Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)

Tsedal  Neeley; Thomas J. DeLong

Case | HBS Case Collection | July 2008 (Revised November 2009)

Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)

Abstract

Greg James, a global manager at Sun Microsystems, Inc., sets out to meet with his entire 43-member customer implementation team spread across India, France, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America to resolve a dire customer system outage as required by a service agreement. Rather than finding a swift resolution to the rapidly escalating customer situation that motivated his trip, he finds himself facing distributed work, global collaboration, conflict, and management issues that are threatening to unravel his team.

Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Crisis Management; Service Delivery; Groups and Teams; Conflict and Resolution; Technology Industry; India; United Arab Emirates; France; United States;

Format: Print

15 pages

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Citation:

Neeley, Tsedal, and Thomas J. DeLong. "Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)." Harvard Business School Case 409-003, July 2008. (Revised November 2009.)

Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2019

Eric Hawkins Leading Agile Teams @ Digitally-Born AppFolio (A)

Tsedal Neeley, Paul Leonardi and Michael Norris

Eric Hawkins, director of engineering at AppFolio—a digital technology firm that offered cloud-based business software to small and medium sized companies—was shocked by an unusual request from his senior leadership team. Could Hawkins and one of his agile teams build a check scanner feature inside their management software? AppFolio’s founders had instructed to never build a check scanner; providing technologies to help businesses move into the digital era was a primary company goal. A scanner for paper checks would contradict the hard-won culture of software innovation and project self-selection that AppFolio and Hawkins’ teams lived by. Hawkins also worried that creating a new team to work on the check scanning project would cause workload and morale issues. But the sales team believed that this technology could close deals with larger, more complex property management companies, some with managers who wanted the check scanner feature. Several large-scale deals were on the line. Hawkins quickly assembled an agile market validation team and considered two options: hold fast to the company’s values and refuse to build the check scanner feature or capitulate and build a basic check scanner with minimum functionality. Engineers would likely consider this a “loser” project, yet sales might get a boost that could open a new revenue stream. Hawkins had to make his decision quickly.

Keywords: digital transformation; values; Agile; vision; corporate culture; Leadership; Values and Beliefs; Organizational Culture; Decision Choices and Conditions; Technology Industry; United States; California;

Citation:

Neeley, Tsedal, Paul Leonardi, and Michael Norris. "Eric Hawkins Leading Agile Teams @ Digitally-Born AppFolio (A)." Harvard Business School Case 419-066, June 2019. View Details

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Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)

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