Case: Hector Gaming Company

Kim L Chau

California Southern University

MGT 86529

Dr. Flores

September 28, 2015

Case: Hector Gaming Company

Introduction:

        Under the leadership of their founder, Sally Peters, the Hector Gaming Company (HGC) has generated phenomenal growth in the educational gaming space focusing on young children as its target market. Over the past fours years of operation, the company has generated 25% on capital investment returns with zero debt, has grown to 56 employees and has established a growth rate of 80% each year in the last two years.  With these results, Peters is considered by the media as a young entrepreneur to watch. Peters, now president of HGC, has created a top-notch culture of commitment to innovation, continuous improvement and organizational learning and wants to unite the company to execute on the strategic plan in moving forward. The executives have agreed on the firm’s direction for the intermediate and long-term future, but they need help on how to implement their strategy. Hence, Peters hired McKinley Consulting to assist in the development and the implementation of the strategic plan with the management team for the coming year. (Larson & Gray, 2011, p. 55) McKinley Consulting is tasked to identify current issues and to make recommendation to resolve these challenges.

Analysis:

The company has experienced tremendous growth and is expected to continue that growth trajectory. The leadership team has come to consensus on the next year’s strategic plans; however, the leadership team is missing a plan of action to outline HGC’s goals and objectives to link to the company’s overall strategies. While external market growth conditions soared, the internal projects were created randomly and were misaligned with target segmentation. In addition, there were rampant project resource allocation conflicts, projects were increasingly missing deadlines and were going over budget. These projects related issues highlighted a deficit in HGC’s project organization structure and prioritization approach. Projects implemented without a strong prioritization system and without linkage to the strategy will result in a lack of team consensus, organizational politics and resource conflicts (Larson & Gray, 2011, p. 32-35).  Already, project managers are fighting over resources and each thinks his/her project is more important. Furthermore, with new employees coming on board, HGC’s leadership team seems to be missing internal policies on culture, roles and responsibilities of team members, and teamwork training to ensure effective collaboration for all employees. According to Seth Godin’s article in Fast Company, successful businesses hate change, but they have to learn how to evolve to continue to thrive in current competitive environment (Godin, 2011). HGC has an opportunity to evolve and to make changes now to avoid further conflicts and to realign the company under one direction while they are in a market leadership position.

Solution:

With the rapid external market success, the analysis suggests HGC is facing organizational challenges that are associated with the growth. Hence, stronger leadership direction and communication is needed to control and to manage the company’s internal development to operate as one again.  Areas of focus are: 1) Peters should focus on defining the company culture and on developing a SMART (Specific, Measureable, Assignable, Realistic, Time related) organizational plan with clear mission and vision statements, goals and objectives for the company. Also, she should define roles and responsibilities for each function. 2) In addition, Peters should implement a project portfolio management system. This approach will align projects with strategic goals and prioritize them accordingly. Moreover, Peters should use decision criteria matrix in project screening to facilitate selection and ranking to determine the importance of each project to the business, which will greatly contribute to reducing the resource conflicts and to also limit the office politics. And finally, 3) Peters should conduct value-based teamwork exercises to help team members to better understand and to relate to one another, which would result in more cohesive team interactions. For example, SolutionsIQ offers a great approach on improving teamwork: Sharing Values, an Agile Team Building Exercise (Panchal, 2011). Peters should explore these types of options to conduct across all teams.

Justification:

By focusing on the internal organizational challenges, Peters has the opportunity to apply SMART principles in defining the goals and objectives for HGC.  The fundamental benefit of SMART objectives is that they are easier to comprehend, to recognize, and to act upon when they are completed (Wikipedia, 2015). Clear directions and communication on the company strategy and goals will help to focus team members on collaboration and on working in unison and not against each other. Furthermore, by implementing the project portfolio management system, HGC benefits by instilling a disciplined process for project prioritization/selection and implementing a scalable technique to balance risks across all projects for the long-term. Equally important, the teamwork exercise will enable the team members to better understand each other in order to resolve communication and potential personal conflicts. Moreover, the employees will feel valued because Peters is investing in their professional development, which is a win-win situation.  Meaning, Peters is able to evolve the company to the next growth stage internally and externally.