Maria Chen’s Performance Evaluation
Maria Chen is both qualified and competent to work for Deloitte & Touché Consulting as a consultant. Her competence was well manifested in her work at SKS. However, her professional competence was not well matched with actual practical experience in a scenario such as SKS presented hence her dismal performance. For a start, she believed she knew all there is to know about companies like SKS. Her knowledge was based on her studies as a consultant and also the paperwork that had been presented to Deloitte as part of the assignment. It is based on this that Chen prepared the complex spreadsheet model that would work as a one-stop solution for all production problems at SKS. Consequently, much of her time in the first 6 weeks of the assignment was wasted working on a solution that would never fit SKS as a company.
The second mistake by Chen was basing her assessment of the company on the wrong information. Every clue at the SKS plant pointed to David Fletcher as the point-person on the ground. Chen subsequently spent a lot of time with Fletcher and went to work based on the information she got from him. The greatest advantage that Fletcher presented was convenience and based on the case study, Chen liked working at her convenience. Instead of evaluating the SKS factory, she relied on Fletcher for information. Unfortunately, the person who really runs the plant was Stan Janovich. The job title for Janovich said “first shift supervisor” but as she was to learn later, he was the de facto operations head at the factory and the only person who knew exactly what was going on. Had Chen listened to Janovich in week 1, she would never have been behind schedule.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Finally, Chen overcompensated and was overeager which not only affected her judgment but also took up a lot of her time. As reflected in the case study, the moment Chen realized that Janovich was the actual head of the factory, she began spending too much time with him and discussing personal issues with him. Getting personal with Janovich would likely make Chen give what Janovich more weight due to the manifestation of bias. Further, Janovich represented the manual approach that was supposed to be defunct, spending too much time with him created the impression that the computer team was at risk of termination. By seeming one-sided , Chen lost her objectivity, at least in the eyes of the rest of the SKS group.
What the Other Team Members Would Have Done Differently
David Hendry, the partner was the most qualified person in the team, both from the perspective of the automotive industry and from working with organizations like SKS. His supervision, training, and coaching would have averted a crisis in the consultancy. Hendry would have advised the team not to rely on paperwork but instead directly evaluate the situation for themselves. Annette Wattley-Davis, the senior manager is the one who advised Chen to stop working on theoretical scenarios without taking time to investigate the situation on the ground. This was sound advice but it came in very late. Further, she gave an instruction instead of acting as a coach to Chen. Annette’s failure led to a lot of wastage of time. Rohan and Patel faced the same crisis as Chen as they had academic experience but lacked the kind of hands-on experience that Hendry and Annette had. Just like Chen, they should have taken the time to learn first, as SKS was a very unique organization.
Steering Committee Recommendations
The plan by Chen to either produce and present a presentation plan or create a noticeable change in inventory within the short hours before the steering committee meeting are both wrong. Deloitte must admit that the change process has failed and negotiate the commencement of a more compressive overhaul process.
The Rationale for the Recommendation.
Deloitte had taken up an impossible assignment and offered to carry it out within an impossible duration of time. The team then went about the consultancy work through the worst possible approach as outlined above . Any attempt to sanitize the crisis that both SKS and the consultancy project team are in at the moment will only make it worse. For the sake of Deloitte’s reputation, the steering committee should spend time explaining to the SKS management why it is impossible to improve operations at the factory or within its supply chain system. Deloitte should focus on the fact that the information that SKS provided did not match with the situation on the ground hence the project was a non-starter. A new consultancy agreement based on a substantive overhaul of the entire production process should be agreed upon. If, however, SKS is not agreeable to a full overhaul, Deloitte should find a way to wriggle out of the constancy as the reputation of the company is at stake. The current change process is untenable, the crisis at SKS will inevitably bring the company down and unless a new approach is adopted, Deloitte’s reputation will also be compromised.
Lesson’s Deloitte Should Draw from the Experience
Deloitte was hired to resolve a crisis at SKS and has now ended up with a crisis of its own. The oncoming steering committee is bound to be acrimonious and may even lead to a legal tussle between Deloitte and SKS unless the latter accepts its mistakes and agrees to a new contract. Either way, it looks bad for Deloitte as they are the experts and should have known better. The first lesson is that due diligence should be undertaken before accepting any assignment as there are some processes that can never be improved upon. They have to be broken down and built from scratch. Secondly, academic competence and functional competence are entirely different concepts. Chen’s academic competence which included a post-graduate degree from Harvard were a liability not an asset at SKS. Competence must always be matched with compatibility.
