Aquarius Case

Analyze Aquarius’ current organization structure:

The Aquarius was organized in a most traditional structure – functional structure. Under this system, people with similar jobs and skills are grouped together into productive units with a hierarchical reporting system. This kind of structure provides variety of benefits. For instance, a functional structure organization establishes a very concrete chain of command. It creates standard operating procedures, established consequences and enhanced accountability. Also functional structures offer a specific career ladder for participants. As such, individuals attaining a supervisory role are more likely to have had experience in the tasks they are evaluating their employees on. This gives them better insight and credibility when making evaluations.

Problems occurred in Aquarius:

* Unstructured communication – the specialists have always bypassed their supervisor and directly communicated with their clients. The large number of formal and informal communication occurred between specialists and clients, each of them wants to sell his/her own ideas. One specialist and one personnel might work at one team, but they have contacted client’s different staffs separately. As the result of unstructured communication, more formal meeting may hold to emphasis the agency policy and course of action.

* Lack of on-job control and supervision - there is no approval or control between account executives and specialists. The account executives have merely influence on the job, or even don’t know what’s happening until the job done.

Generate a potential solution for Aquarius:

The current organizational structure of Aquarius is not good enough to meet the requirements of current market. Some of the major clients left in a short period of time. The need for reorganization is urgent.

We’d like to introduce a customer-centric structure to the company. Under this structure, company can group employees into customer...