Administrative Principles

The structure of the organization at the SunGard location in Toronto is depicted in the organization chart on the last page. This organization chart will be used in this essay as the main focus point and will be described and evaluated as such.

To understand why SunGard Toronto operates the way it does we should look at the overall strategy imperatives which are:

• Become a leader in property & casualty software and services worldwide

• Be a “Product-Lead” services company

• Build customer loyalty and be perceived as a trusted advisor

• Deliver quality customer implementations

• Renowned for operational excellence

• Create an empowered and motivated organization

Looking at these strategy imperatives the customer is a central and returning point of focus and therefore very important for SunGard. This is depicted in the way they operate.

Looking at the departmentalization of the SunGard organization there are two distinctive ways the company is organized: functional and customer departmentalization.

The units ‘Professional Development’, ‘Technology’ and ‘Product Management’ are focused on the software product FrontTier and are separated based on their area of expertise (functional departmentalization). These functional units are delivering their product and service to SunGard and can therefore be categorized as staff functions within the organization.

For the implementation branch in the organization chart the units are focused on the customer and are therefore called ‘Client Services’ (customer departmentalization).

Before becoming a customer focused organization, where work and workers were organized into separate units responsible for particular customers, the organization was using a matrix departmentalization where product and customers were used together. A developer or business analyst had virtually two or more bosses: the project manager(s) of the project(s) they were working on and the development or business analyst manager who they were reporting to. This did not work out so well because there were often conflicting goals between project managers and resource managers. Also, to have a business unit ‘Client Services’ which is servicing one particular customer creates a closer bond between all workers within the unit and the product and services delivered to the customer become more of a team effort.

The chain of command within SunGard is pretty straight forward with all developers and business analysts report to their respective managers. The resource managers and project managers report to a director or VP and the overall authority lies with the SVP operations. VP’s and directors report directly to SVP Operations. All these people have line authority. The decision making within the organization is mainly decentralized since it has a high degree of delegation at all levels, which is needed, in the fast paced environment SunGard operates, so faster decision-making takes place which keeps the customer satisfied. There are also some people with staff authority. These are the implementation architects and business solution architects. When the ‘Client Services’ unit expands the developers and business analysts are grouped together under a technical lead or BA lead and the authority is delegated down to the leads. This helps in getting the span of control of the resource managers within reasonable numbers.

The jobs at SunGard can be divided into three basic categories: management, software development, and business analysis. The way it is setup in the current organization is that there are two types of professionals within a unit: developers and business analysts. This structure is used in all basic software development units like ‘Client Services’, ‘Customer Support’, and ‘Technology’ as depicted in the following diagram.

It is common for the business analysts to deal with the business users at the customer side on