Your company, ABC Electronics, is undergoing a relatively calm period, sales are stable with slight increases, however your market share is decreasing in an environment where new players are appearing with innovative products that are technologically superior to your company’s own, several of them in offshore locations. Strategy consultancy firm PVC has issued a market analysis study that claims that the tendency of your star products is to disappear from the market in 2 to 3 years due to the new alternative products that some of your competitors are already starting to commercialize.
Most of ABC’s employees are experts in the old technologies and products. Many of them have been working with those technologies for over 10 years and they lack the skills needed for the new product line and technologies. At the same time your factory is setup and optimized to produce the old product line. You will need to invest in transforming it to produce the new products. Additionally, the IT systems require an urgent update, since they are configured to serve the old setup of the company. A significant investment will be needed to adapt them.
The divisions have become silos over time and there is little communication or collaboration across departments. ABC is apparently a successful company with a rigid hierarchical culture extremely adverse to risk and change. After all, their current configuration has proven successful for many years.
ABC’s CEO is clear in his analysis of the situation: the company will not survive unless they abandon the current product line and start investing in new technologies that will compete with the new products in the market. For that purpose, he asks you, the head of the internal project management department, to lead a change management project that will transform the company’s focus and structure to embrace the new technologies and product lines.
Please do the following:
Identify what the vision for change for this firm would be. In addition, identify what drivers and constraints the firm must factor in when implementing a change management plan to achieve the set objectives. (33%)
Prepare a diagnosis of the firm and identify the problem / challenge / dilemma that this firm is facing. The diagnosis should cover two parts: external environment of the firm, and internal or organizational diagnosis. You should select the most appropriate change diagnosis tools and factors and make explicit reference to them in your answer. (67%)
