Collaborative Successes

Complete an analysis describing an area of complacency within your company or select a fortune 500 company department or division (i.e. Amazon, Google, or Coca Cola). Develop a measurable plan of collaborative problem solving to include identifying stakeholders, which can support process improvement initiatives, justified by a road map and schedule of events. Lastly, integrate Honda’s BP process concept with how this sponsors or configures change to maximize your organization’s output in supporting the end customer.

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The requirements below must be met for your paper to be accepted and graded:

• Write between 750 – 1,250 words (approximately 3 – 5 pages) using Microsoft Word in APA style, see example below.
• Use font size 12 and 1” margins.
• Include cover page and reference page.
• At least 80% of your paper must be original content/writing.
• No more than 20% of your content/information may come from references.
• Use at least three references from outside the course material, one reference must be from EBSCOhost. Text book, lectures, and other materials in the course may be used, but are not counted toward the three reference requirement.
• Cite all reference material (data, dates, graphs, quotes, paraphrased words, values, etc.) in the paper and list on a reference page in APA style.

References must come from sources such as, scholarly journals found in EBSCOhost, CNN, online newspapers such as, The Wall Street Journal, government websites, etc. Sources such as, Wikis, Yahoo Answers, eHow, blogs, etc. are not acceptable for academic writing.

LECTURE:

Supply Chain Collaboration Dynamics

Collaborating with stakeholders upstream and downstream has become imperative to maximize growth and development within organizations. Organizational platforms are drastically changing based on multi-generational value systems with a direct correlation to collaboration. Chokshi (2014) reported that Wall Street professionals are transitioning to the tech industry, even taking lower paid positions, as time off with family and a strong family-oriented culture are more desirable for the long-term career success. This lecture discusses positive characteristics from learning versus functional organizational structures and the associated collaboration initiatives. Executing problem-solving and process improvement initiatives extends from an organization, with a positive culture; therefore, we will discuss how to motivate individuals to be participative, and conclude with a supply chain council discussion.

Learning and Functional Organizations

Learning organizations have gained popularity since the late 1990’s during the Silicon Valley tech boom. A learning organization is one that seeks to create its own future; that assumes learning is an ongoing and creative process for its members; and one that develops, adapts, and transforms itself in response to the needs and aspirations of people, both inside and outside itself (Mason, 2015). Focusing on the knowledge base, critical thinking and the communication of ideas, the organizational structure is lean with either one or two hierarchical tiers. Key disciplines incorporated into a learning organization include systems thinking; personal mastery; mental models; building shared visions; and team learning (Seng, 1990).

Several outcomes of learning organizations include:

• Garner Independent Thought
• Increase Our Ability to Manage Change
• Improve Quality
• Develop a More Committed Workforce
• Give People Hope that Things Can Get Better
• Stretch Perceived Limits
• Are in Touch with a Fundamental Part of Our Humanity: The need to learn, to improve our environment, and to be active actors, not passive recipients (Karash, 1995)

A functional organization normally hosts three or more hierarchical tiers where personnel are grouped as per their designated specialization. Depending on the structure an employee reports to their functional manager or project manager. The organization chart is transparent in depicting the president, vice president, and other functional departments within the organization. Each department has a director who provides quality and performance oversight.

Advantages of a functional organization include:

• Highest degree of performance is achieved as employees are grouped together by knowledge and skills.
• Skills and efficiencies are improved from performing with similar employees.
• Roles and responsibilities are affixed ensuring easy accountability.
• Hierarchy is transparent.
• No duplication of work as each department has a fixed job.
• Employees more secure as they host the unique skill sets for their area of responsibility.
• Greater job security equals great organizational loyalty.
• Clear career growth paths are established.
• Internal department communications are excellent.

Each structure offers both strengths and weaknesses; therefore, developing a supply chain requires constant integration with the structure, but ensuring participation. While a functional organization structure is more rigid with clear processes, learning organizations are more organic offering flexibility and often quicker response times. The opportunity to work in hybrid organization structures also offers advantages and disadvantages; however, these opportunities all equate to lessons learned and experiences that may be shared with students and professionals alike.

Collaboration and Emotional Intelligence

Collaborative effort is simply recognized as working with another person or a group of people to achieve a desired task or embark upon a new initiative. Collaboration discussions this week relate to transformational and incremental innovation strategies. Both strategies ascertain talent management and collective process strategies to reduce costs and increase performance capabilities. Problem solving and process improvement initiatives are obsolete unless executive leadership and senior management support the dynamics of cultural enhancement, while actively listening to suggestions and taking into account white papers collected among the entire chain of command.

Another element of critical thought to engage in collaboration includes understanding emotional intelligence theory. Emotional intelligence taps into a fundamental element of human behaviors that is distinctly different from your intellect. The intelligence quotient (IQ) is the ability of an individual to learn, while emotional intelligence is a flexible skill set that is acquirable, and improved upon with practice. Lastly, personality related to introversion or extroversion, is stable over an individual’s lifetime.

While IQ and personality are cemented to the root foundation of an individual, emotional intelligence is linked to the highest performers in organizations based on the rational and emotional brains. Four core skills comprise emotional intelligence to include self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management as shown in Figure 2.

The four core skills are comprised of competence, what an individual sees and does to manage their internal and external environments. Daniel Pink, an economist who has studied motivational factors spanning organizations across the world, embraces individual motivations correlated to mastery, autonomy, and purpose. He demonstrates that the “secret to high performance and satisfaction – at work, at school, and at home – is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world” (Pink, 2015).

Supply Chain Councils

As demonstrated during last week’s lecture supply chain management is an element of logistics management. As logistics has become vast across the Department of Defense (DoD), logistics managers are now recognized as Product Support Managers (PSM) based on a single system accounting for billions of dollars. To ensure best practices PSM conferences were established beginning in 2011. These conferences resulted in the distribution and transparency of DoD strategic goals as well as the recognition of organization-wide bottlenecks. Realizing the complacency of innovation among DoD functional hierarchies suggestion programs, climate surveys, and focus groups are now required across all Systems Commands on an annual basis.

Knowledge sharing has become more prevalent across the acquisition programs reflecting a decrease in costs, increased performance capabilities by integrating joint-logistics and supply chain operations, and recognized material support practices by using standardized NERP rules across the four military services and federal agencies. The base construct used to support conference initiatives host 12 steps as illustrated in Figure 4 below.

The culmination of industry professionals along with DoD senior stakeholders has embraced a more innovative culture, which is sponsoring process changes and empowering junior employees and users to forward recommended solutions in the development of a toolkit for future acquisition managers. The tools help integrate the right mix of support sources, ensure compliance with statutes, policies, and funding variables, and systematically document the process for product support strategies. This results in meeting the desired levels of performance, cost management, and customer satisfaction.

References

• Acquisition Community Connection. (2015). Product support manager. Retrieved from https://acc.dau.mil/CommunityBrowser.aspx?id=37218…
• Acquisition Community Connection. (2015). Product support manager toolkit. Retrieved from https://acc.dau.mil/CommunityBrowser.aspx?id=41280…
• Karash, R. (1995). Why a learning organization? Retrieved from http://world.std.com/~lo/WhyLO.html
• Mason, M. (2015). What is a learning organization. Retrieved from http://www.moyak.com/papers/learning-organization….
• Pink, D. (2015). Drive. Retrieved from http://www.danpink.com/books/drive/
• Senge, P. (1990). The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday.
• Talentsmart. (2015). About emotional intelligence. Retrieved from http://www.talentsmart.com/about/emotional-intelli…