Problem: The ALPHA Timer Development Project (C)
As he stopped to refill his coffee mug, Roger Terry began to recall some of the comments he had heard from various members of the single-block product development team (see the comments reproduced below). The following comments were gathered from informal conversations with ALPHA program team members after the project's completion. "Very large portions of time were lost because of having to go back and reinvent the wheel and make ALPHA something it was never proposed to be." "We struggled with the project because of our relationship with Whirlpool. They wanted exclusivity. We were trying to maintain secrecy, working only with them, when we really needed the whole market to speak out. We don't have any real marketing department, we have a sales department that takes care of the ongoing business." "Part of the problem is that you end up with two masters here. You've got the engineering guy who is always worried about the material content and uniqueness of design, and you've got an operations guy who's only worried about the automation and the labor content. The structure and incentives in the organization sometimes pit functions against one another." "The design for manufacture efforts in the beginning included quality and tooling people from operations at headquarters, but plant manufacturing people only first heard of the ALPHA concept after parts had been designed, and tooling orders were about to be released."
"I don't know what we could have done to try harder-I mean, we made people available, and tried to schedule sessions with all the appropriate functional areas and people who where in the know, and participate and critique and give us their feedback. Even though we made all those efforts to get input, as time goes on and people change, and the complexity of it unfolds, and you've got people at Whirlpool saying we didn't do our homework-we did not ask them what they wanted. But we came and asked and asked and asked!" "There is a culture within the company of limited information sharing. When things went wrong, instead of dealing with facts, things were rearranged to make it seem a little bit better for whatever reason. A lot of doubt was generated within the company and then a lot of doubt was generated in ‘customer-land.' It just started building-this great big wall of doubt. Our customers asked us if we were having design problems, and we said ‘No.' They knew better." "No one person was responsible for the entire project. Operations did their thing; engineering did their thing, but early on no one coordinated things. When push came to shove, when a decision had to be made quickly, then one person needed the authority to get the plant people, operations people, quality people, engineering people, and sales people together to decide once and for all what to do." "We really didn't have the kind of input into equipment design and manufacturer choices that we needed to have. The headquarters group always had the final say. Consequently, there are several changes that we will make to get further cost reductions and quality improvements in the next few years that we could have had right off the bat."
Questions
1. How would you describe the team members' morale at this point? What are their primary concerns?
2. Given the team members' comments, what advice would you give Roger Terry regarding the forthcoming double-block timer development effort?