COMM 4315 APPforms Presentation Assignment

APPFORMS Inc. – Applications FOR Mobile Computing and Smartphones

APPFORMS creates APPlications FOR Mobile Computing and Smartphones. APPFORMS creates various practical, functional and recreational apps for Apple IPhones, Android based phones, Blackberry OS phones, Windows Mobile phones, and a host of tablet and convertible computers. APPFORMS is a growing organization. The company started with three people and currently has 44 employees. APPFORMS is a technology company where decision-making is left to the individual product groups and only strategic decisions are pushed up to senior management. Each group thus works as independent profit centres within the larger organization and is accountable for every aspect of the business. Such an organization is typically referred to as an adaptive organization, as they can respond quickly to changes in the environment and market. The organizational culture is built on open communication and trust is critical to overcome miscommunication and errors in processes and products. APPFORMS also uses incentives and programs to reward successes, but the drive for employees is to build products that enhance peoples’ technology experiences, and the opportunity for innovation i

s the key motivator of the people who work at APPFORMS.

He looked at the four smartphones on his desk (he had one for each operating system – Apple, Android, Blackberry and Windows), picked up his Blackberry, logged into his Twitter account and tweeted – Goran Duro @goranduro – “Sorry Blackberry closing Bedford office @blackberry. Contact #APPFORMS”. That was about four years ago. His own company’s Blackberry division had done well initially, but in the face of competition from the leading Android and IPhone markets and the receding Windows phone market (Microsoft had moved away from the mobile business and moved into Cloud Computing), he had to make key changes in his organizational structure and adapt to the changing markets. He was looking forward to an “all hands on” deck meeting with his executive team. The questions they had to answer involved both business decisions and cultural.

1. How should the organization reorganize?
2. What kind of cultural issues could arise when he merged some of the groups that had been operating independently?
   1. The cultural issues could stem from working on different platforms
   2. The cultural issues could stem from people suddenly working with different co-workers.
3. Should there be some sort of cultural sensitivity training? He had heard about some culturally sensitive issue from the Apple Team. What sort of sensitivity training would best suit his organization, already a great mix of talent from across the country and the world?
4. He’ll need reports from Consuela about her plans for cultural sensitivity training and the corporate retreat. He’d also need to be briefed by the different Team Managers, Sanchez, Yaron, Tremblett, Zhao, and Sanipass about what their forecasts were for their teams. Lamba, Tremblett, and Zhao were already looking into integrating the Blackberry and Windows teams. Goran was looking forward to hearing about their findings.
5. Are there other issues that have not surfaced yet, but would need to be addressed, like gender parity, harassment of any sort, internal communication from senior management to the teams and within the teams, and when the Windows and Blackberry teams are integrated, will there be duplication/redundancy?

Subtext – Questions from fact-finding exercises from each of the teams. These four individuals are co-op interns at APPFORMs and had been given certain tasks by their managers. The information about these tasks is given in the document called APPFORMS Org Chart and Scenarios. COMM 4315 APPforms Presentation Assignment