Virtual Management At Accenture
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1. What are the advantages of working in a virtual environment like the one created by Accenture? What are the disadvantages?
The advantages of working in a virtual environment like the one created by Accenture are as follows:
Reach to Customer: Office work environment limits an employee to the office only. In today’s world there are lots of jobs specially consulting or outsourcing jobs requires deep understanding of customer processes, which one cannot get just by reading document or talking to delegated people. It is always better for a consultant to actually reach out and get to know actual situation, there won’t be a third opinion involved since any type of narration whether written oral has to subjective. Thus for those job this virtual environment model suits very well.
Family Time: A person can work through his home as well if he is not traveling. This offers altogether different lifestyle. There is no need to be have special time to be at home as the employee never leaves to office for work. This saves a lot of other activities which are to be performed when there is an “Office” at a particular time. A person can have a flexible routine for himself. Also he can dedicate extra time if required with no additional worries.
Relocation constraint: Many jobs are not reachable for a person because he is not willing to relocate. In this case a person may loose a better offer or a company looses a better employee. Thus virtual teams give provide win-win situation for both employers and employee. Thus for a company with virtual office , relocation won’t be a problem for attracting best talent and for employee also can go for job he want and without any geographic limitation.
Physical handicapped people: For physically handicapped people virtual team can be a best offering. They can work from home with all possible contribution. They don’t have to travel to office.
The disadvantages to virtual environment are as follows:
Travel Intensive Jobs: The idea of not having a virtual office also means that there can be lot of traveling involved in it. Many times an executive may have to travel across countries. This is very difficult, with different time zone and jet lag. Also due to this the benefit mentioned above with family time goes away.
Conflicts: Due to lack of face to face communication there are more chances of clashes between virtual environment team members. Those are very difficult to sort out easily with participants scattered across time zones, scheduling phone conferences can trigger conflicts over whose sleep will be interrupted. And some matters, especially sensitive personnel issues, require a personal visit — no matter the distance.
Lack of project visibility: This is one more disadvantage a virtual environment has where in team members may not get proper project visibility. For motivating members it is very difficult without a face to face meeting.
2. Would you like to work in a company like Accenture? Why or why not? Explain your answer.
Yes, I would definitely like to work in a company like Accenture. In today’s networked world the virtual environment is a requirement. This is very profitable to companies since it reduces cost of owning assets. What all a company needs a network as an infrastructural need.
Day by day roads are getting crowded, and there is no proportion between the time and distance to be traveled. Also the real estate price rising is very difficult to have residence in the city where the office is located. Virtual environment is best solution for that. Also the pollution factor gets automatically eliminated by this implementation.
The geographic barriers don’t matter as far as virtual environment is concern. This is a great advantage. People can work very comfortably across the countries. Thus there are no limitation on business and company to grow. This surely is advantageous thing for which any person will be willing to work under virtual environment.
3. What kinds of companies could benefit from being run virtually like Accenture? Could all companies be run virtually like Accenture?
There are some constraints for a company to go for a virtual environment.
The company who has multinational presence and the work is type of consulting, outsourcing; HR firms will get more benefit to be a virtual environment implementation. This will also take care of multiple time zones since there is no fixed time for office. The cost of asset creation for a physical office is more than that of traveling of executives. The company needs to attract people across the globe without asking them to relocate. Software companies also can go for a virtual management since the instruction can be given on network and written instructions are more effective, they are more favorable for virtual environment.
Not all companies go for running virtually, like manufacturing Companies which has location as important factor, like real estate firm work where team interaction is more important, since virtual teams are not effective in managing conflicts. The companies who already have a developed infrastructure are less prone to go for a virtual environment. A company with scope of a city or 2-3 cities won’t go for a virtual environment. Also business likes retail, travel agency, restaurants, advertising agencies where location and team dimension plays important role can’t run like Accenture.
4. Go to Accenture website. On the home page Accenture promises to help its client’s achieve “high performance.” According to Accenture, how does information technology help create high-performance organizations? Hint: Read article on linking IT with high performance business.
IT helps create high performance organizations by making information access and flow easy and cheap. Data can be stored, processed into useful information and made available easily through Data Warehouses. Also Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, etc make the problem of information asymmetry and availability quite manageable. Through the use of ERP, an organization can create an integrated information platform which is updated real time with every transaction, and the updated information being made available for all departments simultaneously. All this has made the operations, accounting and man-management issues a lot-less daunting task for