1. How would you restructure the facilities maintenance organization at Midwest University?
Besides applying the decentralized organization, Allen should also apply the crossfunctional work teams. A cross-functional team is a group of people with different
functional expertise working towards achieving a common goal. Allen is the team leader
but if he gives orders for his staff to attend to a problem received from a customer and at
the same time his maintenance staff found some issues or anything which he is not
convinced within his job, he can take the decision to stop until this problem is solved.
Simply put, every expert is the leader or the manager of the whole operation when there
is a problem related to his specialty.
Therefore, we would structure the facilities maintenance organization at Midwest
University by applying the decentralized and cross functional work team in order to
improve the efficiency of the facilities organization at Midwest University.
Thus the organizational structure has to be completely organic structure meaning that it
has no official power line of authority except for Sean as the head of the department.
Team leaders are considered as gurus who are not having a dictatorial position
Since there was a problem that personnel respond very late to work orders. That is, it
took 5 to 10 days which made it very hard to keep up with problems. Sean the facility
manager did a research using the knowledge obtained from the various workshops on
continuous improvements. He found out that 85 % of the jobs were an hour’s job. 40 %
were routine. He came to the conclusion that organizational structure was too
bureaucratic in a way that personnel responded too slow to work. The process of
structuring human and physical resources in order to accomplish organizational
objectives, involves dividing.
2. What can Sean Allen do to alleviate the problem of excessive travel time for
work crews?