Sunday, May 31, 2015

SNA to change organization structure.


(Problem)To change organization structure into more efficient one by identifying what information flow looks like in this organization and what it should be.
(Situation)There was a problem I found out when I was doing an internship. The company was the Indian stone trading company in India with 40 employees. 15 of who were working at international department with 3 of Indian employees as a top, managers in the department and 8 of different nationalities as interns under managers. Each employee worked individually. Since we were dealing with seasonal products, we had to catch up with changing and trendy information of products or promotion of specific products. Although the information was not fully shared with each intern as well as each manager, some interns and employees shared information. Therefore, there was miscommunication between internal employees, and employees and their clients. Most of interns did not know who to ask for information. Managers did not know what information interns did not know.  
Therefore, I would like to use SNA to find out below.
Q1, who is the most connected person with managers and interns socially and professionally
Q2, what is in-degree and out-degree of employees to identify who comes to get information to who.
Q3, who is connector and coordinator  
the data that should be gathered for this survey will not be very difficult to answer for them but since there are many employees of more than 9 nationalities, it might be privacy issues. Questions are below.
1)   who do you talk to get information
2)    who is not connected socially or professionally
3)   Who comes talk to you
4)   How often do you talk to each employees
5)   Who keeps in touch with raw material provider company and follows political matters
After survey, I will recommend below.
1)    Set up the most connected person to be able to share information with responsibility to connect others horizontally and vertically.
2)   Use Google drive to share information, instead of saving information in each files that we used to do to save time of asking information
3)    Schedule meetings regularly (once a week or so) to decide what to do with a certain strategy, not ending up knowing no idea what other employees are working on. In addition,
4)    Create a chance of speaking to the top of department by organizing an event. Because none of interns are connected with him .
(Conclusion)I would like to change organization structure as in putting the most connected person being in charge of sharing information between managers and interns. This person was decided based on the numbers of connections. Therefore, the numbers of experience and skills are not considered as criteria. It might cause difficulty acquiring agreements among those with them.
This new position will have managers have little bit more time of talking to other interns and other managers leading more time of discussion and getting rid of miscommunication.
I believe shared information will make it easier to have smooth business in this organization.

1 comment:

Christopher Tunnard said...

Good idea. Would have been useful to discuss how to apply SNA measures to get at the information you need.