Written Assignment

1. Agreement as to recurring team meetings (when, for how long, and advance preparation)

· Team leader: Jingxin (Crystal) Guan

· Recurring meeting times: Fridays 9:00-10:00pm

· Meeting preparation: Review all reading materials for the case study and the EE requirements prior to attend the meetings.

2. Initial understanding of the reasons why the CEO of iQmetrix wanted to try Holacracy.

There are some reasons stated as the following:

· The Medical Records and XQ project failed. Human Resources initiatives such as the Commitments project were slow to be adopted, and an externally hired executive was disregarded. Business Visions couldn’t handle carrier reconciliation for the volume of devices they were selling. Despite maintaining the cultural expectations, excessive autonomy was causing the company to become increasingly opaque. 

· Founder and CEO of iQmetrix, Krywulak was dissatisfied with what he saw around him in the business world. He always intended the organization to be a platform where sharing information and measuring results created an environment for innovators to flourish. Holacracy organized people around common tasks or projects, there were no job titles, only adaptive roles, and work was organized by circles that formed and disbanded as required. Holacracy is closely aligned with his vision of organizational freedom and flexibility.  

· As the CEO is facing a decline in the company’s growth rate and thought that it could be due to management style in the company, they considered implementing Holacracy or self-management approach instead of bureaucracy. This would increase efficiency, transparency, ability to make decisions, flexibility, and productivity among the employees.

· There were many planning inefficiencies, and the company started to miss important deadlines. The culture was affecting growth. When the company expands into a 500 employee organization, the highly autonomous style is not adaptive anymore, even though executives still wish the organizational structure and culture would stay the same as a five-person startup.

· Still wanted to provide employees a level of autonomy and already tried some different approaches, but still not successful (ex. Management by Objectives). Providing too much independence also allowed employees to shut down processes or ideas they didn’t like, causing them to ignore and miss goals. In addition, iQ tried earlier to hire a senior executive from Microsoft who might have a different style to succeed in management, and the outcome was still a failure. 

· Issues with transparency, communication, and accountability, existed with the current management model. Self-management is the key of Holacracy. iQ could utilize the benefit of increasing transparency and the time reduced from making decisions and task assessment.

· Wanted to reduce the amount of time spent/wasted related to bureaucracy in the company. It would minimize decision-making time, so action can be taken more quickly on projects and promote more ownership of responsibilities and goals amongst the employees. The authority gets distributed between all the employees, and they can take their own responsibilities and achieve their goals. This will allow their employees to monitor their own growth and regulate their tasks by planning accordingly.

3. Strategy for next steps in your research—who will research what, and their deliverables for the next meeting.

Our team members will divide and work on each task for deliverable as below:

· Vivian Han & Subashini Hariharan

· Review the following problems that led to iQmetrix decision to adopt Holacracy:

· The Medical Records project failed

· The XQ project failed and was hidden

· Human Resources initiatives such as the Commitments project were slow to be adopted

· An externally hired executive was marginalized (i.e., essentially ignored)

· Failure to complete wireless carrier multi-million-dollar project

· Lack of organization structure, resources allocation, maintaining timeline, miscommunication during the development of the project

· Employees are also not satisfied due to the failures and shortcomings of the company

· Urvi Deshmukh & Jingxin (Crystal) Guan

· Review the following cultural barriers at iQmetrix:

· a. Employees are encouraged to be autonomous and choose their own work

· b. Employees can elect to simply not follow company initiatives (they are IT people, right?)

· c. The emphasis on personal autonomy has led to people not knowing what others are doing, resulting in duplication and missed opportunities

· Team discussion and conclusion writeup-- ALL

· Roundtable discussion: Each team member should provide a short answer—captured in the meeting notes—to these questions:

· Do you believe that Holacracy (or any other form of self-management) can solve these problems?

· Why or why not?

· Identify the key issues that came from the Roundtable discussion. What research needs to be done to address those issues? Who will do what?