Trojan Technologies Inc.

Case №1: Trojan Technologies Inc.

1. Given the decision making power to change the company for growth, how would you develop structure, and define roles and responsibilities using business teams in order to foster growth and customer service objectives of the company?

Customer service being the cornerstone of Trojan Technologies Inc. success and growth, the following write up of the structure and hierarchy that should be implemented will be focused on providing the best possible customer support, while ensuring future sustainable growth and minimizing the drawbacks of abandoning the centralized approach that was used in the company in the past.

The problem that should be addressed first is the unpredictable response time to service requests from the customers. By implementing a shift to divisional company structure and sizing the regional departments according to projected market share acquisition, this problem should be solved.

The next step would be to define the exact structure of regional teams as well as the management teams responsible for the regions. Firstly, we should define the general construct of the regional structure that should be applied to Trojan Technologies Inc. The most optimal choice seems to be a merge between a projectized and divisional structures. While staffing the regional teams with the necessary number of employees, the company should keep a centralized pool of service specialists that would temporarily re-locate to regions as necessary.

To best describe the new structure, we should use the Mintzberg’s Fives Model’s divisional form. The Strategic apex would increase with continental or major regional managers, depending on the region’s market size. Technostructure and Support staff modules represent the engineers and call center employees. There is no direct need to have regional divisions of engineering and remote customer support, so the only change would be an addition of a pool of mobile service workers and specialists to the Support staff module.

The biggest change would be made to the Middle line module. With regional branches in need of management, there are two choices – hiring an experienced manager or providing the best performing employees with managerial training. With company’s strategy based around providing the best customer support and the technology requiring a tailored approach to a particular project, the optimal choice seems to be training veteran employees to take on the middle management positions. This approach would benefit the company’s goals more significantly, even despite a larger initial investment, since the managers will already have a hands-on experience with the technology and services.

The Operating core should consist of regional teams, staffed with a manager, service workers and a marketing department. Having stationary service staff not too far from the project’s location would