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Managing Meetings
As the company is rapidly starting to develop with the introduction of the motorised valve,
and the decision to proceed with the smart valve project, you as J Franklin have become
increasingly concerned about the lack of contact within the management team. Though
you have introduced a system of quality circles and other progress meetings between the
staff and management which have successfully improved Burke's products and overall
productivity, your initial decision to totally abolish meetings to concentrate attention on
small rapid decision making within departments, was perhaps too hasty.
You have found that there have been a number of issues that have developed over the
last few months which though not apparently important have caused increasing amounts
of friction between departments. This appears to have got significantly worse since J
Porter was moved from the position of office manager to lead the 'smart' valve
development team. The re allocation of office manager duties between other departments
has not been a success: a number of apparent loose ends of administration are not being
properly handled. Secondly, though all management have access to progress reports via
the electronic mail system, and can access the central information system on the computer
network, you are concerned that there appears to be a growing lack of awareness of what
the main priorities are within the organisation.
This has meant that departments are failing to consider the overall interests of the
organisation and tending to follow narrower departmental objectives. You are worried that
this trend, if it continues, will damage the tremendous impetus that the company has
developed in the recent few months. You feel that some forum for interdepartmental
discussion is urgently needed so that these problems can be effectively discussed, but are
not sure whether more than one will be necessary and what topics should be covered. You
have asked all management for topics to be provided anonymously that could be usefully
discussed at a common meeting and have received the following suggestions.
Item one: State of toilets
The inability of the cleaning staff to effectively clean the toilets after the night shift is
causing major complaints from the production staff. It would be better if production could
organise their own cleaning operations rather than rely on administration to allocate staff
and determine cleaning times.
Item two: Variety of drinks in drinks machine
Administration has continually been unable to meet the demands of the production
department in the maintenance of the supply of drinks in the vending machines. This
appears to be a problem with the contract caterers who are never told to increase the
supply of tea in the machine and to keep it clean. It would be more sensible to reduce the
amount of lemon tea and hot blackcurrant which both appear to be only drunk by the
finance department and replace it with tea which can be drunk by everyone.
Item three: Customer complaints
There has been an increasing problem with customer complaints. We have set a target to
provide an initial solution to the customer within 24 hours and provide detailed on site
support within 72. We have no problem in achieving the on site support, because of the
commitment that the technical support staff are showing, and are continuing to achieve 92
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