CASE STUDY
and another 285 had commenced. By December 2020, no fewer than 312 solutions had been fully implemented; by the end of last year, almost all measures had been carried out. Positive outcomes abound The measures implemented have had a major impact on the school: the faculty now has 78 lecturers, up from 40 in 2019, 48 of whom work full time. The number of UPF-aliated professors has also risen, from 60 to 65, with the number of collaborating teachers correspondingly reduced from 2,000 to 1,700. Importantly, seven of the full-time faculty now hail from overseas. In line with the transformation goals, the number of programmes oered has been reduced from 144 to 117. The volume of professional articles and books published per year has shot up from 182 in 2019 to 426 last year, while the number of company chairs has risen from just one in 2019 to 10 in 2022. As an example of the exponential increase in research activity, the number of JCR-indexed articles has gone from 11 in 2019 to 49 in 2022, representing a massive increase of 345 per cent. The number of international students has also gone up: from 602 four years ago, representing 43 per cent of the student population, to 677, equalling almost 46 per cent of the student body. The management committee has been beefed up too and now all the participants are members of the academic faculty. When attempting to implement change within an organisation, it is normal to encounter resistance to transformation. It is also worth remembering most transformation processes fail. This is why it is important to have strong leadership; it is an essential ingredient for securing the whole organisation’s commitment to the process. As the achievement of international accreditation is proof of the eectiveness of this process, it should be noted that at the time of writing, the school had achieved a number of important accreditations, namely: AMBA (December 2020) and EQUIS (April 2022), in addition to EOCCS for online programmes in May 2020. In December 2022, AACSB eligibility was obtained and the accreditation process formally launched earlier this year. Even if an organisation succeeds in its transformation, sooner or later there will be a need for further change. In the end, to quote the title of German author Michael Ende’s book, it is a “ Neverending story ”.
of change instead of obstacles to it. It is not essential for teams to be led by department heads, but managers must form part of their respective teams. It is vital that as many individuals as possible participate, always on a voluntary basis. In the case of UPF, a total of 92 people took part in the project including sta, teachers and former students. In addition to the 18 RRTs, the transformation support oce and senior management team were involved. The oce is a unit that manages several tasks contributing to the success of the process. For UPF, this oce was headed by the director of information systems and was tasked with providing data and data analysis (including trend and competitor analysis), as well as planning and coordinating meetings and preparing the minutes. The senior management team is a leadership group that performs a more supervisory role; it has to be very small (just three or four people) and it also has to be highly dedicated to the project – it is led by the transformation leader, who is usually the organisation’s director general. Transformation stages explained Following Tabrizi’s methodology, the process was based on three phases of 30 days each. The diagnostic phase aims to identify strengths and weaknesses. At the end of the first 30 days, there is a general meeting of the whole organisation where groups present reports on strengths and weaknesses found. In the case of UPF, each RRT met on average twice during this phase and in total they identified 210 strengths and 710 weaknesses, including strategic and operational issues. The identification of innovative solutions phase involves meeting at the end of 60 days, when each team presents a list of measures that could be implemented. In this instance, on average each RRT met twice during this phase and in total some 540 innovative solutions were identified. The third and final phase is change preparation. The objective here is to decide on the solutions to be implemented with teams presenting a final list of approved measures to the whole organisation. The UPF teams agreed 456 innovative solutions that were approved by senior management. Implementing the measures After the final meeting in December 2019, implementation of the transformation process began. By February of the following year, 95 of the 456 approved solutions had been fully put in place
Oriol Amat is professor of financial economics and accounting at University Pompeu Fabra. He has been rector of UPF and director of the Department of Economics and Business, as well as dean of the UPF Barcelona School of Management, member of the board of directors of the Spanish stock exchange supervisor and dean of the Catalan Economist Association. In addition, he has published more than 50 books BIOGRAPHIES José Manuel Martínez-Sierra is the director general of UPF Barcelona School of Management. Between 2012 and 2021 he held various teaching, research and leadership roles at Harvard University and Law School. Previously, he served in leadership positions at both international and national level as director of international relations at the Spanish Ministry of Education and was president of the EU high-level group on education and training policies
Ambition APRIL 2023 | 29
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