The assignment: Organizational Analysis
Drawing on your understanding of management theory and Morgan’s metaphors present an analysis of an organization.
This assignment focuses on applying five metaphors of Morgan’s research into a real business operation. This assignment presents correlations between Glass Egg Digital Media and the five Morgan’s metaphors including brains, culture, politics, psychic prison and social domination with specific details and examples in order to understand the organization management.
In the beginning of 2012, I first started as a Marketing assistant for Business Development Director, who was then promoted to be Chief Operating Officer recently. In the mid of 2012, the production department grew bigger when Glass Egg earned more big projects, the need for middle manager in managing new game projects became more urgent. Therefore, in May 2012 I changed to support the production department, first as a producer assistant, then be the producer of the vehicle asset outsourcing project for one of our most important client of Glass Egg. During the time of being a producer, I realized my growing interest in managing projects including working with many people at the same time, being proactive and pre-planning for project process, managing workforce and evaluate team members’ performance and other related tasks to make sure that the project can run well and be able to meet all client’s miles stones. In 2013, I officially work permanently for the production department as a producer reporting directly to senior producer and head of production for project process and any risk may happen to the project.
Company introduction
Glass Egg was established based on the foundation of Morgan Interactive in Vietnam 1995. Due to bankruptcy of the mother company in USA, the team in Vietnam leaded by Phil Tran, a game passionate Vietnamese-American, decided to continue the game business in Vietnam by shifting their focus from 2D production studio to 3D games outsourcing in 1999. Phil with the support of Nam Pham, a Vietnamese young talented game designer, has become one of the game studios that can obtain high level of 3D modeling. At that time, Glass Egg was the first 3D outsourcing games studio in Vietnam and was one of the few in the world. Over 14 years in the games outsourcing, Glass Egg has developed its modeling skills, gather new talented people to meet the world standards and became one of the most reputable and biggest video outsourcing game studio in the world. Glass Egg’s customers are all famous and among the biggest games studios in the world including Ubisoft, Codemaster, Microsoft and Electronics Arts
There are around 240 3D artists mainly focusing on providing modeling art assets. New developed mobile division which focused on developing and self-publishing small games for mobile and iPad is a long-term strategic plan of the company to meet the changing needs of the games industry in the world.
The company was changed to new larger location end of last year which is next to the center of the city due to its expansion in number of staff to nearly 250 artists in total (the total artists has increased by nearly 40 percent from 2012 to 2013). The new location gives more space to provide better facility and turns the working place becomes a more comfortable place for younger and highly motivated workforce. Low staff turnover rates of about 5% (Glass Egg Digital Media Brochure 2012) which ensure that the company maintains its experienced and highly committed employees who became team leaders, work mentors for young artists to follow.
Glass Egg Digital Media operation
It assumes that organization operates like a human brain, each department works like a neuron; they have different functions but link together in order to gather, transmit and process information. It can be self-learning from past activities, self-evolving from past results and therefore; to become more efficiently and effectively. Most organizations are single-loop learning so GE is mostly single-loop learning. However, GE did try to set up double-loop learning by learning from external needs that if they want to strengthen their brand, they should have their own brand. Outsourcing business is reliant to business performance of big video games publishers and developers who actually have reported a decline of sales in high budget “triple A” video games (Graft, 2012). As a result since 2011, GE has started to develop its in-house games and establish a new brand under same managerial team called Like.vn focusing on developing and publishing multi-players online games. In fact, Like.vn itself has published 3 role playing game online titles in from 2012 to 2013. Even under the Glass Egg branch, a new division has been established since 2012 specializing on mobile games following the report of the transition trend to mobile games go along with increasing number of smart phone users (Graft, 2012).
Glass Egg’s business divisions
Like a brain, Glass Egg obtains complex process of decision making that involves all departments and with related external parties (in this case are Client and 3D Academies), transmitting information and communication which lead to making important decisions. Below is the decision making process for new chosen project based on my understanding, talking with the high management team and my own experience as a producer for one of the project in Glass Egg.
Overall decision making process for new project
Stage (1), (2), and (3): Contract negotiation involves mainly Board of Directors, the client and supporting parties (Head of production and Legal counsel) contract terms, agreements, value of the contract, method of payment, and other terms to protect two involved parties.
Stage (4): Informing financial department of new contract agreement
Stage (5): Informing Human Resources if there is a need for a large number of new artists for the up-coming project
Stage (6): Especially in big project when the need of a large number of new artists, HR will inform their need of new graduated artists these two specialized in 3D graphic design Academies (Polygon and Nami CG) in advance to focus on training a number of selected artists for specialized skills needed for the project to work for Glass Egg after they graduate.
Stage (7): Project resources allocation which means appointing main leaders in charge of new project in including producers, Art and Technical managers as well as artists to be in the project
Stage (8) and (9): Project planning including training plan for new artists, building overall schedules to meet client’s milestone and overall work flow for the project, then dividing artists into specialized sub-team like team like main team and subordinated team.
From the above decision making chart we can realize that each position based on their functions and their past experiences can be able to make different kinds of decision. In Glass Egg, Human Resources is not the department who work closely with the artists, as the wide scope of the company as well as a growing number of artists turning the producers become the one managing human resource. Whereas, Head of production become the most powerful person in the production department who can decide all kinds of decision ranging from human resources allocation to reward and bonus approval. These kinds of decisions can be conflict with producers’ desire. All producers want to obtain “valuable” artists who are able to meet producer’s deadlines with approved art quality; However, Head of Production who is the who has ultimate power in deciding which project should receive better treatment. Due to the fact that Vietnam (and also Glass Egg) is in the scarcity of qualified games talent according Nicolas Leymonerie (In the interview of IGDA Vietnam, 2011), valuable artists are highly desired by all producers. According to Morgan (2006) that who can access to most resources will obtain the most power; therefore politics emerges in that way.
It is also Glass Egg’s culture that appreciates human resource due to the fact the operation relies mostly on human work using software and supported tools and there is no machine can replace human work. The company culture also embraces the diversity of people and their perspectives by holding regularly meetings between Board of Directors and Head of Production, meetings between Head of Production and producers; Besides, each project have a numerous of meetings for up-front planning, when issues arise and many other weekly casual meetings. Directors ‘room doors are always opened and available for all kinds of managers and even for artists, while producers and art directors and technical managers are seating in the middle of the team. All of these factors enhance the open free and fast communication environment which decides the success of a project performance.
Leadership style
Although artists are male-dominated workforce due to the fact that working in the game industry seems too intense for their female co-workers, the current number of female managers working directly in the game production conversely is outweighed the number of male managers. Currently there are 4 female producers out of 7 producers in total. The Head of production who is also a female one who has worked for Glass Egg more than 15 years once has revealed that she has favored female candidates to be producers than male ones as there were many male producers had failed her requirements during their probation. She believes that female managers are hard working, better management and easier to work with. Then she changed the traditional rule of recruiting which focus on looking for male candidates, all three most recent producer recruitments were female. This fact shows that female is the dominated gender in the middle managers in Glass Egg and they seem to be more flexible and show stronger empathy for their team members than their male colleagues. Probably this style of leadership is suitable for an intense working environment like games as most artists already have to work more hours than usual as well as suffer high pressure from tight deadline schedules. They also tend to not following normal company working time, most of them have a tendency arriving work late and leaving work late as well and perhaps, need a manger that can be flexible and tolerate to them. However, this can be the trap of favored way of thinking as is it really because the Head of Production feel that female leadership style is more effective for project management or because she feel that it easier for her to work with female counterparts who share many same values, tend to be loyal to their higher manager and be better followers. This is called Psychic Prison metaphor which emphasizes that organization members are prisoners of their own usual ways of thinking and past events; in this case the Head of production after a few cases of failed past male candidates has given up her belief in male leadership.
In the mean time, younger producers usually look up to their experienced producers, consider them as their working mentors and follow their actions in problem solving but when it comes to new changes it would cause difficulties if we only follow what we already know and follow old way of doing. For example, it is for many years that most clients prefer communicating through email. However, recent customers increasingly require having quicker means of communication due to the fact that there is less time to outsource a video game but with greater or same quantity of artwork so they need to communicate faster by using less traditional means of communication like Skype and telephone. Most producers are intimidating with this new kind of communication, which does not give them as much planning and thinking time as before.
Organization is an instrument of exploitation
Outsourcing industry itself is an exploitation game of huge games studios who want to reduce production cost by outsourcing basic work to third countries offering cheap labor. By doing that, in-house resources can be utilized maximum to focus on higher level of work including high level of management, creative work and product distributing and therefore, shorten the production time of one game. Glass Egg, one of the largest outsourcing game studios in the world, has been improved its name over the years, inevitably is exploited by their own foreign clients. Sadly, its employees are in the bottom of this labor “squeezing” business model. All Glass Egg employees can sleep at the company at night and are provided dinner for overworking hours at night which is a disguised method of exploitation that encourage employees especially young and highly motivated one can work all day and night. A cool corporate culture, a comfortable work place, a system of monthly bonus and reward for high productivity and a policy of favor male over female artists are all softly traps to promote and enhance workaholism culture in the company. Finally the benefit of these excessive hours brought are distributed mostly for foreign clients, a group of powerful people and at the bottom the 3D artists.
Overall, all 4 metaphors including brains, culture, politics, and psychic prison are overlapped and closely related in the scope of this writing of Glass Egg and seem to all serve most the benefit of a group of people who use organization as a tool of domination which is the fifth metaphor social domination. However, if focus on this perspective of seeing organization as a dominating and exploiting instrument we see only the ugly face of organization management which is only part of truth. In fact, Glass Egg has created hundreds of jobs 3D modelers and created a working place for game lovers right in Vietnam. More importantly, Glass Egg with its humble foundation in 2D and 3D game art work in 1999 has been known over the world for top 3D modeling artists and raised its ambitious plan to move up to the supply chain from simply providing games outsourcing to games developing and publishing.