MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

Management And Organizational Behavior

Management And Organizational Behavior

TASK 01: Opening Statement And The Description Of The Scenario

Changes are rapidly occurring in the economy. The modern economy is no longer based on mass production and consumption of goods and services. In this changing environment, producing more - however efficiently - is not necessarily better (Fornell et al., 2008). Hence, the current trend toward downsizing in UK firms may increase productivity in the short term, but the downsized firms' future financial performance will suffer if repeat business is dependent on labor-intensive customized service. In order to compete in this new economy companies must have:

quality beyond the competition;

technology before the competition; and

costs below the competition (Watson, 2005).

In other words, many companies must strive to be better, faster, and cheaper than their competitors. These are some of the characteristics of a “project” enterprise.

In view of several big scale bank wide system enhancement projects, management sees the need to set up a team dedicated for project handling. Thus this team was formed in 2009. Due to the nature of the projects, the team was chosen from the existing pool of agent with strong it background. This team is a combination of youth and enthusiasm, and maturity and professionalism. Prior to IVR Blueprint (project name), my involvement in project is strictly a User Acceptance Test (UAT) tester. I was pretty excited when I was given to the chance to be involved in the preparation of project documents. The Project leader Frank, head of Contact Centre, Assistant Project leader Peter who was hired by Frank as Operation Manager in Contact Centre. Both of them are close friend cum colleagues from previous workplace. Along with me and Nic, we form this 4 person project team.

In one of our initial meeting in Aug 09, the project leader delegated every one with specific tasks to be completed by the dateline in Oct 09. After that, he took a back seat and let Peter run the project.

In bi weekday meeting with our regional team, Peter would update to the regional team on the progress of our project. 2 weeks before the dateline, I completed my document, had it circulated to all the stakeholders for their signed off. During this time, Peter had to go for a 3 week Reservist and on subsequence regional meeting, we realized Peter have not started on his documents. When project leader came to know about this, he immediately tasked with both me and Nic with his documents and were constantly reminded of the dateline which is in 2 weeks time. We were shocked that nothing was done after 2 months. Despite many nights of overtime, we had to seek a 3 days extension to complete the documents.

I decided to give him the benefit of doubt as this is our first project. But same incident repeated with our second project name HSBC Advance. Despite knowing he will taking a 3 weeks leave halfway thru the project, he chose to attend regional meeting ...