Blog Assignment:

Problem: I have a problem about how to use SNA to identify the qualification of workers who are suitable for cross training in an organization.

Situation: This is one problem that I faced when I study the Hayward business case: Baria Planning Solutions, Inc.: Fixing the Sales Process.

                Baria Planning Solution, Inc, a consulting company, has business on different sector, like, energy sector, government sector, manufacturing sector, and retail sector. One of the problems of this company is the utilization of its sales support team has inexplicable shortage. The yearly utilization across sales support functions looks fine; however, it has utilization problems in some specific months due to different accounting period of different sectors. For example, the government’s accounting period is ending at Jun 30, retail’ accounting period is ending at January 31, and manufacturing’s accounting period is ending at the end of calendar year. Therefore, we will know some sector of this consulting company face working overload in January. The best solution of this problem is cross training. For example, training one worker from the unbusy-government sector into the busy-retail sector.

The upper solution is offered by my professor, Protano, however, I still have one question: how can I identify the qualification of workers who are suitable for the cross training program. SNA offers me a good way to solve this problem.

I want to use SNA to answer the following questions

Q1: Who are the person has frequent connections between different sectors?

Q2: Who has other sectors’ working experience beside their current job? Who has different background with their current job?

Q3: Who are willing to working in a cross sector team with higher compensation?

To gather data to finish this analysis will not be difficult at all, because the consulting company has its own professional survey department.

By gathering the result of the survey above, I will be able to see who has the highest in degree, out degree in the company; I can see who has well connections between different subgroups; I can see who has the highest betweeness; I also well know who has different experience with its current job.

Action 1, take out the people who answer “yes” in Q 3. 
Result: we know who want to work in a cross sector team.

Action 2, put the people, who has different working experience with their current job, into an emergency group. 
Result: Therefore, when it is really busy, those people can work as a cross sector fireman.

Action 3, group the people who has high degree, high connections between different sectors into a volunteer group. At the same time, the company will offer cross training volunteer program.
Result: the volunteers can also working cross different sectors when the utilization is overloaded.

After leaning the SNA, I realized the SNA is a really helpful tool to solve my question about how to identify who is suitable for cross-training program in an organization.