CASE STUDY EXAMPLE:
Case exercise: O’Reilly Design
O’Reilly Design is a company specialising in designing interiors for leisure outlets such as pubs, bars, restaurants and nightclubs. They have been particularly successful in transforming bars worldwide into ‘Irish pubs’ in conjunction with a leading producer of stout. The company’s owner and founder, John O’Reilly, and his marketing director, Peter Doyle, have secured funding from the local development agency for a consulting project aimed at making them more innovative.
They have asked you to bid for this work and you propose a short meeting with O’Reilly and Doyle to understand their needs better. At that meeting, a few things become clear:
1 It is John O’Reilly who is the driving force of his company in terms of creative ideas, but he is a shy man and reluctant to take on day-to-day management of his 100-strong team.
2 Peter Doyle is the complete opposite of his boss. He is an extrovert and is happy to tackle man-management decisions, but he has no authority to do so.
3 The company is in reality run by O’Reilly’s long-term girlfriend, Sinead Kelly, who has been with the firm from the start and, while an excellent administrator, she has an abrupt manner which has alienated her colleagues. Furthermore, her personal relationship with the ‘boss’ means that the other members of the firm do not trust her.
4 On further questioning, their ‘problem’ is not that they are short of good business ideas; in fact, they have too many, resulting in a lack of focus and follow-through.
In considering your proposal you need to reflect the above and also stay true to the spirit of the grant that is to aid innovation. So you decide that you will work in two areas: one is the implementation of the ideas and the other is the ongoing management of projects. However, you need to involve one or more members of O’Reilly Design in order to ensure the success of the project. You decide to hold a workshop for the ‘senior management team’ aimed at identifying new projects and the start of an implementation plan for them. The date is duly set and you arrive to find over 20 people there (one in five of the workforce). John O’Reilly is reluctant to take an active part in the proceedings and Peter Doyle and Sinead Kelly vie in their respective teams to come up with the most ideas. At the end of the day, you have over 100 new ideas generated but as John ‘approves’ of only ten of them, many are unnecessarily discarded. You run out of time to start building implementation plans.
You are concerned that this project is seriously off track, and persuade John O’Reilly to have a one-to-one meeting with you prior to a session with the other members of the senior team. In this, you hope to find a solution to the current problems.
Assignment Instructions
