Lack of Strategic Leadership

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Looking at the Trophy project there was no urgency in information flow or project feedback as it can be seen that a formal report to high management was only requested six months later and it was already late for remedial actions. The organisation leaders failed to lead and improve on the status of the project. As it can be seen that managers used the project time, resources and funds for their own small projects and this was the cause of the project delay and cost overrun. If Total Quality management (TQM) was practiced, this problem would have been noticed earlier and could have been corrected.

According to Steyn and Schmikel (2016:20) Understanding, respecting and responding to customer needs mean that an organisation has strong emphasis on customer requirements. Engaging in open, continuous, two-way, communication with customers will create a trust situation in which customer satisfaction can thrive. Ongoing measures of customer satisfaction can then be utilised to develop products and services that they really want. Good leaders are always open to feedback and criticism from customers. Customer satisfaction is generally accepted as the most important pillar of total quality management. Ignoring it will be to the detriment of every organisation’s success. There is an old saying that ‘customer is king’, which means that organisations should make a special effort in creating and maintaining a customer focus.

However looking at the Trophy project customer was never the king, it took this organisation six months to request feedback on the Trophy project and to realise and admit that there is a problem and everybody with line managers included has a role to play to bail out this program. This mean a failure to the most important pillar of TQM which is customer satisfaction. Looking at the current status of the program it is in trouble and needs a rescue. If leaders could have listened to Reinhardt in the beginning when he reported his problem with line managers using the project funds for their project and not providing adequate staffing and resources, this could have been avoided. This shows that there was no proper controlling and monitoring for this project.

Recommendations

The organisation must keep itself on check by creating the use of a balanced score card. This will help them in getting feedback from external and internal customers on its performance and will increase relationship with customers. This will help the organisation to build a good relations amongst the teams.

According to Steyn and Schmikl (2016:188) The knowledge-based learning organisation utilises the TQM principles of having a focus on internal and external customer needs, involving management and staff at all levels of the organisation in teamwork, decentralising managerial decision-making, focusing on continuously improving the products, services, systems, and processes of the organisation, systems thinking, and creating a learning environment that stimulates

human creativity and knowledge management. The Balanced Scorecard component provides a framework to describe and communicate strategy and

its measurement criteria in a consistent and insightful way to teams. The Programme Management component delivers strategy implementation in a cross functional coordinated and integrated team-based way, which provides information feedback for appraising and reviewing the organisational benefits.

If this was in use Reinhardt will have been assisted with the manager’s issue of not supporting him and the issue will have been resolved before it’s too late.

- No Quality systems (Systems Thinking)

Reinhardt had a challenge where he had to report progress and plans for recovery every Monday morning. And he ended up spending most of the time preparing reports instead of managing the project. This reports preparations was time consuming for the project manager and the project ended up suffering while time was spent on reports preparation.

Steyn and Schmikel (2016:21) states that Leaders who embrace TQM philosophy place strong emphasis on preventing defects by continuously improving processes, systems, products, and services. This is best achieved by creating a continuous improvement project office in the structure of the learning organisation.

In order to track the progress on Trophy project the appointed assistant program manager suggested the implementation of a computerised problems tracking computer program. A New Economy organisation is expected to have systems existing for programs progress tracking and there was no such system at this organisation. The continuous improving of processes, systems, products and services never existed. The implementation of a computer program still failed.

Recommendation

The implementation of a computerised program to track the progress failed, however the organisation still need to go back to source the funds and complete the program that was already in implementation phase. This is necessary for future use to avoid the disaster that occurred on Trophy project whereby the assistant program manager ended up using the project money to create the computerised tracking system. The organisation is expected to have the system and they must continuously work on improving it based on new technology. In this way it would be easier for them to work on the next projects with easy tracking systems and processes already in place.

Steyn and Schmikl (2016:21) states Quality management is predicated on decision making that utilises reliable information and analyses thereof to assist better decision-making. Effective and efficient information systems technology is an attribute that plays a major role in improving productivity and overall performance in organisations. The process component also requires continuous improvement.

And this is where the organisation failed, they failed to realise that without a proper technological systems in place they will not be able to perform and make use of reliable information.

Bibliography

- Steyn, P. & Schmikl, E. 2016. Programme - Managing Organisational Performance and Innovative Improvement.

The Trophy project (Brenda)

Problems with the structure Trophy project are using

More communication structures (confusion when functional managers did not provide adequate enough resources assuming that that is covered

Dual