COIT20251 Assessment 2 Part B – Minor Case Studies
Case Study 1: Koala Food – related to the topic of “Stakeholder Analysis and
Management”
Koala Food is an Australian company in the food industry. It had a system that collected all the
safety and other test data and produced reports that were submitted to the government to
gain approval to sell their products. The system was over 20 years old. The users were
perfectly happy with the system as it was. Upper‐level management was concerned that the
two people who were maintaining the system were getting on in years and would be retiring
soon, leaving the company with no one to maintain the system. Without the system, the
company could conceivably not be able to sell any new products. Clearly the problem did not
belong to the users. They had no issues with a system that they had been using successfully for
years. The assigned business analyst encountered resistance from the users that was
supported by supervisory and union management. The users didn’t have the time to spend
telling the business analysts what the system did and how it produced to reports for the
government. The users did not need a new system or the trauma of change that comes with it.
The two technicians maintaining the system were similarly too busy keeping the system
running with changes to report formats and modifications to regulations and had long since
lost touch with the programming and technology.
In this case, the specific problem owner was in the ranks of upper‐level management and was
not identified. The business analyst had orders from the top to define what the system did in
such a way that the entire regulatory compliance system could be replaced by a new system
written in modern programming language. The users of the old system could care less about
getting a new modern system, preferring the system they were used to, and were totally
uncooperative. And there was a hard deadline: the day the last of the maintainers will leave
the company for a well‐earned retirement in six months. If you were the business analyst in
this situation, what would you do? (Based on materials from “Business Analysis” (Blais, 2012),
pp.116-117, with modifications)
Analyse the above Case Study to answer the following two questions:
1. Where do the major stakeholders sit on the Power/Influence/Interest Diagram?
2. Discuss the strategy that you would apply to manage the stakeholders in this case who are
uncooperative?
Hint: Study the materials on pages 106-114 of the unit textbook as a starting point.
Case Study 2: Australian Kitchen – related to the topic of “Business and
Financial Case”
Australian Kitchen is a mid-sized kitchen cabinet making company that designs, makes, and
installs residential kitchen cabinets for builders as well as homeowner customers in Brisbane.
They make kitchen cabinets with custom designs according to customer requirements. Their
cost of making a kitchen cabinet is substantially higher than that of volume kitchen cabinet
makers who make standard kitchen cabinets based on a limited range of kitchen models. The
Australian Kitchen company comprises of several departments such as accounting and
finance, customer service, design, production, installation, logistics, marketing, and sales. Each
department is headed by a manager who is responsible for managing the performance of the
employees in that department. There are one or more teams working in each department, with
each of the teams being led by a team leader. The departments like to work independently and
focus on their departmental goals rather than the company goals giving rise to departmental
silos. This situation has resulted in lack of coordination, collaboration and information sharing
among the teams across departments. Recently they have been facing higher customer
demands because of their brand reputation. Due to excessive business customer demands, it is
taking too long to complete jobs such as designing kitchen cabinets, signing contracts, and
completing the projects, leading to a long backlog of tasks which could potentially undermine
the company’s reputation. In addition, recently there are raw material supply chain issues.
The top management has recently launched a business improvement project to restructure the
organisation, improve the business processes, and diversify employee skills so that the teams
can work more efficiently towards achieving the Australian Kitchen company goals. A
business analyst employed by the top management has come up with a business case which
includes the following business improvement options:
• Flatten the organisation structure so that front-line staff has more autonomy in decision
making.
• Removing silos in the company so that customer service, design, production, logistics and
marketing and sales teams can collaborate and share information more easily without needing
the approval of their managers.
• Launching a cloud-based ERP system to enhance collaboration and communication among
the teams.
• Re-skilling the front-line staff to become generalists to work in many different roles as needs
arise.
(Based on materials developed by CQU staff)
Analyse the above Case Study to answer the following three questions:
1. What tangible and intangible costs would the business improvement options involve?
Discuss with brief explanations.
2. If implemented successfully, what tangible and intangible benefits would the business
improvement options deliver? Discuss with brief explanations.
3. Identify impacts of the business improvement options.
Hint: Study the materials on pages 170-175 of the unit textbook as a starting point.