Dyna Corporation

To: Mr. Pacey Foster

From: Miss. Jyoti Swain
Date: October 2, 2019

Subject: A memorandum on the analysis of Dyna Corporation using the political lens.

The political lens views an organization as an arena for conflicts and disputes among individuals and groups with

varying individual and collective goals and interests. At the root of every dispute lies conflicting interests of

different stakeholders in the political system and its resolution requires political actions like negotiation, exercise

of power and influence etc. Two most important concepts of the political lens are power and interest. Using these

concepts, I will analyze Dynacorp from a political standpoint and identify the factors that are facilitating and those

which are hindering the change process to a front/back structure at Dynacorp.

Organization redesign:

The changing market and Dynacorp’s inability to meet customer requirements for complete integrated solution

led to its downfall from being a market leader. In order to face the growing challenges and to meet the strategic

needs of the organization, the CEO mandated Dynacorp’s change to a front/back structural design based on the

task force’s report. As part of the new design the “back end” combined the engineering and manufacturing

divisions into end-to-end cross functional business units (BUs), concentrating on a specific product category from

development and manufacturing to dealing with marketing strategy and product positioning. The “front-end”

customer operation sales force though kept intact, faced profound changes in the daily activities as opposed to

the back-end. The new design created industry-focused branches or account teams to better support customers

and BUs. Both parts are multifunctional but with different grouping dimensions.

Problem:

Even after the system being in place for a year and half “the U.S customer operations division has consistently

been behind plan in both revenue and profit” as stated by the executive vice president for U.S customer
operations, Carl Greystone (Ancona, M-2, 86). Now let’s see how conflict of interests among the different stake

holders and the power play of these stakeholder is contributing to this situation.

Interest:

In a political point of view, there are two types of interests-individual and collective interest. In order to

understand the alignment or conflict in interests of individuals or groups, we need to first identify the key

stakeholders in the organization. Stakeholder can be defined as “individual or group that have a stake, i.e. set of

interests, that is affected by what the organization is and how it carries out its activities” (Ancona, M-2, 35). In

Dynacorp’s change process the key stakeholders are EVP U.S. customer operations Carl Greystone, VP for

Northeast region Ben Walker, Branch Managers like Martha Pauley, head of BUs like Jim Davis, other sales team

members and customers like Judy Brown.

Clearly, there is conflict of interest among these stakeholders. The higher managerial positions as they should and

as usual were looking at rebuilding the organization’s market share and increasing margin, whereas most of the

branch managers are more focused on individual interest like the new performance measurement system. Martha

Pauley also points out that the issue in the organization’s ability to compete in market also lies in its high cost. The

higher management has not addressed it and she doesn’t have the power and control over the unit manufacturing

cost and the customer support resources to provide right amenities to move forward. There are conflicts between

the branches and business units as well. On one end the reorganization involved a whole new array of

responsibilities, need to have knowledge of the full product lines and software applications, that the sales teams

are confused as to who handles what piece of sale due to lack of trainings and communication and the business

units on the other end continuously push different types of sales based on their products, which is causing friction

between them, as rightly stated by Martha Pauley. Another major problem that the organization is facing is the

lack of efficient and skilled work force for the new roles. The reorganization created roles that requires the

customer operation teams to sell integrated solutions and not just products. But while the roles are new, the same

old people who know very well how to sell a product and not a solution are filling in the shoes without any proper

guidance or trainings, as stated by Ben Walker. One of the sales team members even states that he would like to

have more customers like Judy Brown who want standard off-the-shelf equipment for their business.
Hence, we can infer that the interests of the higher management, managers and team members is highly

conflicting. The top management wants the organization to regain its market value, whereas the managers are

more focused about their performance review and the team members are still operating under the same old

mindset.

Power:

Power is the ability to influence behavior and comes in to play when there are conflicting interests. The higher

management used their authority to mandate the transformation in organization structure but neither considered

the mindset and attitudes of the team not provided the desired support for successful change. All the people will

not have the desired skill set for the new roles, and that is where the problem arises, as aptly stated by Ben Walker,

“Our short-term problem is that we have a new structure, but the same people to fill the slots.” He feels with the

help of early retirements, downsizing and hiring of appropriate staff the issue can be solved. But he does not have

the authority to implement it and even for the top management it is difficult to replace nearly 25 percent of work

force.

The new structure has caused confusions among managers as to who should handle what sales, and so they can

not use their authority to get the work done by their teams. In the old structure individuals enjoyed the power of

expertise and informal networks by having close ties with clients, but with the new account teams in place to

handle customer requirements individuals need to work as team players and build new networks around their

teams. Also there are members of each support groups in individual teams, which is good but it also affects the

effectiveness of the support team, as mentioned by one of the sales team members in the team meet, “This is one

of those custom systems that they can’t seem to gear up for” (Ancona, M-2, 90). Another major loop hole is lack

of proper support system to have a team building and cooperative mindset, like half of the people are not turning

up for team meetings, no off-site meeting, and so it gets difficult to grasp issues early on in time, i.e. lack of formal

and informal networks within the organization.

Conclusion and suggestions:

Dynacorp seems to be making progress with respect to renewed growth and profitability and gradually catching

up to their market competitors. The new organizational design seems to have fixed many strategic issues faced

by the organization, but as it is clear from the above analysis that it left many political issues unanswered.

The evidence above shows that the reason behind the failure of the U.S. customer operations division is due to

the conflict between individual interests and that of the collective goal of organizational growth, lack of proper

communication and networking within the organization, absence of proper staff for the new roles and failure in

the part of management in having concrete guidelines and taking authoritative actions.

In order to resolve these issues, the needs to have effective, continuous and open communication at all time. The

management should provide efficient guidelines and true picture of the organization time to time to all other

stakeholders. Should also organize timely townhall to update everyone about its whereabouts. The management

should work closely with managers or department heads and collect and review their feedbacks, which would in

turn help them to take quick and effective decisions. Also, management should take initiatives to align mangers

interest with that of the organization in terms of quality and productivity and not just on the annual performance

metrics. Managers and team members should have frequent timely meeting with on-site and off-site staffs.

Frequent meetings will help the group to prioritize their collective interest and at the same time help to identity

and resolve conflicts and motivate them to work as a team, also help management identity issues and interests of

the staff for better decision making.

Secondly, the organization needs to train the existing sales staff to help them to successfully fit into the new roles

and to change their old mindset and to have a new goal with border perspective of selling solutions and not just

products to their customers. And, simultaneously hire new work force with desired skill set or replace existing as

per need. Appropriate power and authority should be given to concerned people in each department so that they

can make effective changes as and when needed at their department level. This will enable them to assign work,

as they know their team well. Lastly, they need to promote networking through meeting, which will lead to new

connections with in the teams and across groups to better aid in meeting the organization goals.

Dynacorp needs to implement these political strategies to overcome the issues that are persisting in the

organization in order to achieve its goal of growth and profitability.