team to build capability and focus on the longer-term strategy.
‘The strategy has to make people feel that things are different quite quickly, that things are changing in a positive way. That creates momentum, which buys breathing space to do the capability development.
‘I know for sure we didn’t get everything right. But I also know, because people have told me, that the atmosphere, the culture, the approach has changed. Our stakeholders are seeing much more value and they're feeding that back. You get comments like, "I've never seen so much delivery in this team before," which is really motivating.’ This has been especially true of the response to COVID-19.’
What is your advice to those thinking of doing their own transformation?
‘Be patient. In a global organisation, if you genuinely need to get your own organisation to change, it has to be driven by the people within it.
‘Ultimately, no level of investment is going to create that change unless the people who are actually on the ground, not just in the technology functions, are embracing it and working in a new way and have bought into it.
‘We're in the second year and although we’ve come a long way, we've still got a way to go.’
