Aston Blair Case Study Solution
What went wrong with the task force?
Aston Blair has been facing low sales and issues in tapping the market demand effectively. Previously, the company over-estimated the sales and revenues for the period that resulted in over stocking and inventory surplus.In such situation, Casey and Torn, the senior shareholders of the company made a special task force to resolve the internal company issues and to offer sound recommendations to resolve the issues.
The team developed has been divided into three groups to focus on the financial, marketing and sales aspect of the business.Since Casey and Torn appointed the team members separately, there is no formal introduction between the team members.Though the members had the basic introduction of whom they are working with, however, each group developed certain walls around them and worked within those walls.This gave rise to the three sub groups within the same groups which lead to misaligned goals and objectives and mis matched recommendations since no group shared their findings with the other.
In addition to this, since there had been no formal relationship and team synergy among the members, the team members developed certain grudges with each other, which lead to weak relationship between the team members, such can be seen from the Meir and Bacon relationship. Also, there has been clear non-alignment and non-communication platform between the product manager and the marketing manager and with the task team ultimately, which made them offensive towards the task team’s findings and recommendations in the meeting.This could have been resolved or not occurred if the management had aligned and developed a common communication platform between the task team and the marketing managers.
Moreover, since the task team has been formed, no informal communication took place between the three groups, these three groups worked on individualistic base which resulted in abrupt results and recommendations at the meetings. Lastly, there had been no team support or synergy among the team members.
Lastly, since there had been no integration among the three groups and findings, the recommendation presented at the meetings offered quite diverged set of recommendations which made Casey and Torn ponder over the recommendations specific to the business development. And failed to include the marketing managers in the discussion related to the manipulation of the forecasting data and sales data.This further agitated the situation.
What should have been done differently?
Since the major issue arose due to ineffective team structure and synergy, the team structure should have been made effectively, in doing so, after selecting the respective members for the special task team, a formal introduction should have been made by the upper management to introduce and to out line the roles of each other in the task.
Aston Blair Harvard Case Solution & Analysis
In addition to this, instead of dividing the task team into three groups, one group should have been formed to report for the three domains of the company business and would have empowered the team members to decide who may perform what role.This would have developed a certain sense of trust and responsibility among the team members and would have generated the team synergy in which sharing is easy. This formation would have resolved the group information silos and would have allowed the team members to develop more sound and authentic recommendation by combing the result of all the three domains. (Seppala, 2015)..................
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