Gail’s phone buzzed as she entered the DigiTech office Monday morning. Having been the director of human resources for three years, Gail was accustomed to her phone buzzing as soon as the day began, but this time was different. Stephanie, the company’s chief operating officer (COO) had sent a text requesting an urgent meeting with Gail.

DigiTech was an educational gaming provider specializing in peer-to-peer games for kids between 12 and 15 that provided the foundations for software coding. DigiTech had been in business for 12 years and employed about 125 people in various functions from user experience to graphic design, to technology support. It was an exciting time at DigiTech, as the company had recently created a new strategic plan and digital transformation plan that would take DigiTech into the next generation of computing power and gain back the market share it had recently lost.

Late last year, the business analyst at DigiTech had discovered that the company was losing clients because its connectivity was not fast enough, and the quality of its games was falling behind the market. While DigiTech had no problem improving the quality of its games, the company discovered that when its games had become more detailed, its connectivity speed had dropped, leaving clients frustrated. DigiTech decided to move everything to the cloud to improve connectivity speed and give the company access to the computing power required by the higher-quality games as part of its digital transformation plan.

Stephanie was frustrated. She expressed to Gail that DigiTech's operations team needed to successfully implement the projects that would take its software into the cloud. This put the implementation plan that was supposed to take five months and nearly two months behind. This was a problem for Stephanie and the company’s CEO because they had both promised the owners that everything would be up and running by June—a mere three months away.

Stephanie’s immediate reaction was that the operations team needed to work harder and learn whatever they needed to to get it done. To that end, Stephanie wanted Gail’s help so that HR could make it happen.

Gail asked Stephanie what she meant by the operations team’s need to “learn whatever they needed to to get it done.” Stephanie indicated that the operations team was having difficulty getting things “set up right” in the cloud because things needed to be configured differently than before and that they had seen increased security breaches since starting the project. Probing further, Gail asked what the operations team needed to learn, specifically, to which Stephanie replied, “I’m not sure, I just know that they need some training, and fast.”

QUESTIONS

1.What do you believe has led to the emergency meeting between Stephanie and Gail from (1) an organizational perspective and (2) a strategic HR perspective?

2.What internal and external forces were influencing DigiTech?

3.In hindsight, what should Gail have done before this eventful Monday morning? What should Gail do now?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

1 Emergency Meeting Perspective 1 Organizational Perspective The emergency meeting between Stephanie and Gail likely stems from the critical delays and challenges faced by DigiTech in its digital tran... View the full answer