Reference no: EM132308489

You are an Operations Management consultant, who specializes in gap analysis, process improvement, and organizational culture. You are assigned to to consult an organization (of your choice...it can be a real organization or fabricated one). While engaged in root-cause analysis to some of the productivity issues (you can be creative and create some of the productivity issues/metrics), you observe the organization runs a lot of projects on product development, which would demand a more flexible culture and organizational layout such as a project organization or matrix organization. However, the organization cultivates a very mechanistic and hierarchical culture, which has resulted in bottle-necking the leadership and management practices.

Despite the chosen organization's efforts in process improvement such as facets of Total Quality Management (i.e. lean measure, six sigma measures, benchmarking, etc.), you identify that information used for data-driven decisions must be reported up the chain of command, all the way up to the "C-suiters." There, the CEO with his/her senior staff make decisions and pass them down to the functional managers to take action. You identify that the functional managers and other supervisors are highly de-motivated and don't feel trusted to make decisions. You also identify that the mechanistic structure hinders effective flow of communication, in addition to, a very inflexible infrastructure for decision-making.

As a consultant, you must articulate your findings in a report, with a strategy "way-forward." For now, you only have enough data and supporting information to develop the early part of your plan, which will encompass organizational information, problem identification, problem of practice issues, a problem statement to guide the research, and a literature review to substantiate findings and hypotheses.

You will use the attached Culminating Case Study Template to construct your report. Your report will develop into a very well written APA paper. The template itself is 7 pages. The first part of your report (Case Study_Part 1) should be no less than 15 pages. An APA 6th ed. guide has been provided; however, there are plenty APA 6th ed. guides out there you can use. For effectiveness and efficiency, sources in the form of research journal articles have been provided; nevertheless, Stockton has a very comprehensive library, you may use any research journals, articles, or books on the subject matter as you would like. The minimum amount of references is five, with the textbook being one of them. You will want to pay close attention to Chapters 1 and 6 in the text for this part of the case study. You will also have access to the rubric that will be used to measure quality and quantity of your work.