Discuss the below:
Q1: There is this not-for-profit organization that has been providing adult day care services to seniors who are unable to remain at home without some level of supervision for 10 years. The organization currently has a staff of eight caregivers who are all professionally trained to serve the senior population. Family members are able to bring their loved ones to the center between the hours of 6:00 am and 8:00 pm Monday through Friday. The organization receives donations from local churches, foundations, and family members who patronize the business. However, the organization has never received federal grant dollars to carry out its operations.
The executive director of the center recently learned about the federal government offering grant funding to not-for-profit organizations providing intergenerational programs. That is, centers offering services to multiple generations of people at the same facility. Services could include seniors providing tutoring services for children in an afterschool program or expanding daycare services to children.
The executive director believes that this is a great idea and presents the idea to the board of directors and the staff expressing how it will increase the center's funding stream, position the organization to serve more people in the community, create jobs for 10 new people in the local community, and enable existing staffs to be promoted to a team leader position responsible for training and mentoring new staffs. The executive director also mentions that the failure to position the organization to take advantage of this opportunity could mean that it will be business as usual and that facilities incorporating the new business model could attract our senior clientele.
If you received this message from the executive director, what would be your initial thoughts? Would you give a decision of a go or no go? Why? What implications could this have on employee morale and productivity?
Q2: There is a not-for-profit association that has been in business for over 35 years providing management and organizational consulting services to large health care systems in the Pacific Northwestern part of the U.S. The organization generates 95% of its revenues from grant opportunities and another 5% from membership dues. The organization is a fairly lean organization with six extremely productive consultants that work well together. In fact, it's more like a close knit working environment that is uncommon to see at a lot of organizations. The consultants were approached by their CEO about the prospect of adding another consultant to the team. The consultants pushed back expressing concern that the organization has not secured a new grant in a year and that the prospect of applying for another grant would not occur until eight months. Also, the consultants believed that this individual would not fit the culture of the organization because he has never worked in a nonprofit organization as he spent his entire career in Fortune 500 companies as a consultant. Lastly, the consultants who examined his resume assert that this individual does not remain in one job long enough, which could pose an issue in establishing and maintaining rapport with association's members.
Despite the consultant's attempt to plead their case, the CEO hires a new consultant.
What are your thoughts? What impact could this have on the organization (i.e., employee morale, operationally, financially)?
Q3: A leader and her executive staff at a large federal governmental agency were interested in converting the agency's inquiry tracking system to an electronic based system. The agency receives on average 68,000 letters from stakeholders annually for a plethora of reasons such as people submitting comments for an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rule Making, requesting clarification on a new regulation, and filing complaints against private organizations. The large quantity of letters are opened by a staff of 14 administrative assistants who examine the letter, assigns it a tracking number, enters contact information and the nature of the letter into a database, and makes three copies of the letter and its corresponding information. The administrative assistants hand deliver one copy of the letter to the administrator's office and two copies to the manager and the policy analyst in the department who will respond to the inquiry. Due to the large copying expense and recent complaints that some stakeholders never received a response regarding their inquiry, the agency leaders decided to transition to a 100% electronic system for inquiries. That is, the 14 administrative assistants would scan the letters and e-mail them only to the department that would respond to the inquiry. All original documents were destroyed immediately after responding to the stakeholders.
After six months with the new system, agency leaders learned that only a few of the administrative assistants were utilizing the new system; however, they were not inputting all of the necessary data. The assistants were also hand delivering the correspondence to the departments. Furthermore, the majority of the assistants just continued to do business as usual by hand delivering their letters to the appropriate departments.
What's wrong with this picture? Could we save this project? How would you have approached this entire situation differently?