Module Project: First submission: proposal

QUESTION

Module Project: First submission: proposal

Introducing and researching the organisation that you will analyse over the coming weeks.

You will complete this Module Project in four submissions:

• A draft Proposal, due in Week 1 (this week)
• An Organisational Analysis, due in Week 3
• A Critical Literature Review, due in Week 5
• A final Module Project, due in Week 7

Scenario

Imagine you are a well-known business consultant hired to restructure a multinational organisation of your choice. To ensure you can access all necessary information, use an organisation that you know well or one for which you can get detailed information. Your Module Project will be to propose a new organisational design and approach to restructuring that would allow the organisation to be more efficient, to be more competitive in the industry, or to tackle an existing structural deficiency.

To prepare for this Module Project submission:

• Review the Week 1 Learning Resources and classroom discussions on contingencies surrounding the restructure decision.

To complete this Module Project Submission:

Submit an approximately 500 word proposal in which you:

• State and introduce the organisation that you propose to restructure and the motives behind your choice. What makes the organisation a good candidate for reorganising? Use the Daft, Murphy and Willmott (2014) analytical framework and symptoms of structure deficiency to give you some guidance.
• Conduct an initial research for secondary sources that you will be using as sources of data on your chosen organisation. Examples include relevant articles on the industry or the organisation that you are analysing, business or public reports, relevant websites, organisational charts or any other publicly available data. This is to ensure that you have access to enough information to develop a substantive analysis about the organisation you have chosen. This will prepare you for your Organisational Analysis in Week 3.
• Submit an initial list of at least 2-3 peer-reviewed articles which you will use to inform the theoretical framework underpinning your proposal to restructure the chosen organisation.  This will prepare you for your Critical Literature Review in Week 5.

ANSWER

Module Project Proposal

Introduction

Restructuring of a company refers to making changes to the method of running a company in methods such as consolidation of debts, changing the organization’s size, increasing the scale of operations, changing the organization structure etc. Restructuring a company helps in the mitigation of problems such as bankruptcy or restructuring the organization for better functionality.

Costco’s Organization Structure

My project proposal is to restructure the organizational structure of Costco Wholesale Company. The American company manages and controls many warehouses stocking groceries and other food commodities. Only members of the company can access the offered services, products and facilities. It is considered one of the largest and best-selling retailers of beef, organic food, chicken and wine in the world (Greenhouse, 2005). It has been ranked as an employer of choice on the Forbes list, ahead of companies such as Google. According to The United States Securities And Exchange Commission Report (2015), the company’s current organizational structure is based on its operations and locations. Its corporate structure connects its organizational components and addresses the needs of its various market regions. The organization has a functional structure which groups the employees according to their different functions, such as accounting, marketing, sales etc. It also incorporates a divisional organizational structure which groups the different parts of the organization depending on the various business locations and markets.

Reasons for the Selection of Costco

The organizational structure of the Costco Company has various disadvantages, the main one being that the structure is not adequately flexible to the changing world markets and varying consumer groups. Flexibility is a requirement for the organizational structure of a company having many functional groups headed by one headquarter (Gulati & Puranam, 2009), such as Costco. Adapting to the constant changes in the market and functionality of a company is the major problem facing organizations (Daft et al, 2014). Globalization is creating the need to have a flexible structure, with the need for companies to become competitive and cope with cultures and different markets. Costco has to implement a structure that can do exactly that. The structure of a big company like Costco should support the diversity of its target markets. It should work well with demographic diversity, people from different cultures and nationalities, and gender.

The strict definition and classification of a company’s employees according to their duties hinders their flexibility. A structure that allows for the duties of workers to continually change or get improved encourages role diversification and multitasking. Costco’s organizational structure sets out the duties of employees and groups them according to their roles. It requires restructuring so as to accommodate multitasking and flexibility of workers in their undertakings.

Data Sources

For this project, I will use online articles from reputable sources, course content, and books on organizational structure. The Daft et al, 2014 analytical framework and symptoms of structure deficiency book and Gulati and Puranam’s discussion of the possible trade-offs between informal and formal organizational structure will be the primary sources I will use in this project. I will also acquire data on Costco’s organization structure from newspaper articles and scholarly journals.

References

Daft, R., Murphy, J., & Willmott, H. (2014). Organization theory and design. Cengage Learning.

Gulati, R., & Puranam, P. (2009). Renewal through reorganization: The value of inconsistencies between formal and informal organization. Organization science, 20(2), 422-440.

The United States Securities And Exchange Commission Report (2015) Retrieved March 24, 2018, from http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/909832/000090983215000014/cost10k83015.htm

Greenhouse, S. (2005). How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart. The New York Times, 17, 1.