Managing complexity effectively

A Holistic Management and Control System

A management system with its various components can become extensive and complex, making its application more difficult. The training center of Deutsche Telekom drew inspiration from the EFQM model and created a holistic management and control system. By focusing on success-relevant components and, above all, integrating them effectively, a coherent and transparent overall model was achieved.

The Importance of Holistic Management Systems

A holistic management system for strategic planning, control, and further development is becoming an increasingly important prerequisite for success in any organization operating in an environment of constant change and growing demands.

Practical Challenges

In practice, however, the management system itself often poses a significant challenge for organizations—consisting of many different components that must be integrated into an effective overall system. Aligning goals, strategy, processes, key performance indicators, and more, while meaningfully connecting them, often fails simply due to the sheer scale and resulting complexity.

The Dream of a Transparent Overall Model

The Deutsche Telekom training center in Stuttgart also faced these challenges. As an internal service provider with over 20 employees across five locations, it is responsible for training more than 450 junior employees in nine apprenticeship professions and seven dual study programs. The economic trends of rapid change and ever-increasing demands are particularly reflected in the fields of education and training. As a result, the management of the training center requires a high degree of adaptability, flexibility, and willingness to change.

Experience with the EFQM Model

For many years, the training center has used the EFQM Excellence Model as an impulse generator, incorporating essential management system components such as holistic self-assessment, goal and action planning, process descriptions and improvements, and the use of key performance indicators. However, continuous evaluation of the management system and its components revealed disadvantages in practical application:

• Some tools were too theoretical and not closely related to core business functions (e.g., extensive evaluations using the Excellence Model).
• Certain aspects were too extensive relative to their cost-benefit ratio (e.g., collecting and analyzing key figures that could not be clearly linked to cause-and-effect relationships).
• Many elements were too complicated and complex (e.g., considering all factors instead of focusing on success-relevant topics).
• Lack of transparency and comprehensibility (e.g., managing individual system components without considering their interconnections).

A Better Yet Simpler System

The training center set itself the ambitious goal of renewing its management system to make it both better and simpler. Under the premise of “simplifying and focusing the management system,” requirements were developed for a new management model to serve as the foundation of a professional control and organizational development system.

Aspects of the New Model

• The new model aimed to incorporate the following aspects:
• Core business relevance
• Consideration of all relevant topics (holistic approach)
• Overarching mission statement, goals, and measures
• Incorporation of future market trends
• Focus on key success factors and (current and future) core competencies
• Consideration of modern leadership topics (agility, leadership, change management, etc.)
• Implementation of systemic management (networking topics, interactions) and control-relevant key figures with cause-effect chains

The Twelve Focus Topics

Based on experience with the EFQM Excellence Model, a holistic management model was first defined to cover relevant aspects while being highly organization-specific. This resulted in a model with twelve focus topics that practically address the business and concerns of the service provider.

For each focus topic, a title, objective, and five clarifying points (“What do we mean by this topic?”) were defined. The training center also had experience linking approaches with results based on years of working with the Excellence Model. Accordingly, key performance indicators were defined for each focus topic to measure efficiency and effectiveness. For the focus topic “Leadership,” for example, these included “discussions between managers and employees,” “team meetings,” and “employee survey results related to leadership topics.”

Structuring Processes

The twelve focus topics of the training center are not isolated but serve as a structure for a systematic process landscape, covering:

• Leadership processes (e.g., leadership, strategic management)
• Core competency processes (e.g., professional training staff, networked learning)
• Customer-related core processes (e.g., customer management, training/dual studies)
• Support processes (e.g., employee management, partner/resources/administration)

Connecting Key Components

A management system is based on a core model with relevant topics, such as the focus topics, which also represent the organization’s processes within a process landscape. However, for a management system to support continuous evaluation, planning, control, and further development, additional elements must be incorporated.

Currently, the twelve focus topics serve as evaluation criteria in an annual assessment workshop involving all employees, identifying strengths and development areas. The evaluation is based on the Excellence Model, using the well-known Plan–Do–Check–Learn (PDCL) logic.

Aligned with the organization's mission statement (vision, mission, values), the assessment results help derive key priority topics for the training center. These, in turn, form the basis for the annual goal and action planning process (referred to as the Team Strategy Plan), ensuring transparent integration with the focus topics and corresponding key figures.

Example: Team Strategy Plan

An example from the Team Strategy Plan illustrates the methodological approach and element connections: The vision includes “customer enthusiasm” as a key aspect. This leads to the operational goal of “increasing customer satisfaction” (measured via customer feedback results). Supporting measures from the focus topic “Customer Management” include customer meetings, information, and workshops, each with defined key figures and targets. Other measures and goals from different focus topics also contribute to this objective, such as employee qualification from “Professional Training Staff” and information databases from “Networked Learning.” Through discussions on measurability during the Team Strategy Plan process, the desired results are automatically defined and incorporated into a dashboard for ongoing control.

Key Success Factors: Focus and Networking

How does the new, transparent management system account for the two key success factors—focus and networking? The training center has used a prioritization methodology for management decisions for several years: Answering the question “What are the key drivers?” helps identify important topics during the assessment, prioritize relevant processes, and derive effective activities during team strategy planning.

Focus on Success Factors

Additionally, as part of an overarching view, the training center has defined strategically relevant drivers as key success factors crucial for long-term and sustainable success. By considering different perspectives, relevant attributes were identified and defined, covering all key topics from customer, market, and organizational perspectives. Within these success factors, critical core competencies for long-term success were identified—both existing (including unique selling points) and those needed in the future.

For example, the training center identified “Professional Training Staff” as an existing core competency and unique selling point. Meanwhile, “Networked Learning” was identified as a future core competency needing further development. Both topics are also reflected in the process landscape under core competency processes.

Driver Logic and Key Figures

Beyond logically integrating all aspects of the management system, the training center also sought to establish clear relationships and cause-effect chains within performance metrics. A key realization was that managing the organization based on output results (e.g., performance outcomes) is insufficient. These Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) serve as lagging indicators, making it impossible to trace back to underlying causes when something fails.

Success Through Employee Participation

During the development and implementation of the renewed management system, it became clear that this was not a minor optimization effort but a fundamental transformation requiring leadership involvement and employee participation from the outset. Employees were actively involved in shaping the system, ensuring that changes were transparent and practically beneficial. Their feedback described the new system as:

• Structured
• Simple
• Clear
• Practical
• Comprehensible
• Closer to people and their tasks
• Clearly interconnected
• Efficient with minimal effort for good results

Table: Characteristics of Focus Topics (with detailed example)

LEADERSHIP

Inspirierende Führung mit systematischer Förderung und Forderung

Excellent leaders…

• … continuously assess their leadership skills and constantly develop them,
• … create a structured leadership process and implement it sustainably,
• … encourage their employees as a support for self-encouragement,
• … promote agility through professional management of change/transformation,
• … promote equal opportunities and diversity.