Hector Gaming Company Case Analysis

Case: Hector Gaming Company

The Hector Gaming Company (HCG) is a project driven company but it shows that most of the managers are taking any requested projects, not meeting deadlines/budget and taking projects that are out of company’s scope and vision. These problems escalated when the HGC started growing two years, now there are well known for their educational games in which it’s quite unique in the market. Due to lack of teamwork and communication, the president and the top ten managers are struggling to keep up with their projects. The other problem with the organization is that all the managers are accepting requested projects of their own personal interest. Lastly, the top ten managers used the same strategic plan and process suggested by McKinley Consulting. The solution for these problems is to make everybody in the organization be brought back of what the company goals, mission and objectives are. For project selection, it can be solved by taking all those projects and put them through a decision criterion among the managers. This can be accomplished by settings goals and objectives together as an organization by creating teams.  This will help by sorting out which projects they can handle, meet the budget/schedule and fits the company’s vision. As any other company, managers should never take strategic planning lightly since the company is growing in a fast pace, managers cannot assume the outcome would be same as before. Strategic planning should always be consulted and discussed within the organization in order to run the organization effectively and avoid implementation gap, organization politics and conflicts/multitasking.

What is our major problem?

The major problem in the HCG is that there are no standards or presets of long term goals and objectives. Due to this problem, managers do not know the company’s vision and goals in which leads to them to accept projects of their own personal interest. Also, most of the projects are not meeting the deadlines and budget; this could be caused due to poor scheduling and resource allocation since most of the projects are not even being completed on time, most of the times are exceeding the allocated budget and not being able to prioritize projects.

Identify some symptoms of the problem.

We can see several symptoms of the problem are the following:  

• Lack of teamwork and communication between the managers, due to this symptom many projects are unable to meet the deadline, each project manager believes that their project is more important than the other managers and the company is not meeting the budget requirements for each project.
• No guidelines on project selection and priority, because of this symptom it is creating confusion between the managers on which project to select and which project is considered as highly important.
• Lack of leadership, Peters the president of HCG is not able to establish a common goal within the organization. She needs to be established long term goals and objectives within the organization. Also incorporating a corporate structure for her company.
• Potential of losing key employees, due to the uncommon goal of the company, another gaming company tried to hire a key product development employee away from HCG in which it could create potential threats in the future and HCG would be a in a competitive disadvantage.

What is the major cause of the problem?

HCG is growing in a fast pace at a rate of 80% in the past two years but due to internal conflicts such as organization politics in HCG, the company growth rate and market share would drop. The major problem with this company is that they have no common goals/ objectives, poor leadership and poor organizational structure. Peters would have to establish a company’s mission for their employees to follow, implement an organizational structure of what projects to select/prioritize and Peters would have to be closely involved in projects that needs attention or is reaching closer to its deadline.