Managing A Global Team At Sun Microsytems: Greg James Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

_{Managing A Global Team At Sun Microsytems: Greg James Case Solution}

Case Overview

Sun Microsystems Inc. has been a provider of complete Information Technology (IT) solutions to the various companies which include the software, hardware, services and storage. The company had made the technologies open sources. The philosophy of the company has been to bring in innovation. This attribute in turn helped Sun to expand itself and develop a large customer base. (NEELEY, JULY 15, 2020)

The major issue identified in the case “Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Micro-systems, Inc. (A)” is the fact that Greg James, the global manager at Sun Micro-systems Inc. has called a meeting with his 43 member team which is based in four different locations India, France, United States and the UAE. The major purpose of the four offices is to resolve the customer system outage as per the agreement with the client.

The issue identified in the case is the fact that James finds himself in a situation where he actually finds himself in a situation where he has to face the global collaboration, management issues, conflicts and the distributed work which is actually hampering the team performance.

James Team Management

Greg James has actually been unable to manage the team in efficient and effective manner. The reason is simple, since he has been a part of four different teams who have been operating from diverse cultures, work ethics and environment, therefore, managing such a team is a difficult task. Along with this, he has been unable to satisfy the needs of all the four offices. All the offices have been facing different issues, which James has been unable to overcome until now.

The Indian office which was a part of James team was not being handled in an effective manner. The issues as stated in the case were that the time difference for the meetings was quite difficult for the Indian office to manage, and they had to wait for long hours and come early to attend the meeting and prepare for it.(Mehek, July 2020)

Along with this, the Indian office felt as the second class citizens, as James always made them given suggestions and feedback at the last. The Indian office was not asked to perform innovative jobs and this was a major flaw in James coordination with the office.

The issues which were not handled properly by James were the fact that Dubai office felt they were not whole connected with the overall process and business of Sun. Along with this, the employees felt incomplete because they were not provided with complete information by the management. They were missing deadlines due to cultural reasons and James was unable to overcome the issue.

The France office was concerned that they were paid 30% lesser stairs than the United States office. Although this was a fact, however, James did not actually overcome this issue at any point in time. James did not discuss the issue with them and in fact he asked the France office employees to work for 50 hours a week with unpredictable schedule.

The issue at United States office was that they got less leaves than the French office. Along with this, the maximum work load divided amongst the four office was given to the United States employees. The major issue was that James was unable to manage the work load distribution.

The dispersion of James and his lack of communication and coordination with the four offices was the major reason and cause of the issue. Instead of being at one office for most of the time, if James would have been an active decision maker in all the four offices, then the situation would have been dealt in a rather swift and easy manner. At the moment, since it was an Open Work environment, therefore, no one was available to respond to the query. Hence, it was the responsibility of James to structure the team in such a manner where things would have been managed smoothly and efficiently.

HS Holdings Crisis

The major responsibility of the issue lies with the Indian and the United States office. The reason for this conclusion is based upon the conversation amongst the two offices. If a voice mail was received by the United States office then should respond immediately.

On the other hand, if the United States office was not replying to the pages, the Indian office should have directly called the concerned individual or the engineering department to overcome the issue at hand. In fact, none of the two parties were interested in resolving the issue, as both of them were actually trying to blame one another. (MindTools, 2016)

Basically, HS Holdings Crises occurred when the server went down on Sunday at 23:30 PST, and then the Technology Integration Company basically called upon for help. The issue was a major one because the entire system got crashed for at least two hours. This was a major setback for the banking business. The contract it had with the bank was of $300L service which failed to perform as per commitment. (Gomes, 2004)

The blame game started to flow during the current critical situation, the Indian office paged the United States office three times and even left a lot of voice mails. The Indian office was with the view that they were assisted by the united office. Indians were of the thought that the US office should be on call 24/7.

The response by the United States office was that they said the complaint by the Indian office was logged in the wrong queue for the resolution. They said that they did not get any pages because of the query being in the wrong queue. In fact, United States office asked the United Arab Emirates office and Indian office for such blunder.

The Indian office then communicated internally where Ashok asked Praveen that no page has been received by the United States office or the support team. He was actually looking to find the reason of this failure. In the end, the HS holdings wanted the company to return the contract amount and also pay back the losses that occurred at the bank where the system crashed for a couple of hours.....................

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