Question

You are the IT director at Attaway Airlines, a small regional air carrier. You chair the company’s systems review committee, and you currently are dealing with strong disagreements about two key projects. Dan Esposito, the marketing manager, says it is vital to have a new computerized reservation system that can provide better customer service and reduce operational costs. Molly Kinnon, vice president of finance, is equally adamant that a new accounting system is needed immediately, because it will be very expensive to adjust the current system to new federal reporting requirements. Molly outranks Dan, and she is your boss. The next meeting, which promises to be a real showdown, is set for 9:00 a.m. tomorrow.

Describe how will you prepare for the meeting?

Identify what questions and issues should be discussed?

Answer 1

Understanding the context:

1. Professional hierarchy:

We all work in an organization having some different variations of hierarchy. Even though this ladder exists across the firm, but it become s more evident in the decision-makers group as the perception and conflict have the potential to affect the business in real terms instead of any simple workload.

I should keep in mind the point of view of Molly who is my direct senior. But at the same time, Dan’s idea could revolutionize the ticketing system which could be game-changer.

2. Business requirement:

Regardless of how connected different sub-domains of a big organization Is the internal intricacies of different is hard to perceive from outside. In this situation, every service line leader cannot get the full idea of all things happening in other service areas. Considering this every leader would put things forward and emphasize things he/she think is most important.

Here something similar is happening where Molly and Dan both are putting changes and emphasizing that their change is more important to implement first.

we should hear them out and ask some basic question to each-

1. How many human hours of effort are getting wasted in workload which needs to be computerized?
2. Is the change affecting the client (user) directly?
3. How important do you think you change in the organization as a whole? Is it affecting any system outside of your service area?
4. Please list down the hurdles you think in implementing the process in a computerized manner? (even though you might not have an idea of Technological terminologies).
5. Can we break things down the implementation in phases?

3. Hearing out both parties:

Listening is the most important part of handling any change requirement. I will try to hear and understand the point of view of each together such that each comes to know about the difficulties and details of the other side as well.

In the middle of the conversation I can pose questions discussed above, the response would give me some insights of business importance and revenue affecting the aspect of the change. Some common deduction I can make out of our conversation is:

1. The number of human hours saved is a direct contributor to the reduction in expenditure and human redundancy.
2. If the change is client-facing, then the ease of the product usage could affect the revenue collection.
3. If the phased implantation is possible and two systems are not dependent on each other then I could suggest the simultaneous initialization of the implementation to bring both to a middle ground.

At the end of the, I would take note of the conversation and reevaluate the things with my team at the later time no promises before careful analysis!