CORE PROBLEM - ORGANIZATION STRCTURE AND EFFECIVESS - ANALYSIS BACKGROUND Before attempting this problem, students should have already completed the first problem of enumerating their own organizational structures. In this problem, we will analyze the organizational structure. This core problem is individual work, though students are encouraged to discuss it within their orgs and with other students.
ASSIGNMENT In this problem, each student will critically analyze the organizational structure of their companies. Students are expected to analyze the following:
1. Strategic Priorities of the Organization: From the organization structure, decipher the strategic priorities of the organization by the choice of structure, people or goals. Examples of strategic priorities can be for example: Hyper growth, Focus on profits, focuses on geographical expansion, focus on product line expansion, and focus on engineering and so on. The idea is to reverse engineer the organization structure to discover priorities. This can be 2-3 slides.
2. Identify problem areas or opportunities: Identify a workplace problem or an opportunity that you are familiar with in day to day job - "we do not provide enough time for testing," "the plastic coffee cups leak," or "We accept changes in requirements from the customer way too easily", or "We are wasting too much money in process standardization".
Now imagine that you are the CEO of your company and are concerned about this issue. How could you fix it through changes to the organizational structure, reporting lines, goals, responsibilities, measurements, etc?
Use 1 slide to describe the problem and another 1-2 to outline your proposed solutions. The solution should be big picture organization wide.
3. Identify conflicts: Within your organization, identify conflicts in people's incentives. These can be for example, between sales and delivery, between process and delivery, between profit and customer satisfaction and so on.
Study these conflicts and analyze if these conflicts are healthy or unhealthy for the organization. Why have these conflicts been put into place and what are the pros and cons of these? Is there a better way of incentivizing? This can be 2-3 slides. The entire submission should be a PPT with 3 sections and cumulatively about 8-10 slides.
GUIDANCE • Students are strongly encourages to discuss their thesis within their companies.
• How does reporting work when one person is working with multiple people?
• Why do CEOs sometime make small functions report to them directly?
• Why are conflicting roles put in place?