Streamline Training & Documentation: Some Case Studies of Social Network Analysis

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Some Case Studies of Social Network Analysis

In its July 23 issue, Fortune takes a look at how organizations can best identify and use the informal networks that underlie their formal reporting relationships.

If you're already familiar with the basics of social network analysis, the most valuable part of The Hidden Workplace," by Jennifer Reingold and Jia Lynn Yang, is the portion describing five case studies:

Bell Canada — Needed to leave its monopoly self behind and become "more outward-looking, dynamic, and productive." Management identified a core of employees "who embodied the mentality the company sought: committed, passionate, and competitive." These employees were made the seed for a group of "Pride Builders," who became leaders of cultural transformation at the company.

Lehman Brothers — Worked with Rob Cross at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce. The goal was to improve retention of talent by helping top performers do even better by improving their networks.

Fluor — To meet employees' desire to know more about the company, melded mentoring and networking in the form of "mentoring circles." In each circle, an executive was matched with "five to nine lower-level employees drawn from different parts of the company." The aim was "to give employees a sense of belonging to a broader organization, one whose different parts fit together in a certain way."

Procter & Gamble — To improve collaboration among R&D personnel — located in 25 technical centers around the world— used a social network analysis to see where there were gaps. Two important findings: R&D in China and new-hires were not well-connected with the rest of the R&D organization.

Raytheon — Did an analysis of the network at their Rocky Mountain Engineering Center. The upshot was creation of "five 'centers of excellence': groups of engineers who communicated via their own e-mail lists and occasional face-to-face meetings." Raytheon also helped a relatively isolated group of system architects become more connected with others who had allied expertise.

Reingold and Yang close their article with a couple of recommendations to managers seeking to optimize the role of their companies' informal organizations: set loose parameters (no micro-managing, but also no abdication of all effort to create structure), and find "the right ambassadors to shuttle between the formal and the informal."

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Labels: Management practices, Networking

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