Companies which are successful always have strong managers as well as leaders who encourage, support, also develop employee longevity within the organization. There is a substantial disparity between management and leadership although the two skills are both important to achieve a profitable company and the skills have to be used collectively. Leadership is an idea of communicating the vision of an organization, while management mostly involves the implementation of the vision of an organization. The manager normally performs the responsibilities that the organization has written. Also, managers have a good team below them to meet the goals as well as carry out the duties. Several organizations have a mission statement which supports and reflects the vision of the company. A company that has an elaborate mission statement tends to have a good business operation that makes the business achieve its goals. Business has many challenges it faces; the management and leadership of an organization should be flexible so that they can satisfy the needs of their customers which is dynamic and changes each time. This paper will analyze the business of John L. Smith, the challenges he is now facing due to the expansion of business and provide the solution to each challenge.
Business Profile of the company to be analyzed.
| Name (owner) | John L.Smith |
| Business type(product) | Technology Service |
| No. of employees | A hundred (full time) |
| Other | Thirty main long-term contracts, a twenty thousand square foot data center, over four hundred servers, hosts fifty main business applications, two minor contracts with customers from Europe customers. |
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Organization structure
Majority of the employees are operations and technical support (database, operating systems, applications, server, network).
John handles the entire sales and marketing.
Also, there is one project manager, five helpdesks, one contract together with five administrative support staffs.
Analysis of the business:
Product:
- The product that the company of Smith offers is the technology service for the customers that help in hosting the business application of the clients.
Process:
- With the help of an installed telecommunications circuit to the Internet, and network and computer equipment, a whole day operational support staff is guaranteed.
- Once in a while increase the connectivity as well as the bandwidth to the Internet then also hire several technical support staff and administrative staff ( Han, Gopalakrishnan & Lee, 2015) .
Glitches:
Costs
Communication
Service degradation
response time
Quality
Conclusion: the business of John is growing fast, and he is unable to manage the speed. Given that the company is service based, enhancements basing on the feedback is extremely significant to sustain it.
Improvements:
Prepare:
- Changing management training and roll out to the company.
- Creating key performance indicators and measures of success.
- Set the guiding principles for the management.
- Organize the team.
John ought to design new training approaches for new employees, prepare his management team and set the goals to attain.
A current process as it is:
- Review wholly the present procedures performed in the company.
- Every preceding performance data ought to be evaluated.
- Pinpoint the potential clients within the place, then research on their demands and requirements.
The future process to be:
- All the activities that are waste to be identified.
- Do not randomly expand the business.
- Set the goals for the future, vision, and scope.
Technical change:
- Employees are required to be trained to handle the new system.
- Every design to be implemented ought to be tested
- The entire improvements in the database, network server, internet bandwidth and computer systems should be done to make the systems effective.
Human change:
- Eliminate the poor performing staffs and organize the departments
- Employ an expert who will handle complex systems.
- Evaluate the employees’ working capacity, then rate them according to their performances
Implement:
- Keep track of the events, moreover, assess the outcomes owing to the vicissitudes.
- Rollout the new strategies to enhance performance
- Assessment of the process, system as well as people
- Risk/issues resolutions ( Nolan & O’Malley, 2015) .
Review:
- Continue review of deviations from goals and training process.
- Responses from the consumers offer the most vital enhancements decisions.
Review of Johns present challenges:
• Response times: When they offer changes as well as updates, the more the time being spent by the support staff to contrivance the changes ( Han, Gopalakrishnan & Lee, 2015) .
The support employees are unable to process the request of the client because they are inexperienced and lack of training needed to dispense quality work. The employees of Smiths company should be trained properly so that they can implement the changes that the company is going through quickly. The communication channel between staffs and the to be improved ( Han, Gopalakrishnan & Lee, 2015) .
• Service degradation: The convenience of the hardware platforms of Smith's company is decreasing gradually. Whereby the platforms were accessible full-time, the customers are now suffering from some long and recurrent outage periods ( Nolan & O’Malley, 2015) .
John is not in a position to manage the requirement of hardware since has a lot of tasks to accomplish. Therefore, he is not able to offer his entire concentration and focus in this area. Another team of technical employees should be hired by the company to handle the maintenance of hardware and minimize the outrage period that the clients are complaining about. When a separate team handles this section, the company would be able to serve its customers to their satisfaction, and they would be loyal to the company.
• Quality: When changes together with updates are executed, most of the time they always have to be reinstalled since they are not installed correctly.
The problem of the system not performing well is because the support is inexperienced to utilize the system to it potential to deliver quality work. The inexperience causes this problem in managing the system that is as a result of insufficient training. To increase the quality of the system, the company should hire a team of technology staffs to maintain the software. If the quality of the services is maintained then the company would be able to hold off competition from other rivals and attract new clients whereas retaining the old client ( Bridgeford et al. 2016) .
• Communication: Whether vicissitudes to the coordinating outages or the platforms, the support crew does not inform the clients, and the problems are starting to affect their revenue stream ( Nolan & O’Malley, 2015) .
Communication is very important for each company. Smith should have a department that deals with exclusively offering services to the customers ( Ren et al. 2016) . Since the business of Smith is increasing every day, more supporting staffs should be hired to aid with communication with the clients. Good communication with the client is important since it eradicates uncertainty since any issue that affects the clients would be addressed instantly. As a result, many customers would prefer Smiths’ business because they can get an instant reply to their queries.
• Costs: In the past, when additional equipment was required, John purchased, installed it, and billed it back to the customer each month. Also, over the past few years, the cost of support has been gradually rising ( Nolan & O’Malley, 2015) .
Because of mismanagement, the excess costs continue to increase. Break-even analysis should be performed, and revenues department should be developed that will take care of the sources of expenditures as well as incomes. Break-even analysis will help Smith determine if it is necessary to buy new equipment to aid service delivery. This procedure is important since it improves the quality of service being offered by the client. Consequently, the existing client base will be maintained, and new clients would be attracted ( Han, Gopalakrishnan & Lee, 2015) .
John ought to outsource or even offshore a number of the services along with functions he is offering to a company that focusses more in a certain field. For example, a company in India which may be able to run his service center help desk. The cost will be cheaper than what he can offer to his consumers.
References
Bridgeford, T., Kitalong, K. S., & Williamson, B. (2016). The Challenges of Offering a Technical Writing Program in a 2-Year College. In Sharing Our Intellectual Traces (pp. 113-124). Routledge.
Han, B., Gopalakrishnan, V., Ji, L., & Lee, S. (2015). Network function virtualization: Challenges and opportunities for innovations. IEEE Communications Magazine , 53 (2), 90-97.
Nolan, S., & O’Malley, M. (2015). Challenges and barriers to demand response deployment and evaluation. Applied Energy , 152 , 1-10.
Ren, J., Zhang, Y., Zhang, K., & Shen, X. (2015). Exploiting mobile crowdsourcing for pervasive cloud services: challenges and solutions. IEEE Communications Magazine , 53 (3), 98-105.
