THE MESSY SITUATION AND ILL-STRUCTURED PROBLEM

The Messy Situation and Ill-Structured Problem

The Messy Situation and Ill-Structured Problem

Section A

The Problem

As city budgets tighten across Dallas county, local service providers and advocates say steep cuts may cost the County far more in the long term than the price of maintaining certain departments. They worry recent progress made in certain departments could quickly regress if funding for other services is further slashed.

The Dallas County Sheriff Department has yet to put forward its proposed budget for the next fiscal year, as it waits to see what County commissioners funding may come down to. However, in the past two years, cuts have been made in our Patrol Department, killing a handful of patrol programs, reducing man power in the unincorporated areas in the county and cutting patrolmen activities down to nothing unless called for services.

Sheriff Lupe' feel these cuts can make a dramatic difference for some county residence, and can mean the difference between success and failure of any and all patrol departments. Without patrolmen it means less visibility, it means more people committing more crimes; it means more wasted resources because it makes it hard to intervene early. This could be a tragedy for county residents, who get tired and may just do things that they might regret later.

Section B

Analysis of the Problem

As the situation stands, the Dallas County officials have yet to present the budget for the current fiscal year. Another concern to the authorities is that they are claiming an unprecedented cut in fiscal budget for Dallas County.

The U.S. organizational boundaries have also shifted, albeit in different ways (Perrewé, 2007). The most radical changes highlight at the U.S. patrol department, which had under-gone an extensive strategy of divestment and outsourcing. This included budget cuts and outsourcing anything not regarded as core to automotive assembly. Both contributed to downsizing. The employees in U.S. have also outsourced and/or divested to third party manufacturers.

A more mixed pattern of downsizing is likely to prevail in the Dallas County. The petrol department is going towards a major downsizing. Dallas County's workforce has fallen from 155,000 to 85,000 employees, with plans to drop to 65,000. This may be a consequence of budget cuts, divestments, volume reduction, and delayering.

U.S. downsizing methods have varied, but the organizations have used compulsory redundancies, sometimes in a brutal fashion. Dallas Petrol Department, which formally had an implicit lifetime employment guarantee for managers, is likely to introduce a ranking system for their managers, with the lowest 10% made redundant in a so-called “rank-and-yank” scheme.

Managerial job security, or the lack of it, has also become a prominent issue in the United States. At the Petrol Department in Dallas, for example, the “internal labor market—career progression—secure jobs” managerial model has been eroded over a period of time. Pressure to meet project deadlines, interact with difficult coworkers, and manage home and work responsibilities are common stressors for many employees (Karasek, 2008).

As a result, most employees are familiar with the physiological ...