Describe and Evaluate What Pfizer Is Doing with Its Pfizerworks.

6-23) Describe and evaluate what Pfizer is doing with its Pfizerworks.

What Pfizer is doing with Pfizerworks is a smart strategic plan. Pfizer technically, in my opinion, broke the organization into a sort of work specialization structure. They are outsourcing the tedious work and it is costing them less money in labor costs.

6-24) What structural implications-good and bad- does this approach have? (Think in terms of the six organizational design elements.)

I think that some good implications of Pfizerworks is that it has work specialized in things that employees at the base of Pfizer and the people that work with Pfizerworks do. The people at Pfizer send the “busy” work to the employees at Pfizerworks and so they can pay less in labor costs. Doing this also makes it so that the people working at Pfizer can do more knowledgeable work than just imputing information on a computer. A bad implication that I see with what they are doing is that when it comes to complex things, the employees at Pfizer should be doing the work so that they know what the plans are, and they know better of what the outcome should be than those that work for PfizerWorks.

6-25) Do you think this arrangement would work for other types of organizations? Why or why not? What types of organizations might it also work for?

I do believe that this would work for other types of organizations, but they must be a type of organization that doesn’t need to know all the details of what the strategy making is. Per the Washington Post, outsourcing busy work is very popular in the health industry. This type of work wouldn’t work for all organizations though. Organizations that are mechanistic would not be able to use this arrangement because there is a certain hierarchy that must be followed, and I would assume that it wouldn’t be an employee that would be giving the go ahead to outsource. I would imagine that the employee would have to verify cost with the HR department and then continue from there. This would take more time.

6-26) What role do you think organizational structure plays in an organization’s efficiency and effectiveness? Explain.

I think that the role that organizational structure plays in their efficiency and effectiveness is a large role. If the organization didn’t use work specialization, it would have taken a lot more time to do the task at hand. They saved 66,500 employee work hours by outsourcing to Pfizerworks. This means that it is taking the people in India far less time to get the “busy work” done, than it does for a base employee to do it because a base employee at Pfizer has so many more things to do than just do paperwork.

Sources:

Sullivan, E. O., & Snell, K. (2011, March 20). As Indian companies grow in the U.S., outsourcing comes home. Retrieved January 31, 2017, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/as-indian-companies-grow-in-the-us-outsourcing-comes-home/2011/05/17/AFZbrp7G_story.html?utm_term=.67f3da05fa11

The Case for Stealth Innovation. (2014, December 19). Retrieved February 01, 2017, from https://hbr.org/2013/03/the-case-for-stealth-innovation

Robbins, Coulter, De Cenzo. Fundamentals of Management: P163 Prentice Hall, 2016. Print.