Assignment No.

NUST Business School

Management & Organizations
BEIJING EAPS Consulting Inc.

Submitted to;
Zunaira Saqib

Submitted by;
Salman Asad
Mina Alam

MBA2k17
Section B

Date: 23rd October 2017

1. How would you define current organizational structure of BEC? What are the

issues with the current structure?

At first glance, the organizational structure in the case seems to be a functional one with

cross functional teams arising as per project need. There are two project managers who

assign tasks to the departmental heads as well as to department employees. The

structure is given as Exhibit 1 in the Appendix.

As per our analysis, what the internal documents purport to as a project management

structure, where employees report to their respective functional as well as project

managers, it seems more like it that BEC’s organizational structure is a matrix structure.

Issues with the current structure:

 Reporting line and authority is not clear and well explained. Project managers

and functional managers are at the same level in the organizational structure.

 Simultaneous projects cause employees to work on 10 tasks at a time.

Employees and staff feel overworked.

 Prioritization of tasks is an issue because of tight deadlines. Employees use own

judgments to prioritize tasks in case of conflicting assignments from project

managers and functional managers.

 Role of project managers not understood by departmental heads and employees.

2. Mr. Zheng has decided to stick to current organizational structure. What changes

would you recommend to improve the structure and current problems?

The introduction of Project boss and top leader to the structure by Mr. Zheng can

eliminate the dual reporting barrier and can clarify that who will be reporting to whom

in the organization. The Project boss: Ms. Song (for Project A) and an XYZ employee

(for Project B) who will be responsible to coordinate the activities of several

departments for the completion of a specific project and Mr. Zheng: as top leader in the

matrix will be responsible to maintain a power balance between the functional and the

project departments, as shown in Exhibit 2 (in the Appendix). The project managers

will not assign tasks to the employees in functional departments directly rather the

project managers will assign project tasks to the functional managers in each

department. This eliminates the issue of task prioritization in the organization. The

functional mangers will report to the project boss (Ms. Song & Mr/Ms. XYZ) about the

progress of tasks in each department. In case of dispute, the issue will be put-forward

to the top-leader (Mr.Zheng) who will take all the necessary actions, if required.

The advantage of the structure includes more efficient use of resources, flexibility, and

adaptability to rapidly changing environment than functional hierarchy in mainland

China.

The potential issue that may arise can be that focus from the core work activities can

be taken away as great deal of time and cost will be required to coordinate meetings

and assignments with project managers/functional department managers to address the

dispute.
3. Mr. Zheng has decided to change the organizational structure to Horizontal

structure to solve the issues. How would you design a horizontal structure and why

is it better than Matrix or hybrid structure?

The top-management team will consist of CEO; Mr Zheng, Chief Consultant and Vice

President. Four independent functional teams, one from each department, each one

working independently but executing a specific process, will be introduced, as shown

in Exhibit 3 (in the Appendix). The reason behind selecting independent teams rather

than cross-functional is due to the independent nature of each process. The knowledge

of a person from R&D wouldn’t help those working on executing the training to the

customer company. The teams are also made by paying attention to the list of

responsibilities of each department illustrated in in Exhibit 3 of the case study (page 9).

The processes are step-wise, and output in one process can be utilized as input in the

next step/process. Those processes are research information related to the customer

company (R&D Team), delivering brochures (Marketing Team), counseling sessions

(Consulting Team), and training delivered to employees (Training Teams). Ms. Song

will be the process owner for Project B and Mr. XYZ for Project A.

As team members are selected from each specific department like marketing team

members are from the marketing department, so problems of selecting the right cross

functional team that exists in hybrid structure can resolved. A single project/process is

completed in a single run so hassle of multiple projects is not there.

This structure eliminates the time and cost associated with the meetings that are held in

order to resolve the conflicts among functional and project bosses that mostly occur in

in Matrix structure.
 The process in horizontal structure may give rise to the delay in EAPs’ services to the

customer company if any of the teams in the process is unable to deliver the required

output on time.

4. Mr. Zheng has decided to change the organizational structure to a Hybrid

structure. How would you design a hybrid structure and why is it better than

Matrix or horizontal structure?

In Hybrid structure, Cross-functional teams are made who will report to the Project

Owner A (Vice President) and Project Owner B (CEO), as shown in Exhibit 4 (in the

Appendix). The whole process from collecting information till delivering the end

product will be done by an individual team.

It increases the efficiency due to the availability of specialized staffs from each

department in BEC. The two projects that are A & B will be launched more quickly

resolving the time-lag issue of horizontal structure. Multiple teams can run multiple

projects simultaneously to deliver to growing number of customers.

It’s more flexible than the Matrix structure due to the existence of healthy relationship

between top management and cross functional project teams. Clear lines of authorities

are defined and no dual reporting conflict exists as all the teams in specific process are

instructed to report to their respective process owners only.

Although this structure has more advantages as compare to the other structures but it

also has embedded potential problems. One of the main problems is selecting the right

team with right expertise at the right time.