E II HARSHAD SAVANT PHD01003 A 13/01/2021 DESIGNING WORK ORGANISATION (DWO) Professor Dr SANJAY SINGH Paste your signature Declaration: 1. I have submitted faculty feedback 30 minutes prior to appearing in the End-Term Exam. 2. I have not copied the answer/matter in this answer booklet from my classmate, internet and any other sources. Paste your signature Signature of the Student Q1 Based on the given information, identify at least two initiatives from Table 1 that you will select and implement to turnaround The Citizen Sun. All initiatives should be within the given budget. Using Tucker Marion and Sebastian Fixson’s (2017) Model of Innovation in Organizations discussed in the class, offer reasons why the initiatives selected by you would work best to revive The Citizen Sun company Ans – As per the Harvard Business Publications simulation titled – Innovation Simulation Breaking News – the objective is to find a viable, ground breaking solution for a company that has been into publishing newspaper. The Citizen Sun, the publishing newspaper has been facing stiff competition among all the digitization and changing market. Any measure to reduce and cut costs have been proved to have no significant impact on the revenues and profits. Thus, there has been steady decline in the revenues and profits over the years. The CEO is left with just one choice to keep his business from failing – he decides to motivate his team to find new big idea that might work and the company will survive. For that he gives 12 weeks and a budget of $50,000 as internal and external resources. The only important requirement is to come up with truly original idea which will have such a feature that will increase readership, their traffic (in terms of people visiting their websites) and in turn generate more revenue.[1] By looking at the Tucker Marion and Sebastian Fixson’s Model of Innovation in Organization, we can conclude that there are basic 4 types of innovation – “specialist” (the feature that focuses on one key differentiating factor from its competitors), “venture” (the risk vs return comparison role of any business idea), “community” (understanding the wants and needs of society, finding those ideas that will make significant positive impact on society) and “network” (the ability to branch out new features that will diversify and sustain innovation from different related or unrelated ideas).[2] [3] Thus, the requirement of CEO and the Model of Innovation in Organization gives us hint that the idea doesn’t need to be truly a disruptor – meaning that it can pose lower risks. Also, since we are truly not in any position to utilise any time and features that might be cost-prohibitive or taking too much time to implement, we need to find a low or medium aspect in terms of them. Thus, we have 4 major criteria in choosing any of our ideas 1. The cost to implement should be low or medium. 2. Time to implement must be low or medium. 3. Idea should be truly innovative. 4. The risk taken should be at most moderate. From the above requirements, if we were to compare the given alternatives from the table, we can finalize a few of the ideas that have potential to give significant results. These ideas will have shorter time to test and should not cost not much to test. Thus, we can finalize following ideas1. Run innovation bootcamp with internal team. 2. Post questions to Citizen Sun social media followers. 3. Run innovation content on CitizenSun.com. 4. Run idea ‘hackathon’ at local startup event. Image 1 – List of choices available in the simulation. Source [1] From the above criteria, we can see that option 4 does not have any direct impact on our innovation processes. Further, all other ideas are either costly to try or take too much time to try. Thus we are left with first 3 choices. Out of these, option 2 and option 3 are more or less same and thus we can choose between those two. So we have combination of Option1 and (Option2 or Option 3) I decided to choose the first option as Run an innovation contest on CitizenSun.com with $1000 reward for top 3 ideas I decided to use this option because it will give me better understanding of what customers (loyal subscribers and readers) want and thus create a feedback process from bottom up because customers know their choices better as they have various alternatives between different competitors and they choose the better option that is able to provide more features at similar or reduced prices. Also, by giving them reward, I could generate more interest and incentive to all participants of the contest. This, in turn gave me focused ideas that were truly innovative and had the potential to make significant impact. The second choice I decided was to Run an innovation bootcamp with internal team with $1000 reward for top 3 ideas I took this option as second choice as the internal team was now more clear on what they need to do based on various feedback given by customers from the first option. Thus, now we could focus our efforts on things that we could do from the list of what the customers had suggested. Also, by giving incentive for top 3 ideas, I was again able to induce people to participate and put more efforts for the same. Image 2 – List of choices available within the 2 initiatives in the simulation. Source [1] Thus, I was able to harness the ideas from both stake holders – internal as well as external. This gave me a list of different ideas as shown in Image 2. From this, I decided to take the option that had highest level of innovation, Invest in augmented reality news, as it was significantly different from other choices and had the potential impact more. Although it carried more risk and had higher time and cost factors, but the innovation was on a different level. Image 3 – CEO’s feedback of the result as shown in the simulation. Source [1] In the Tucker Marion and Sebastian Fixson’s Model of Innovation in Organization, I would categorize my idea as a combination between “specialist” and “venture” as it utilities a new risky idea along with a differentiating factor of specialization. This can also be confirmed with CEO agreeing and saying that is what he had wanted. Although, there might have been a better idea in terms of cost to implement and time to implement, but I feel that drastic innovation was truly necessary and hence this idea might work better. Sources [1] https://forio.com/app/harvard/innovation/#/workspace/initiatives [2] https://utorontopress.com/us/the-innovation-navigator-2 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2upYwBVd5KI Q2 Consider the organizational chart of a hypothetical organization on the following page (Figure 1). Comment about its existing organizational structure. Offer your suggestions for transforming the current structure into a Holacracy structure consisting of appropriate Holacratic circles. Ans – The image given below is the existing structure of the hypothetical organization It can be seen that the existing organization has a “ladder” type structure with a typical hierarchy divided into different levels of authority that report directly to their bosses. Further, the model can be termed as “Functional” as each department has been categorized into their respective roles with no role being replicable between the departments (Eg Sales vs Engineering). The main disadvantage of Functional organization are as follows [1] 1. Job roles are not replicable across various departments. 2. Every department is in direct or indirect competition with each other for resources, objectives, internal requirements and needs. Thus, the overall objective of company is ignored or minimized. 3. It is difficult have any type of inter-departmental co-ordination as each department has their own way or functioning and this rarely matches between two departments. Although, this creates a faster intra-department co-ordination, but inter-departmental coordination gets affected significantly. 4. Creates information silos between departments and thus there is no timely exchange of information leading to information duplication or conflicting information. 5. Decision making process takes too much time as it needs to be reviewed at every level. Thus, we can see that the best option for them is to reduce the “ladder” structure into more “flat” structure with only reporting being the essential criteria of establishing hierarchy. Thus, we can think of Matrix Organization Structure. But, for Matrix organization to work we need to have greater focus on inter-departmental co-ordination, which is not immediately possible. Also, we cannot have total fluid organization due to reporting structure. Thus, the only immediate structure that this organization can transition is into Holacracy. Holacracy structure will be beneficial over functional structure in following ways [2] 1. Holacracy focuses more on roles instead of job titles. 2. Employees are able to freely decide their roles between themselves within the circle. 3. Ability to move between departments is more easier. 4. Decision making process takes less time. 5. Higher level of employee engagement. By looking at Holacracy Constitution written by Brian Robertson and Tom Thomison, we can identify the following steps for transitioning our hypothetical functional organization structure into holacractic organization STEP 1 – Define the “role” for each worker. Each role will have significant purpose and responsibilities as per their domain areas. STEP 2 – Establish corresponding authority for each role within the domain area. STEP 3 – Define “circles” and identify their corresponding circle members with policies within the circle that is suitable for that respective circle. STEP 4 – Find “circle lead link” which is defined as the role within the circle that acts as a link or communicator and has authority within the circle to carry out various functions and decisions. STEP 5 - Establish sub-circles and cross-circle roles for co-ordination and functioning. From the above steps, we can see that the Holacracy structure will be as follows There is a separate circle for Board of the organization. The MD of all departments would act as link between their respective department and board and hence is put outside of their department circle. We can see that there are 3 departments – Engineering, Operations and Marketing – each marked with different coloring for each department circle. Within these departments, we have marked the VP, AGM, Manager, Deputy Manager, Junior Manager and Head Supervisor as co-ordinators. The department then has 4 sub-circles with each circle having its own circle supervisor that supervises 8 workers. Thus, we are able to successfully change Functional structure to Holacracy structure of our hypothetical organization.
