Case Study: Menlo Innovations

Case Study: Menlo Innovations

How Top Management Leaders Fostered Innovation in The Company

In modern organizations, work flexibility has remained one of the unsettling tasks every management is focused on achieving. For leaders to enhance innovation in the company, they need to foster teamwork and create an innovative workplace so that employees are productive through workplace design. From the case, it has been indicated how the founder of Menlo innovation inc. had to decide whether to implement traditional project management methodologies and office layouts. It is clear from the case that the founder of Menlo innovations identified the two strategic objectives that led them to organize based on 1876 layouts that Edison's invention factory once used. The approach used by management, in this case, was to ensure that employees could share information and ideas and take part in projects as a team, something that enhanced their innovativeness as an entire team.

Given that Menlo wanted to steer its growth, in 2001, the company's leaders implemented an innovative system. Their implementation opted for agile project management techniques and a flexible workplace to ensure that the company maintains its essential growth in the market. The adoption of agile project management gave the company significant benefits compared to its previous management techniques. For instance, the project made Menlo have tremendous planning, thus leading to its overall success (Purkayastha & Faheem, 2008). On the other hand, it is clear that numerous software engineering firms never valued project management because they always thought it would limit their innovativeness and creativity. But Menlo went against all odds and enhanced agile project management technique that mainly focused on efficiency, thus making the company register positive growth. From this view, it is true that as a leader in the company, you need to be innovative so that to enhance new ideas that can make your company, like Menlo, register positive growth.

How flexible team efforts yielded optimal benefits for the firm

Having a flexible working place always comes with significant benefits for the employees and the organization as a whole. The management of Menlo knew this noble factor and thus opted to enhance flexible organizational structure so that to ensure engineers works when more relaxed (Klein & Sorra, 2017). According to Sheridan, who enhanced the flexible arrangement in the workplace, he believed that doing that would allow the employees to collaborate when doing the projects, thus accomplishing their tasks more efficiently. It is also evident that flexibility created a work-life balance within the company, making employees take Menlo as a favorable place to work. Furthermore, the employees had a room to show their creativity with flexibility, which attracted more employees to the firm. In what seems to be more important is that the idea helped the organization maintain high retention, implying that the management implemented this flexible workplace to reduce employee turnover.

Innovation is an essential factor within the organization because it has essential benefits for both the employees and the company. For instance, the benefits of an innovative workplace are that it helps to increase the employees' level of satisfaction, thus leading to higher productivity. Having an innovative workplace also helps employee retention because it offers flexibility and work-life balance (Purkayastha & Faheem, 2008). According to Sheridan, after enhancing flexibility in the company, even some of Menlo's former employees started to return, indicating that innovation is a significant thing that management needs to establish within the organization as apart from making employees productive, it also motivates them to stay.

The Significant of Effective Project Planning in The Success of The Company

In order to measure the success of any project, you need to look at three variables: scope, time, and cost. The three aspects are vital because they always determine limitations in project management. It is clear that a project that can efficiently achieve all the highlighted three factors can be considered to have succeeded. But to achieve the three is not a walk in the park but rather a strategy that requires significant planning and execution that is mostly possible through strategic project management (Purkayastha & Faheem, 2008). This indicates that project management plays a significant role in ensuring that the organization is successful in its growth and planning. From the argument of Sheridan, supporting project management helped Menlo reduce development costs and time. By enhancing project management engineers in the Menlo firm, they identified mistakes early enough and corrected them. This helped the company and employees to save costs and time needed to complete projects.

Variable alternatives

For this case, the firm's viable alternative was the implementation of a flexible workplace and agile project management. Other options were the use of traditional project management techniques to manage projects within the company throughout.

Recommended alternatives 

When making decisions as leaders, you need to make it based on efficiency that each option taken brings a positive impact to the organization. In this case, Sheridan's case decision to enhance an innovative workplace and agile project management was the best alternative. These options were significant to the organization as they allowed for an excellent work-life balance, thus the reason Sheridan and his co-founder opted for them as the best options.  

Action Plan

Given the impact of the options on Menlo, it is significant that Sheridan, the company CEO con, continues implementing them. Also, the CEO should continue embracing flexibility as that will foster the company's vision of extreme programming. Having looked at how vital the options are to the company, it is crucial, based on my view, that its implementation should have been settled by 2008. It is also important to have a continuous evaluation, and this would be based on employee and client satisfaction. 

References

Klein, K. J., & Sorra, J. S. (2017). The challenge of innovation implementation. Academy of management review, 21(4), 1055-1080.

Purkayastha, D., & Faheem, H. (2008). Menlo Innovations: A new approach to workplace and project management. IBS Center for Management