Trojan Technologies Case Solution

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?

Trojan Technologies Inc. was founded in 1977 and back then they only had 3 employees, fifteen years later they had 50 employees and it is expected that in the year 2003 they would have around 1000 employees. This is a very rapid growth which puts a large strain on the organization’s structure. It clearly has not developed quickly enough to accommodate the changes in contingency factors, especially size. This has created countless organizational issues including: no defined job roles, no differentiation in jobs (day one employee has very similar role to a senior employee), very heavy workload on some positions (due to dual roles), and customers need to interact with 4 different departments and no formal introduction for new employees (Ivey Management Services, 1999). In addition to all that, the departments are loosely defined – marketing division often had to incorporate project engineers into their work. This all causes burnouts in employees and lowers quality of customer service.

Although there is no clear structure, it seems that this used to be functional structure, which grew into a structure that has some similarity to the matrix organization structure, because of the dual-roles and lack of well-defined priorities. When it used to be a small company, it could just be proactive to the outside environment, everything could be communicated easily since there were only a few employees and customers. Now it could be considered a large company and they should have standardized work processes since they cannot incorporate every employee into each project’s problems.

Due to their contingency factors, they do not need a tall organization structure (Trojan has mostly standardized orders) and they it would be not possible to scale Trojan and maintain a flat structure (Lighthouse, n.d.). In the past had proven that functional structure is not possible. Fully implemented matrix structure would further increase workload and number of roles for a single position, slow down projects even more and make it more difficult for employees to set priorities.

However, the recommended structure, to solve the problems that Trojan is facing, is regional division structure. It would benefit the company to leave the board, product engineering and central call-center in the central office, but move rest of the departments to the newly made divisions. Firstly since they had a significant geographical distribution of sales, service workers had to travel a lot. This structure would eliminate the service department’s need for constant travelling from one project to another, thus reducing “burnouts”. Secondly, the divisional structure would also house flexibility which is what Trojan highly values, since it means that they can address issues with installed products without having to slow down other divisions. Thirdly, in the past, Trojan was most successful without slog having a ‘close-knit’ workforce and having a division would sort of revive that. There would be the only couple of people in the departments and everyone in the division would know the customers and their issues. This would help to maintain what DeVries called an ‘immediate connectivity’. Lastly, another thing employees may have disliked is the lack of career ladder in such a large company, where you do not feel your contribution affecting the whole company. While regional division would not increase career ladder possibilities, it would create an outside incentive to do more, because the employee could see his/her contribution helping their division. Not only that, the customer would also directly benefit by not having to contact several different departments, but most likely have a key contact person in the regional division’s office.