Dmps Case
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What is your assessment of Elizabeth Winters as a manager of DMPS?
Relationship building
Ms. Winters’ predecessors had learned the hard way the importance of an integrated peer network. When Maddox reorganised the divisions in 1999 in order to encourage collaboration and enhance the combination of expertise across units, he unintentionally separated the marketing and product development teams. Similarly, as some DMPS employees had noted, CW tended to isolate their new ventures “while they were вЂ?incubating’ ” — possibly stemming from the existing culture that valued individual contributions over combined efforts — and that there was indeed a need to have a more integrated network of groups.
An important first step that Ms. Winters took was the way that she moved rapidly to take advantage of top level management support given to her by Nick Kennedy and Anita Fields to meet with mid level management. This helped to achieve two objectives. Firstly she managed to spread the news of her arrival and of the new direction and plans for DMPS thus building momentum. Secondly she was able to quickly introduce herself and network among multiple players in the company — a method that proves invaluable in determining allies and gaining support by personally bringing a top level initiative to the mid level at a time when many felt that they were facing a crisis. Involving managers both internal and external to the project would have helped with the reorganisation of DMPS.
Organisation
The existing individualistic culture was one that had developed around a product development need. Whilst smaller “silos” were indeed conducive to supporting the flexibility and innovation inherent in this culture, and suitable for the creation of a wider array of product designs within the existing firm, they proved to foster a degree of duplication of efforts as well as the limiting knowledge sharing throughout the organisation. New ventures require the support of the parent company and its resources and this needed to be changed for the success of DMPS.
With this in mind, Winters’ efforts to change the structure of DMPS was, in my view, a necessary one. The creation of a system whereby individuals reported to multiple managers accomplished several goals. Firstly, it facilitated a wider awareness of ongoing activities across the organisation. Secondly, it allowed for more solid strategy formation by having advice and guidance come from multiple inputs with a wider range of experience. Lastly, this structure paralleled that of the parent company, allowing for easier understanding of what these activities represented.
Furthermore, it accomplished Winter’s goal of creating better customer intimacy for a service by bringing the service development process closer to the customer as through dedicated account managers and specialised service line managers.
This process also enabled Winters to overcome an issue faced by her predecessors. Previously the company’s direction had changed back and forth from a more focused strategy with simpler product offerings, to a differentiated strategy trying to do everything simultaneously. With the new system individual units and line managers could focus on their offerings whilst allowing the overall system to diversify in to related offerings, achieving a greater feeling of direction and smaller degrees of ambiguity for the employees to deal with. There is no mention of it in the case, but Winters ought to keep working on ways to integrate people across the company, possibly through informal functions or sporting activities.
Resources
The CW approach to resources was unfortunately not best suited for DMPS. Whilst there are indeed elements of the culture that would have been beneficial to a new venture — namely the expectations of and support given to innovation — the way in which it was fostered had limiting constraints. Promotion from within, whilst it may have had beneficial shorter term motivational effects, ultimately led to the “CW Mindset”. This mindset was born and bred to be one that supports the innovation and development of new products which is measured by established metrics. This, slightly more limited view, is highly symptomatic of “Groupthink”, a condition that can restrict the introduction of new ideas and concepts and thus proved to be unsuitable for the introduction of a business line as different as DMPS. In short, there was a need for new blood.
Ensuring that all positions within DMPS were open to all allowed Winters to inject fresh blood in to the company. Microtech employees and other external candidates bring with them a variety of benefits. Firstly, they can bring experience that is more pertinent to the service environment than the existing product specialised staff. Secondly, it allows for the introduction of new values in to the company, namely flexibility, adaptability, willingness to experiment and learn, as well as valuable startup experience. Thirdly it enables the company to break free of the CW mindset.
Winters appears to have been skilled in analysing areas of weakness and finding talented resources to fill these gaps. An example of this is her introduction of the “complex business development” team composed of a variety of external staff. This team’s “ability to deal with unfamiliar environment, assess the situation and design solutions” gave DMPS the expertise and flexibility they needed to bring them closer to the customers.
Furthermore, the company’s previous incentive system rewarded managers based on the headcount under them and the revenues under management. This emphasis on size incentivised managers to grow as quickly as possible, and was therefore not suited to the launch of an entrepreneurial venture such as DMPS. Changing incentives to ones based around milestone completion was certainly a move in the right direction.
Previous Incentive system increases compensation with greater headcount or revenues under management. This might cause individuals to overfund — BAD MONEY
What is your assessment