Be the Manager You supervise a team of marketing analysts who work on different

Question

Be the Manager You supervise a team of marketing analysts who work on different snack products in a large food products company. The marketing analysts have recently received undergraduate degrees in business or liberal arts and have been on the job between one and three years. Their responsibilities include analyzing the market for their respective products, including competitors; tracking current marketing initiatives; and planning future marketing campaigns. They also need to prepare quarterly sales and expense reports for their products and estimated budgets for the next three quarters; to prepare these reports, they need to obtain data from financial and accounting analysts assigned to their products. When they first started on the job, you took each marketing analyst through the reporting cycle, explaining what needs to be done and how to accomplish it and emphasizing the need for timely reports. Although preparing the reports can be tedious, you think the task is pretty straightforward and easily accomplished if the analysts plan ahead and allocate sufficient time for it When reporting time approaches, you remind the analysts through e-mail messages and emphasize the need for accurate and timely reports in team meetings. You believe this element of the analysts' jobs couldn't be more stra·1ghtforward. However, at the end of each quarter, the majority of the analysts turn their reports in a day or two late, and, worse yet, your own supervisor (to whom the reports are eventually turned in) has indicated that information is often missing and sometimes the reports contain errors. Once you started getting flak from your supervisor about this problem, you decided you had better fix things quickly. You met with the marketing analysts, explained the problem, told them to turn the reports in to you a day or two early so you could look them over, and more generally emphasized that they really needed to get their act together. Unfortunately things have not improved much, and you are spending more and more of your own time doing the reports. What are you going to do?

Evaluate the case and propose a solution. Prioritise the steps to be taken in your approach, be systematic and motivate your assertions ?

The case study above is valid for 50 marks. Please help me to obtain the most marks out of 50.

Thank You

Kind Regards

Explanation / Answer

As manager it is your key responsibility to manage the analyst and they turning the reports on time. Your supervisor will only look at it as your failure of not getting the job done, even if you have been putting real efforts. For managing this kind of unpunctuality or irregularity it is important that the analyst are made to realize the impact of their action of late submission of reports. However, from the analysts' point of view they might be having a genuine issue with time constraint of submitting the reports. As the analysts need to co-ordinate with a lot of people inside and outside the organization to gather information for generating the report. Even after the gathering of information which is raw and has to be formatted for persentation. As a manager you should be responsible for taking care of the hinderences in front of the analysts in gathering information atleast within the organization. Co-ordinating with other departments to provide the required information on a priority basis can be of great help for the analyst. With the time constraint errors are bound to happen within the reports as there might be no time for checking of errors before submission. For motivating the analysts you as a manager can incentivize the submission of error free reports. Incentives should be framed in such a manner that they are reachable and also in disguise gets the job done. Like you can come with different amount of incentives on different days of submission and different amount or additional amount of incentive for less amount of errors or without errors or combination of both, such as two days before the submission date or one day before the submission date. Even you should arrange for grace periods for submission of reports without incentives ofcourse to obtain a error free report. Incentive can be monetary and also in addition to that recognition for the a job well done is a great factor for motivating the analysts for timely submission of reports.

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