1. What were the challenges Shikhar Ghosh faced when he joined Appex?
When Shikhar Ghosh joined Appex Corporation in May 1988, the Cellular Telephone Industry was growing rapidly and the market for Appex was expanding. The need of the time was a large scale expansion and organizational level changes to handle the increasing customer demands and planning for the future strategies.
Following were the challenges which Ghosh faced when he joined Appex:
1) The organization was initially small and the decision making was centralized among the key executives. All other employees were only involved in developing and selling products.
2) People had expertise in definite sectors but everybody did anything which came to their mind.
3) There was no functional structure, roles were not defined and there was no job description
4) As the market was growing, more projects poured in and people worked on many projects at once
5) The environment started becoming chaotic and the company was spending cash quickly without monitoring its expenses.
6) Employees were only “fire-fighting” with the existing operations and there was no development or underlying planning structure.
7) Customer complaints started increasing and Appex was unable to handle the increasing demand and volume of customer requests.
8) Company started missing the installation dates and fell behind schedules, there were failures in product development. 9) Information flow started becoming difficult, there were clashes in the product development process and coordination and integration started falling apart.
10) There was no financial planning, the operations became unproductive and looseness of projects didn’t work. 2. Evaluate the importance of each of the structural changes Shikhar Ghosh implemented. How important were they? What problems did each ne w structure address? What problems, in turn,