Royce Consulting

        Royce Consulting consults primarily for major businesses, meaning that consultants are directly on site in countries across the globe. Royce has 160 locations, one of which has 124 people working. Entry-level staff are hired directly from college, promoted internally; managers maintained client contracts, managed personnel and assisted executives and leadership in creating consultation proposals. Their specific infrastructure is highly minimal: They are a virtual company in many ways, whose rank-and-file staff are often being held up at hotels or the houses of friends or offices of clients. Their infrastructure overhead is thus also nominal. In general, their only fixed costs are basic management and the necessary technology to do research for and assist with clients; aside from that, the firm's operations are variable, able to scaled up or down to the degree of business. Innovations being considered for infrastructure are a hoteling system for managers and a virtual office software suite.

        Potential issues for Royce are a few fold. First: Introducing new technological changes involves administrative overhead and techniques. Nothing is more useless than a website that doesn't work or an e-mail system that doesn't get answered or isn't used. Technology often needs to reach a critical mass of expertise and participation to be worthwhile. Neither administrative an support personnel nor graphical design personnel had any expertise with virtual office-style programs, or indeed anything beyond Word. Second: Their headquarters, which are admittedly of nominal importance, are in the Midwest. As large as cities like Chicago or Detroit may be, it seems that a different headquarter choice might be more fitting. Since most personnel are on-site or in transit, their headquarters are half empty virtually constantly. This was the impetus to create the hoteling system in the first place: To be able to cut permanent offices. Third: A directive style of management is not appropriate for a company of this nature. It is true that command and control needs to be more sophisticated and often stricter when workers are spread out geographically, but at the same time, having top-down communication and directives prevents those same workers from developing autonomy that allows them to keep in touch in relevant ways. When management is far away from the worker, the worker has to be self-directed and report salient issues on their own: Monitoring is impossible. A directive style clashes directly with this objective. And since partners control most of the deals, it further reduces the autonomy that rank-and-file people, who are college educated and presumably savvy, to pay attention to their surroundings and to client needs and to build what they're doing directly. It's especially problematic when compared with their progressive training system, which spends extensive time preparing already-educated workers for consulting and autonomy then obviates that need with a top-down management hierarchy! Since much of the behavioral knowledge and corporate culture is passed down by manager-worker apprenticeship, it becomes even more suspect to have such direct control.        Fourth: Manager and worker involvement was not solicited for the creation of the five-year plan or the hoteling or virtual office concepts, despite the fact that partners would still hold ultimate veto power in any arrangement. This becomes especially galling when it is realized that “the move to hoteling was necessary but [partners] were glad it wouldn't affect them”: in other words, the people who were affected least by the change were most involved. Managers were uniformly hostile to the idea and viewed it as insulting. Thus, Royce Consulting faces serious command-and-control and organizational structure problems that might cause long-term issues even given progressive training, corporate values and culture, etc.