Management at a Company
Management at a Company
Nowadays every organization has to undergo changes in order to remain competitive and increase profits. Hewlett-Packard Company is a large organization that has been working for many decades already. It has been successfully developing since the times of its creation due to its professional management and regular implementation of changes that help the company to adjust its activities in accordance with the current situation in the market and customers’ needs. This research paper is devoted to the business activities of Hewlett-Packard Company and the organization of change initiatives by its management.
Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) is a world’s leading provider of technologies, products, software, services and solutions to individual clients, medium and small-sized businesses as well as large companies, e.g. government, education, and health institutions. The products of the company can be used for the following purposes: PCs and other devices for the access; printing and imaging-related services and products; information technology company infrastructure e.g. storage and server technology of the organization, networking solutions and products, technology maintenance and support; multi-vendor services for clients, e.g. consulting in technology, support and outsourcing services, business and applications process domains; software for IT management, delivery and application testing software, management solutions information, analytics of big data, risk management and security intelligence solutions ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 3).
Historical Overview
Hewlett-Packard Company was established by the classmates at Stanford University Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in January 1939. The first product of the company was an audio resistance-capacitance oscillator (HP 200A), an electronic tool for testing equipment of sound. Formally Hewlett-Packard was created on August 18, 1947. The President of the company was Mr. Packard and the Vice President was Mr. Hewlett ("Hewlett-Packard Company", 2008, p. 9).
The company elaborated the first PC (personal computer); the first personal touch screen computer, and the first handheld computer. HP developed the system of electronic mail in 1982 in UK and progressed in the business computing field with the HP 9000 technical computer introduction with the technology of 32- bit superchip. This organization also entered the market of printers with its laser printers and inkjet printers’ launch ("Hewlett-Packard Company", 2008, p. 10). The company conducted a number of acquisitions since that time.
Change Management in HP
There were several significant change initiatives in HP. Two of them are described below.
Change 1
Statement of the Project
There existed two goals of this program. One of the goals (short term) was to create a HP tape drives’ new generation that delivered an improved client experience for corporate customers in the market of enterprise storage.
The second goal (long-term) was to implement an approach that is more customer-centered to the development and design of HP Bristol’s tape drives. The requirements phase goal was not to place requirements of the customer ahead of company, technology, and competition-based demands; however, to place requirements of the customer on the same position with the other demands. The development and design phases’ goal was to ensure regular input of the customer during the progress of product design (Sato & Panton, 2003, p. 2).
The change model of Kotter was appropriate for this project as there existed already CEO and company support for the best customer experience delivering in the industry. Eight stages of Kotter to change’s creating are as follows: (1) sense of urgency development; (2) guiding coalition forming; (3) vision creating; (4) vision communicating; (5) others empowering to act in accordance with the vision; (6) short-term wins’ developing; (7) transformation’s broadening; (8) change anchoring in the corporate culture (Sato & Panton, 2003, p. 2).
Participants of the Project
The Design of Customer Experience project lead was Andrew Panton, the co-author; the author, Steve Sato also participated. Andrew asked Steve to assist him with the tools, approach, processes and change management development for this project (Sato & Panton, 2003, p. 2).
Process
The objective was to make the company more centralized, more focused, even though more customer driven, and more agile. Carly is a champion for the organization and is highly customer-driven. In order to strengthen the firm to get more customer-driven, this person established delivering the best experience of the customer in industry among the most important company’s three goals (Sato & Panton, 2003, p. 4).
Results
The work’s results brought about different changes in three principle areas: culture, organization/process, and product. Improvements of product have been recognized by clients through testing of iterative usability. The new Process of Product Design has assisted with creating a significantly stronger accent on the client throughout development of product that has pushed strong support and engagement of all the development program groups, e.g.: improvements of product; enhanced learning and installation experience; experience of improved usage; experience of improved support; experience of improved accessibility; process and organizational changes; changes in organizational culture (Sato & Panton, 2003, p. 9).
A significant role in the implementation of this project belonged to the management of the company and change leaders. Their hard work and following the Kotter’s change model significantly helped with the project’s realization.
Change 2
Announcement of Separation Transaction of HP in October 2014
HP management on October 6, 2014 announced intention to split into two publicly-traded independent organizations: one including the company’s technology infrastructure for enterprise, software, financing businesses and services, that is supposed to do business under the name of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and the second that will include company’s personal systems and printing activities, that is supposed to do business under the name of HP Inc. The split foresaw some conditions, e.g. receiving approval from the Board of Directors of HP. The split was supposed to be finished by the end of the year 2015. According to the plan of separation, shareholders of HP will possess shares of both HP Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 4).
The customers of HP are organized by commercial and consumer groups, and HP products, services and solutions purchases, can be realized by HP directly or through a different partners indirectly, that include: retailers selling HP products to clients via their own Internet or physical stores; resellers selling HP services and products, often together with their own products or services that provide added value to certain groups of customers; distributors that deliver HP products and services to resellers; manufacturers of original equipment that integrate HP’s services and products with their own services and products and offer the integrated solution to their clients; independent vendors of software that supply their customers with certain software solutions and frequently help HP in selling their services and products to customers; integrators of the systems that offer expertise in implementing and designing of IT solutions and frequently cooperate with HP to extend their influence or expertise in sales of the services and products; advisory companies that offer different IT consulting and management levels, including certain work of systems integration, and usually cooperate with HP on solutions for the clients that need HP’s unique services and products ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 9).
The services and products of HP are available globally. The management supposes that such geographic diversity makes possible for the organization to meet worldwide basis demand for either enterprise or individuals clients, draws on technical and business expertise from a diverse workforce, ensures company’s operations stability, offers streams of revenue that can offset economic geographic trends and provides a possibility to enter new markets ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 10).
The principle HP culture element is innovation. Company’s efforts in development are concentrated on developing and designing products, solutions and services that meet clients’ changing desires and needs, and new trends in technology. The efforts of HP are also focused on determining the areas in which the management supposes it is possible to make a certain contribution and the spheres, in which cooperation with other large technology enterprises may leverage HP’s structure of cost and improve experiences of their customers ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 11).
One of the innovative ideas of HP could be entering the other electronic devices’ market. The company has a solid background in a similar industry and could easily gain a success.
Competition
HP faces a significant competition in all its business activity areas. Primarily it competes on the basis of performance, technology, quality, price, brand, reliability, distribution, reputation, services and products range, ease of products use, customer training, account relationships, security, support and service, application software availability and offerings of internet infrastructure.
Every HP’s business segments markets are characterized by the significant level of competition among large organizations with strong position as well as numerous rapidly growing new companies. There are many short product life cycles, and in order to stay competitive the company should develop new services and products, regularly improve its existing services and products and effectively compete on the above-listed factors. Also, the company supposes that it will be necessary to regularly adjust prices for its services and products in order to remain competitive ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 12).
HP employed around 302,000 individuals globally in 2014 ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 17).
Risk Factors of HP
Risk Factors of the company include:
In case the company is unsuccessful at business challenges’ addressing, its operations results and business can be affected adversely and its investing possibility into business growing may be limited;
pressure from the competitors’ side may decrease HP’s revenue, prospects and gross margin ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 18);
HP’s intention to split into two publicly-traded independent organizations is subject to different uncertainties and risks and might not be executed by the anticipated timeline or expected plans, and will require much expense and time that could adversely affect or disrupt the business ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 20);
The split might not bring all or some of the expected benefits;
The split might result in the significant tax liability ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 21);
Economic uncertainty and weakness might affect adversely HP’s revenue, expenses and gross margin ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 22);
HP depends significantly on the third-party suppliers, and its financial outcomes might suffer in case of failure to properly manage suppliers ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 23);
Disruptions of business might significantly decrease HP’s future financial condition and revenue and increase expenses and costs ("Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K)", 2015, p. 25).
Besides the above-mentioned, there is also a number of other risks faced by HP.
Conclusions
As it can be seen from the above information, HP has undergone several changes since its creation. This research paper describes two major changes initiated by the company’s management. They were critical for the organizations’ competitive advantage and success. The history of HP confirms the importance of right change process organization and selection of the proper change model for its implementation.
References
Annual Report 2014 (Form 10-K). (2015). Hewlett-Packard, 3-36. Retrieved from http://h30261.www3.hp.com/~/media/Files/H/HP-IR/documents/reports/2015/hpq-annual-report-2014.pdf
Hewlett-Packard Company. (2008). Datamonitor, 9-10. Retrieved from http://www.lhoir.fr/divers/memoire/Etudes%20de%20march%E9s%20_%20Chiffres/DATAMONITOR_HP.pdf
Sato, S. & Panton, A. (2003). Using a Change-Management Approach to Promote Customer-Centered Design. Sato Partners, 2-9. Retrieved from http://www.satopartners.com/pdfs/satoeditfinalfinal.pdf
Zhang, H. (2010). Research Hewlett Packard through its Value Chain. International Journal Of Business And Management, 5(8). Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.453.5743&rep=rep1&type=pdf
