Organizational Planning: FedEx Corporation - Term Paper Example

? Organizational Planning: FedEx Corporation Organizational Planning: FedEx Corporation The company provides e-commerce, transportation and business services. FedEx Corporation offers its services to a wide range companies and government institutions. It is committed in providing quality products to its existing and new customer. Employees are crucial resource in acquiring competitive advantage (Van, 2003). It is the company culture to nature leaders from the existing workforce. Considering the competitive advantage and organizational culture factors, the corporation organizational structure requires to be restructured. FedEx Corporation structure is in horizontal form (FedEx para 2). Horizontal organizational structure limits staff production, growth and development. Promotion is also limited. The company should adopt matrix organizational structure. Matrix organizational structure promotes staff growth, development. As a result of growth and development they become productive. Matrix structure facilitates employees to rise from one level to the other easily as contrasted to horizontal structure. Recommend organizational structure Structural adaptations. Each employee should be answerable to two managers, the line manager and the project manager. This will improve the company’s efficiency and effectiveness in that high production per individual staff will be realized. This is because each staff will be monitored by two managers who have different expectations. The project manager will expect various employees to deliver and achieve the targets. On the other hand the line manager expects the the employees under his/her leadership to perform effectively and meet various deadlines. The project managers and line managers should also report to departmetal managers and the vice president. The departmental managers and vice presidents should report to the president. The matrix organizational structure has got the following advantages which fit FedEx corporation. Resource coordination The recommeded matrix structure will enable the line and project managers to focus on their expertice and specialization. The line managers will focus on managing, hiring and training employees while the project managers will focus on achieving various goals in particular products. the line manager produces competent human resource through advising the human resource directorate on the skills and competencies required in a particular position. After the successful selection and hiring process the line manager orients and equips the staff with additional skills required in execution of their duties and responsibilities. The line manager ensures that the staff under his/her command have the necessary capacity to handle various task as expected by the company (Bryson, 2011). This can be achived through various training and development programs. On the otherhand, the project manager assigns a project to staffs. Such projects have got deadlines and threshholds targets. Projects managers ensures that the targets are achieved. This will facilitate the staff to be productive (Baligh, 2006). Specialization. Employees are placed at their functional areas by the line managers since the project superviours expects them to accomplish specific tasks under their areas of specialization. Specialization enables the employees to exercise creativity. Creativity is an avenue for creation and improvement of products and services (Galbraith, 2008). Through creation and improvement of products and services the company gains competive edge over the competitors. The improved goods ancompetitve edged services will facilitate the company to acquire over the exsting competitoers while creation of new products and sercices will counter he new markert entrants competitors. Breadth of skill Most coporate projects are broad. Employess from different departments are expected to cordinate in completion of such tasks. Therefore, employees are in constant contact with others who have distinct skills. In efforts to complete project, a particulat employee learns other basic skils. For example, an employee in accounting department can learn how to fix a simple computer error from the information technology experts. Such an employee does not have to call for help from the information technology department each time the computer develops a fault (Griffin & Moorhead, 2008). Communication Due to the fact that the employees are in constant contact information flows more fluidly within departments. There is Interaction between employees which enhances team work. Team work is vital for the completion of various projects. Through effective communication projects are completed in time and various goals are achieved (Bryson, 2011). Additionally, employees learns from each other and form social groups. Flexibility Matrix structure facilitates sharing of resources across distinct departments (Bryson, 2011). This is achived in the process of accomplishing a particular project through team work. Various departments collobarate through sharing the material and human resources. The employees feel more flexible in executing their duties since they are not limited to the use of material resources as well as consultation with various specialists. This creates freedom. Through freedom creativity and innovation is realized. To accomplish the above recommended changes the company top managemt should train all the employees on the new structure. Each department should be trained after the other. The company should design implementation program. The structure should be implemented in pharses. This will enable the employees to adapt to the new organizational structure changes. Implementation committee should be formed to oversee sucessful transition between the old and the new organizational structure. The comitte should comprise of all the vice presidents. The matrix organizational structure should be implemented as a test plan in one two departments. Through the test plan the implementation committee will learn it’s weakness and design sustainable strategies to stregthn such weakness. This will also give room for modification implementation strategies that may be found challenging. A review should be conducted on monthly basis to seek weather the matrix structure is effective. Each employee should fill out a questioneer. The questioneers should be anaylzed and conclusions deducted. Once the structure has been found effective in the intial two departments, it should be implemented in other departments (Griffin & Moorhead, 2008). Organizational structure is a platform for executing managerial funtions. A company with the suitable organizational aquires competitve edge over it’s competitors. Through transforming from horizointal to matrix structure FedEx will realize rapid growth and development. Cost of running the company will reduce since there will be effective sharing and utiliztion of resources across various departments facilitated by the matrix structure. Futhermore, the structure will create a platform for creativity and interaction among staff. References: Baligh, H.H. (2006).Organization Structures: Theory and Design, Analysis and Prescription. New Jersey: Springer. Bryson, J.M. (2011). Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations: A Guide to Strengthening and Sustaining Organizational Achievement. New York: John Wiley and sons. FedEx.(2013). About FedEx. Retrived on 16th feb 2013 from: http://about.van.fedex.com/ Galbraith, J.R. (2008). Designing Matrix Organizations that Actually Work: How IBM, Proctor \& Gamble and Others Design for Success. New York: John Wiley and sons. Griffin, R.W., & Moorhead, G. (2009).Organizational Behavior: Managing People and Organizations. New Jersey: Cengage Learning Van, G. (2003). 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