Kerrie is a General Manager for a financial services company, which is facing a downturn in revenues due to a recession. Kerrie has agreed to a 15% reduction in her operating cost for her division.

In part A Kerri uses a team based approach to address the cost reduction. It quickly becomes apparent to her that the majority of her management team were more concerned with how it would affect their departments and less concerned about the bigger picture. Karrie is aware of how it will affect all of their departments and her challenge at this point is to try and sell her decisions to the team. She also utilizes the departments HR representative for guidance with the restructuring from a neutral position.

Part B discusses the implementation of her plan, starting with the redesign team. The results of the Redesign Team took about a month but revealed some very interesting information. Researched showed that the company had a disconnect from the customer. First, they didn’t offer online services which is a must have even if your financial services company prefers direct contact with the client. The research also revealed that some of the tasks like attempting to return calls were a dissatisfier to the customer and a huge time drain on the Account Managers. The research pointed in the direction of making the company more centralized rather than the regional structure that currently exists. In addition to the resistance from her management team Kerrie also faced dropping employee engagement numbers which prompted her to open more communication with the employees under