Part A
1. Briefly describe your organization's domain that is, the goods and services it produces and the customer groups it serves.
2. What core competences give the organization a competitive advantage? What are the organization's functional-level strategies?
3. What is your organization's principal business-level strategy: low cost or differentiation? How successfully is the organization pursuing this strategy? In what ways does it need to improve its core competences to improve its competitive position?
4. In what ways do your organization's structure and culture match its strategy? Is there a good match? In what ways could the match be improved? Is the organization experiencing any problems with its structure?
5. Is your organization operating in more than one domain? If it is, what corporate level strategies is it pursuing? How is it creating value from these strategies? Is it successful?
6. What kind of strategy is your organization pursuing in the international environment? What kind of structure does your organization use to manage this strategy?
Part B
1. What kinds of goods or services does your organization produce? Are input, conversion, or output activities the source of greatest uncertainty for your organization?
2. What role does technology in the form of knowledge play in the production of the organization's goods or services?
3. What role does materials technology play in the production of the organization's goods and services?
4. What is the organization's level of technical complexity? Does the organization use a small-batch, mass production, or continuous-process technology?
5. Use the concepts of task variability and task analyzability to describe the complexity of your organization's activities. Which of the four types of technology identified by Perrow does your organization use?
6. What forms of task interdependence between people and between departments characterize your organization's work process? Which of the three types of technology identified by Thompson does your organization use?
7. The analysis you have done so far might lead you to expect your company to operate with a particular kind of structure. What kind? To what extent does your organization's structure seem to fit with the characteristics of the organization's technology? For example, is the structure organic or mechanistic?
8. Do you think your organization is operating its technology effectively? Do you see any ways in which it could improve its technical efficiency, innovativeness, or ability to respond to customers?
Part C
1. When was your organization founded? Who founded it? What opportunity was it founded to exploit?
2. How rapid was the growth of your organization, and what problems did it experience as it grew? Describe its passage through the growth stages outlined in Greiner's model. How did managers deal with the crisis that it encountered as it grew?
3. What stage of the organizational life cycle is your organization in now? What internal and external problems is it currently encountering? How are managers trying to solve these problems?
4. Has your organization ever shown any symptoms of decline? How quickly were managers in the organization able to respond to the problem of decline? What changes did they make? Did they turn the organization around?
Part D
1. Given the pattern of changes your organization has made to its strategy and structure over time, which of the decision-making models best characterizes the way it makes decisions?
2. At what hierarchical level does responsibility for non programmed decision making seem to lie in your organization? What problems do you see with the way your company makes decisions?
3. Characterize your organization's ability to learn over time. Evaluate its capacity to adapt itself to and modify the environment.
4. Can you pinpoint any cognitive biases that may have affected the way managers made decisions or influenced their choice of strategy or structure? What was the effect of these cognitive biases?
Part E
1. With the information that you have at your disposal, discuss (a) the forces for change, and (b) obstacles to change in your company.
2. With what kind of innovation (quantum or incremental) has your organization been most involved?
3. In what ways, if any, has your organization sought to manage the innovation process and alter its structure or culture to increase its capacity to develop new products or services?
Part F
1. Does revolutionary or evolutionary best describe the changes that have been taking place in your organization?
2. In what types of change (such as restructuring) has your organization been most involved? How successful have these change efforts been?
3. With the information that you have at your disposal, discuss (a) the forces for change, (b) obstacles to change, and (c) the strategy for change your organization has adopted.
Part G
1 What do you think are the likely sources of conflict that may arise in your organization? Is there a history of conflict between managers or between stakeholders?
2 Analyze the sources of power of the principal subunits, functions, or divisions in the organization. Which is the most central subunit? Which is the most non substitutable subunit? Which one controls the most resources? Which one handles the main contingencies facing the organization?
3 Which subunit is the most powerful? Identify any ways in which the subunit has been able to influence decision making in its favor.
4 To what degree are the organization's strategic and operational decisions affected by conflict and politics?