Straight Forward, Familiar, and Easily DefinedEssay Preview: Straight Forward, Familiar, and Easily DefinedReport this essayFirst, according to (Robbins & Coulter, 2009) structured decisions are those defined as “straight forward, familiar, and easily defined”. Unstructured decisions are defined as (Robbins & Coulter, 2009) “problems that are new or unusual and for which information is ambiguous or incomplete”.
In this scenario, the designing industry had no past procedure established for consideration of value on design changes. Since Chuck took it upon himself to create this process by establishing focus groups to review changes as well as other marketing considerations, this would be best considered an unstructured problem that Chuck turned into an industry standard. Now lets look at question number two.
Q: – Describe and evaluate the process chuck went through to change the way design decisions were made. Describe and evaluate the companys new design process.
Chuck Jones set out to change the design process that Whirlpool was using from a return on investment approach to an approach backed by data. When the resource allocation team asked Chuck to provide proof that his new design ideas would pay off for Whirlpool he was unable to give the team solid financial data. The first step in changing the process that Chuck took was to survey other companies that he viewed to be in similar situations. Chuck found out that very few companies had a process for determining future results with something other than past performance. Chuck would need to come up with a plan to measure how customers would react to future design changes. Positive reactions would then equate to the financial return on investment that the resource team wanted. Whirlpools new design process would focus on the customer.
In 2007, the resources team was looking to find a partner to help them market what they created. Chuck set up an open contract that required a team of four people to work from 9:30 am until 3:15 am each day. In addition to being able to do an overnight turnaround on the contract, the five people in the company were able to make it to work any time they wanted. Each morning the company would make a list of results in their database and the team would pick them. Following work on what was best for the company was a series of meetings with managers, consultants, team leaders and product and product development leaders. An objective would be to create an idea out of those results in one meeting. At the beginning of each company’s second meeting, each of the four team members would report on a process in progress. From there, they would then be able to create plans that were specific enough to make final decisions.
In 2008, the resource management team began to consider what the best practices could and could not be developed into. When these first reports of success came in, it was clear that what was best for Whirlpool really couldn’t be the most cost effective ways to address the current problems the company faced and that they would have to change radically if they ever changed their approach to the resource management model to make sense of their current needs. In September 2009, a team member called Dr. David White had developed a plan to develop a business plan for customer service. This blueprint would involve a set of recommendations for the business, specific strategies on how to use the company’s resources, but the real challenge for Whirlpool’s new business plan was that it relied on what White calls “dramatic thinking and technical language.” According to White, “This is not a framework that you read about in some high school book. It’s a blueprint for how do we develop this kind of strategy that will go across business operations, to the point where we can get what we need within a certain timeframe. It is not a model built for how you can implement this kind of behavior in small-business processes. People should try different models just because they want to do it right.”
In September 2010, The R&D Program for Whirlpool began. White’s plan would be to build a system to automatically create all four of the necessary resources for the team to utilize. In addition to working with the business directly to develop the plan, the team also built out a “plan” for developing the second resource to work from a single work site or office. The primary goal of this plan was to build around a system by which multiple people working on a single project could share information and provide feedback of varying quality to be applied to the plan which were put forward to the company directly. “In reality, what I envisioned was a structure where one person can go and do all four of the resources in one location but at no cost to us in terms of development or value,” said White. “We could look at the team and say, ‘Okay, this person doesn’t have a project that needs that kind of feedback. ‘ We could build something that would fit seamlessly back into that, but at no cost to the team and we were then going to look back to that project and say we really could have done more.”
For months, White’s