CASE ANALYSIS-IGB 13

MEDISYS CORP.: THE INTENSCARE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT TEAM

Submitted by: Vanila Mehta P40049
MediSys, a U.S.-based medical equipment maker, has been developing IntensCare, a new medical
system for monitoring intensive-care patients. It has invested heavily in IntensCare, launch of
which is eagerly awaited by the market. The product development team, representing several
functional areas of the company, has been working on the product for six months but is now
running into significant problems with the product design, the schedule, and their own group
dynamics. Recently, pressure increased when they learned that two more powerful competitors
had begun work on their own products for this market. Several team members are concerned about
meeting the team's targets. Struggling especially hard to overcome the various problems is the
marketing manager who has profit-and-loss responsibility for IntensCare.Art Beaumont, the new
president hired in 2008, created an IntensCare product development team, along with his executive
team. This team included: Karen Baio of Regulatory Affairs, Aaron Gerson who was the Research
and Development researcher who formulated the idea, Bret O’Brien who was the manager in
Product Engineering, Jack Fogel who was the Senior Production manager, Dipesh Mukerjee who
was the Software & Design manager, and Valerie Merz who was Marketing manager. Beaumont,
along with his executive team, created this cross-functional team in order to create and implement
a strategy for growing the business swiftly. A cross-functional team is one in which employees
from about the same hierarchical level, but from different work areas, come together to accomplish
a task. This team represented a new approach to product development at MediSys since it used a
cross-functional team to speed up product development by working together continuously to move
a product from its conceptual stage to final production, known as parallel development.
Positive synergy is the ability of a group to outperform even its best individual member. In other
words, teams are often used in research laboratories because they can draw on the diverse skills of
various individuals to produce more meaningful research than could be generated by all the
researchers working independently. This team did not seem to have positive synergy since its
members had different drivers, which made it difficult to make good decisions together as a team.
For example, as O’Brien described it, marketing’s role was revenue-driven, production’s was to
manage a supply chain, software and design’s was to integrate the software into the design,
engineering’s was to deliver at cost and on time, and regulator’s was to throw roadblocks in front
of everyone else. 3. Three concepts that lead to team effectiveness include context, composition,
and process. For the context section for determining team effectiveness, adequate resources,
leadership and structure, climate of trust, and performance evaluation & reward systems are
necessary. In this case, the MediSys IntensCare product development team seemed to lack a good
leadership and structure because Jack Fogel, the team leader, seemed to be too concerned with the
product, and too little concerned with the business issues and impending launch. Climate of trust
seemed to be an issue that was lacking between the team members since the members were worried
about the time line and aggressive goals and did not trust or were not confident with each other in
meeting those goals. For the composition section of team effectiveness, abilities of the members,
personality, allocating roles, size of the teams, etc. are included. In this case, personality of the
team members seemed to impend on the team’s success. For instance, Karen Baio described her
other team members to be childish and they looked at the project as a game. She also described
Valerie Merz to be very self-centered, focused on marketing, and very aggressive in the meetings.
In addition, the process section of team effectiveness includescommon purpose, conflict levels,
team efficacy, etc. In this case, conflict levels seemed to be an issue in the manner that the team
could not decide if a modular design was a good idea or not. Therefore, with factors that arose
such as these, the team’s success was impended upon.
Bret is the lead engineer and has only two engineers under him. Multiple projects along with the
launch of IntensCare are split amongst the two engineers under him. Bret’s partner Dipesh is in
India most of the time so they do not get to communicate as much. Also, it is stated that in the
engineering department that dates and quality are the only drivers for them to accomplish company
goals. There are many alternatives that can be implemented. The first alternative is to hire more
engineers to ease the workload for the engineering department. The second alternative is to bring
Dipesh back from India to help the engineering department to focus more on the project and add
incentives for performance. The third alternative is to hire a consulting company to help resolve
the debate over the modular design that she knew was critical to successful adoption and long-
term success in the market. The pros of hiring more engineers to ease the workload for the
engineering department are it will relieve some of the stress that the department is facing on the
project and allow the company to put the new hires on other projects so that Bert and his team
can focus on IntenseCare project which would lead to more effective communication among the
cross functional team which comes with a drawback of extra cost to company.