HR Assignment Questions

(Managerial Exercise)

1. Presenter: HR Manager
Audience: Top/ Senior Management- consisting of heads of functions & business
division.
You want Self Managing Teams (SMTs) to be introduced in the new plant coming up in
the new factory location at the worker level. The plant is expected to employ 140-150
persons. The members of SMTs will work without a supervisor. No individual roles
would be assigned. Only the team outputs and roles would be specified, and so SMT
members would have considerable choice/ freedom in role assignments.
How would you make it happen? How would you structure your presentation and what
will be the content? How are you going to manage the opposition? What response you
will have to defend?

2. Presenter: Research Manager of a company manufacturing pesticides

Audience: Department Head and Senior Scientists in R & D.
Convince them that production of RX-550, a very profitable product with virtually no
competition, should be discontinued immediately. The product has been banned in Japan,
USA & certain parts of Europe, as the strong evidence has emerged regarding its negative
ecological impact.

3. You have been promoted to take up the emerging task of Management Development in
your company. Mentoring / coaching is an effort towards getting people to come up to
speed in an intensely competitive environment. This requires that employees take out 1 to
2 hrs of their schedule every week. The person you are about to talk to would make a
terrific Mentor. How would you initiate and get it done.

4. In the year 2000, the Indian Railways – the world's second largest railway network
under a single management was nearly bankrupt. Over the next eight years, however,
there was a dramatic improvement in its performance. In this transformation process what
were some of the organization's renewal (for the mindset change of people) initiatives
taken.

5. You’re the supervisor of a group of employees whose task is to assemble disk drives that
go into computers. You find that quality is not what it should be and that many of your
group’s devices have to be brought back and reworked; your boss says that “You’d better
start doing a better job of training your workers.” A) What are some of the “staffing
factors” that could be contributing to this problem? B) Explain how you would go about
assessing whether it is in fact a training problem.