Decision Making

3 Pages 848 Words

In this paper, I would like to report on my job experience as a business consultant in Japan. In 2001, I worked in a corporate main-system implementation project in a Japanese traditional chemical company. That project was made up by 4 teams (Accounting, Budgeting, Production control, and Procurement) and each team had about 10 or 12 staff, and it totaled around 50 people. (Fig. 1)@I was assigned in Production control team and functioned as a progress management staff. In the project, there had a weekly-meeting to discuss challenges and to check progress of each team. Attendants of the meeting were a project-leader, team-leader and sub-team leader from each team.
One day, three team leaders (accounting, budgeting, and production control) reported that all things were going well as usual, but only procurement team-leader reported differently. He said that his team could not complete their tasks within their schedule demanded by the project, because they had trouble with coordination with their business partners and clients. (In this project, procurement team had to contact with their suppliers and clients about their new transaction flow.) Therefore, he requested that more staff should be allocated to his team, or schedule should be arranged for them. But regarding this issue, most attendants of other three teams (Accounting, Budgeting, Production control) insisted that procurement team should tackle with the trouble by current resources and should get done within current schedule, because they (three team leaders) did not want to be affected by such changes and also did not have any interests in other teamfs trouble. Therefore, although he explained the difficulty of coordination with partners and clients many times, most attendants continued to oppose his request. Eventually, project leader respected the majority opinion and he concluded that procurement team should work harder towards the objective.
Then, procurement tea...