Terracog Global Positioning Systems Case Study

TerraCog Global Positioning Systems

Q1: How have departmental and individual objectives led to the current situation?

Terracog was a successful privately held firm specializing in high quality Global Positioning system. The company was not always first to market. A competitor posthaste introduced a GPS prototype called “BirdsI” that displays satellite imagery. This was marked improvement on the simple, vector-based graphics used by the rest of the industry. This did not impress the TerraCog team. When Terracog came to know that they judged wrong and “BirdsI” was huge success they also planned to launch a GPS with satellite imagery dubbed Project Aerial. Current situation is that both the objectives are not organized in a professional manner and all individuals have their own mind set with conflicting group objectives. In individual objective, Allen Roth the Director of designees and Development is more interested in developing his own product line instead of helping the organization needs. Harnold the VP of Development and designs, on the other hand is less worried about the project and his duties as he preparing for his retirement. Ed pryor the VP of Sales is concerned about losing his sales target because it will benefit him in better pay check. Cory Wu believes that investing more in labor cost is not needed as he himself has done a good job without any quality check. Alice Gorga is worried about sales and have not invested time in R&D. Amd Tony Barren the Director of Productions, is afraid of negotiating in his reputation as his previous records of projects were not good. The department is making production by analyzing from their past failure projects and playing it safe, not being more innovative.

Q2: What is the current decision making process?

Their decision making process is very slow with bad timings as they have introduced a product that was already made by its competitors. The teams of Pryor, Barren, and Roth are not united on a common goal and are too focused on protecting their own departments. Each team had separate agenda in achieving their own individualistic goals. In order to compete with their competitors the sales tam felt that the product should be priced below $425 to capture the lost market share to the competitors. Tony Barren, made decisions based on the fact as he was responsible for quality issues in past. He didn’t want quality to be a concern again as this affect his own job.