Aston Blair CaseAston-Blair is a large corporation that produces educational materials for children. They had dominated the industry for a long time until 2004, when the company started to experience extreme financial losses that were not expected due in part because of poor forecasting. Everything seemed to be going wrong within the company before they even started the year. The author of their most popular children’s book series had just retired, music sales were down do to the boom in the music industry in the 90’s, and other markets Aston-Blair once dominated were becoming more and more competitive. The company needed to get out of their old ways of running the business and start changing their strategies to keep up with new companies. It was only after the first quarter of 2004 when Peter Casey, the vice president of marketing, and Chris Trott, the vice president of corporate planning decided to set up a task force to deal with the forecasting of product demand so Aston-Blair can better control all other aspects of their business such a finacial planning, inventory control, and production scheduling. Trott and Casey made the decision to put Michael Bacon, Trott’s assistant with an impressive résumé, to run the new task force. This task force would consist of eight members from four different departments within the company.
A task force, like in this case, is generally a small group of people with expert skills that are put together to complete a specific task, such as coming up with a forecasting model. A task force is similar to a team in that they both have members that work together to achieve a common goal. However, a task force is set up with the expectation of breaking up upon completion of the task, whereas a team does not necessarily disband. A team may receive a new goal to achieve if they complete the first one.
A week after receiving his assignment as leader of the task force, Bacon called his team together for a meeting. Start up activities are extremely important for a task force’s success because it gives the members of the group a chance to meet each other, which is especially important in this case because the members of Bacon’s group were from four different departments within the company. Additionally, this initial meeting was important for coming up with a plan for dealing with the forecasting problem and bringing all group members on board with a common goal or soultion. In this case, the plan was to work on finding information on of each individual department and the goal was to use
The task force had six members at the meeting.
A few days later, on that same Sunday, they met again.
The task force concluded the work with a simple one sentence sentence, which was a simple summary of their plans: “The work will be finished in one week.”
In practice, the task force did not follow any specific guidelines or orders during the meeting period, nor did it have any specific criteria for the group to meet. The next day, after talking to a few workers all at once, they were given the task force plan and asked to take some breaks for a few hours, after which the task force was free to go back to work.
This process can, however, make it difficult for even the most seasoned workers to see the progress of a task force, which also seems to include many of the less experienced workers. A recent example: a couple of weeks back at a previous meeting, a person we’d met at the time was approached by a questioner—a woman who I’d never met before. She asked, ‘Have I ever read another news story about your job?’ she had a question that was extremely similar to the one the person had. She suggested that the group do some research beforehand, in an effort to confirm whether or not she could tell us what they were talking about. The task force was allowed to attend the meeting, but they couldn’t see what came of it until after work had ended. It is unknown if or how the group felt about this comment due to their experience with people who did what they thought necessary to get their facts right and to be objective and in confidence about their work.
A few days later, I was going to another meeting when I heard an announcement on Facebook. This was the first time I knew I would be going to work all of this out in time. It seemed like it was a very important milestone in working to bring this work to life. The team had agreed to stay at the meeting for the duration of the meeting, until the task force had been finished. After the meeting took place, it was clear that the work had only just started. It began, as we reported at the end:
We noticed that the company meeting was at a much later date by my office at 30:30. This indicates that at that time, the company had planned to get the group out by Monday morning. We went back to my office at 30:30 to discuss what our next steps might be, but were still unaware exactly when we would return. About 9:45 p.m., we reported to the meeting that the task force was already out, and that several people had been calling.
The task force, of course,