Question

This assignment challenges students to formulate a professional response to in-depth issues contained in a real-life Video Business Case. Students will act as an independent professional business consultant reporting to senior managers of the company concerned. Students are expected to provide informed and robust advice to this business client.

The video below is provided by Ernst and Young company. It refers to the issues faced by an organisation in the Maritime Safety Industry. Ernst and Young is required to solve these issues. Now, we as students, will need to act as consultants of Ernst and Young, in order to provide in depth solutions to these problems.

Here is the transcript of the video that needs to be assessed:

ISSUE

The issue we had to resolve was for a private sector organization who operate in the maritime safety industry. They are a well-established private company and provide global services to a number of different organizations. The particular issue arose due to a point of inflection that they arrived at as an organization. So historically over the last 30 to 40 years they'd established a range of services which were well known and well trusted and well regarded by the organization's they interacted with as a company, they were very satisfied with their financial performance and they had a very strong reputation and brand in the market. What they had realized a number of years ago was that they couldn't remain static as a company and they needed to change the way they deliver that particular service to their clients. The rate of change outside of their industry and so with their competitors were accelerating far beyond their own internal rate of change. So at the risk of standing still they realized they had to transform their organization, so they began this transformation about three years prior to us getting involved. The issue arose that they had probably three different points of inflection where they effectively had to stop that transformation which was occurring and restarted and this was causing a number of concerns to the board and to the company itself. There was financial concerns, regulatory concerns, reputational risk at stake and also there was the sustainability of the services as it impacted Maritime Safety. So through this process they realized that the structure they had in place at that time was not going to allow them to successfully deliver this transformation so they engaged us at that point in time to do a health check and review of what had occurred today and give an independent perspective on whether that transformation was actually going to be successful and provide a set of recommendations around what changes they should make and what options they should consider regarding affecting or impacting that transformation within the organization

Issue Background

The company size was probably what we describe as a small to medium sized organization with maybe 40 to 50 employees strong. Their board was and is consisted of a number of large enterprise type organizations and the reason they engaged us as a firm was to come in and provide that intermediary layer between the organization itself who were delivering the transformation pretty much in-house and themselves as independent board members, to gave them a view of the likely success of that transformation occurring. So a bit more background and context around the transformation was it had a number of different elements to it, one was organizational, two was cultural and three was technical or technology-based. So the company itself was primarily in maritime safety but in essence they were also delivering a technology service to their clients.

Cause

The issue was primarily caused by the organization itself not having an independent perspective on the likely success to effect a transformation, it also had little independent oversight over how it could have actually transformed or changed that transformation through these various inflection points that it went through. There was also a degree of organizational capability which was missing and identified but hadn't been independently verified through the previous two to three-year pass, so the company itself continued to provide the services in parallel with changing and transform himself internally. One of the significant issues that we identified was that there was no burning platform or desire to change because it was operating quite successfully in his traditional way. The same people that were providing that traditional Swedish services were also trying to effect a transformation so there was no actual completion date or reason to ever successfully complete a transformation because the company was actually operating very successfully through delivering its ongoing suite of services to its client. Some of the other causes that we identified through that initial review we did of the company was that the approach to addressing the issues that encountered historically was to bring in in-house some additional capability in the same areas, so they continued to feel like exasperate some of the issues through bringing in similar capability and similar services without ever separating and bringing in a new perspective or new approach. So the issues if you like were continuous, they weren't evolving, they weren't being addressed or identified. So the board were quite concerned that he couldn't see the end to this transformation or project. They were continuing to be successful but they were recognizing that they were being outpaced potentially by some of their competitors and they also identified that there was a lack of innovation.The reputational risk and commercial risk was increasing on a monthly basis and hence they involved us as an organization to come in and do that independent review and then identify what some of those different options to proceed were for them moving forward you.

Answer 1

To bring the change within the organization, the following things are important:

1. Towards Employees

• To motivate the employees to adaptable to a change, you need to understand and identify their values, culture, interest and skills and change the climate of the organization by drawing emotional energy from it and attracting them towards new change initiative.
• Involve your employees in making policies and procedures for change, seek their reviews, put responsibility on their shoulders as engagement with full heart will result in smooth flow of change process.
• Easy flow of communications from top to bottom and bottom to top.

2. Towards advancement:

• Bring in new ideas, skills and experiance in the team by appointing some more people. This will create a sense of performance recognition and also bring new ways of working the same old traditional task.
• Bring Technological advancement in to the business which will increase not only the quality of output but also spare the employees from routine work and they can focus on intellectual activities more.
• Do market research properly so that the ever changing trends can help you to intruduce the required level of innovation to compete in the market.

Ways to achieve:

1. Reward employee
2. Bring some ESOP or Incentive schemes
3. Employ Good leaders
4. Group decisions and self managed team building
5. Lastly, Managerial wisdom

Thanks