Archives for the Month of October 2006 on Chris E. Carson's Blog
MGMT250 10/30 - Ethics
We had a class discussion today about ethics. This topic has only recently begun to play a part in management education after the emergence of large corporate scandals that have shaken the public's faith in big business. Prior to the 1990s, ethics were largely unspoken guidelines that were generally accepted across all industries. While violations of this code did happen, as they always will, they only reached a breaking point in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, causing the government to step in. Correspondingly, more pressure was placed on institutions of higher education such as business schools to make a better effort to instill ethics in their students. Thus, we are taught such things in management class.
The ethical question presented to the class that was of most interest to me was this: "Would you follow your boss to another company if you were asked?" To me, this does not seem like it violates any ethical principles. I think my answer would likely be different if the position I held were more important than an internship position. I can say from personal experience that interns are not valued much by many companies since their tenures within the company are very limited.
Most companies do not invest in their interns nor do they expect much from them. There are two primary purposes of an intern position within a company: one, to provide semiskilled labor at a very reduced cost, and two, to give back to the community by allowing students to gain practical experience. The second purpose of offering an internship can often lead to a direct hire once the intern has graduated college. While it is often desirable for a company to hire an intern because he or she is automatically much more knowledgeable about the company than an outsider would be, it is certainly not required or even expected of the intern in many cases. The first purpose alone, cheap labor, makes an internship program worthwhile to the company.
In a different situation, where the company has made a significant investment into an employee's training, the answer to this question would be different. The company invests in the improvement of your skills; in return, it expects you to provide it with value-adding work. Should you not return the favor, it would be considered unethical; not giving back to the company could even be considered the theft of knowledge.
MGMT250 10/27 - The burden of leadership
What is expected from a leader? This is a question that must be asked in any team setting, especially in the business world. In the immediate situation, our HR simulation group, it is a very relevant question that I ask myself every time we meet. Since I was chosen by "upper management" to be the official team leader, I have 'divine right' to lead. However, this mandate is ambiguous at best because of the lack of guidelines and a lack of real, concrete authority given to the team leader.
Our particular group is very a very collegiate, collaborative group with no real hierarchical structure. Because I have no concrete authority, I choose not to portray myself as the authority figure in most cases. Since I must rely upon other group members to do their part to complete the requirements demanded of us, I must allow a certain degree of flexiblity in the methods or data sets that they use to do their jobs. My tendency to micro-manage people's activities is apparent to me every meeting, and I do my best to repress it. The drawback is that I feel as if I am not in control of the team; but one finds it hard to question the structure of a team that consistently produces results in a timely manner.
MGMT 250 - Wage Incentives
In class on Wednesday we broke up according to desired profession and discussed how incentives could benefit our individual desires. Many groups such as sales and marketing teams were able to suggest a commission program; however, other teams such as management and my own accounting group were left with more of a quandary. Our jobs are very qualitative and have no quantifiable output which can be measured. Therefore, no bonus based on output can be given. The solution to this question is a subjective bonus given out by the boss or a committee formed by the boss to the most productive employees of the year. The supervisor or the committee will determine by vote or subjective selection the employees to receive a bonus.
MGMT250 - First quarter decisions have been made.
Unfortunately, it appears that this entry never made it into the system, so I must write it again.
Our team met on Tuesday evening once again to discuss our strategy and decisions for the first quarter. The criteria to discuss largely entailed deciding which programs to enact and wage setting strategies.
We decided in the outset that promotions would be made whenever possible, and whenever an employee is promoted from levels 2 through 4, an employee from the lower level will be promoted to replace him or her. This results in greatly reduced cost, since hiring a new worker is much more expensive. We made zero hires at levels 2-5, and 63 hires at level 1.
We determined that our long-term strategy with respect to wages and fringe benefits would be a complex one with some amount of risk. Since fringe benefits only affect the HR department's budget during the first quarter of implementation, we decided that the most effective strategy for dealing with fringe benefits would be to raise them in one lump sum during the first quarter and hold them constant for the remainder of the year. Since fringe benefits are priced as a percentage of wages, we also concluded that it would be most cost-efficient to do this before raising wages at all. Therefore, we decided that in order to bring fringe benefits up to an acceptable level for the year we would incur a budget overrun of approximately $100,000, with no allocation to wage raises.
We are confident that our strategy will be a successful one and look forward to receiving the results of the first quarter.
MIDS301 - The SAP Project
Yesterday in class, we read a short play about the inner workings of a company written by our very own professor, Michel Avital. The play focused on the IT issues within a company that produced metallic alloys called "Metalica."
All departments of the company were using different proprietary legacy computer systems that did not communicate cross-department. In its current state, the sales department could not access current inventory numbers stored in the manufacturing department's computers or vice-versa. This was viewed by upper management as a target area where efficiency could be improved greatly; in fact, the head of systems development claimed that this shortcoming would be detrimental to the company's performance and possibly cause it to become uncompetitive in the long run.
The company decided to implement a system called SAP in order to standardize computer systems. Over the next months, the IT department moved quickly to install the new systems in the test department, a serivce center located in Hopewell, VA.
The results of the implementation after more than a year had passed were less than exciting. In fact, the general manager at the service center called it a "meltdown" and spoke with the head of systems development in a curt and accusatory manner. The director explained that only 16% of IT projects are executed without problems, while two thirds are abandoned eventually. While they did not want to be part of the failures, bumps in the road are expected and will be worked out as soon as they are recognized.
This is as far as we have reached in class discussion. Further reading has revealed that Metalica does take efforts to resolve the issues with the installation of the system, but the company will continue to wrestle with IT problems for some time to come.
The Standish Group statistic about IT project failures is one part of this writing that should be highlighted. On the surface, it is positively astonishing that only one-third of IT projects should ever succeed at all, let alone only a measly 16% be executed without long-term issues. Then again, when one thinks in the context of this paper - the growing, infantile IT market of the mid-1990s - most companies had legacy systems dating back to the 1980s and even the 1970s when computers were exclusively purpose-built and custom-installed as needed. This is exactly what happened in this company - funds were allocated to computerize certain databases when the need was recognized and it became cost-efficient to do so. This resulted in a patchwork of non-compatible systems that were never linked to each other nor did they have the built-in capability to do so. The architects of each individual system did not recognize the need for these networks to communicate with each other; perhaps most of the networks did not even exist when these systems were installed, in some cases. The task left before the IT department to standardize was for certain a daunting one.
MGMT250 - The HR Simulation saga continues...
On Wednesday, our team convened once again to determine company actions for the first quarter. It has now become clear to me that the lack of thorough introduction to this project is deliberate -- it is up to our team to determine how we complete this project. What seemed before to be a simple case of negligence seems to be a wise move when one views this project in the big picture. While our team still becomes frustrated at certain junctures, it seems that the more we work on the project, the more quickly we understand the tasks at hand and the strategy to take. The professor responds to emails in a very timely fashion; without this resource, we would surely be in a much more precarious situation.