Exam Summary

MANM484: Leadership and Management. FHEQ Level 7 Examination. This is an online exam available over a period of 24 hours. Time allowed:  1 hour within a 24 hour period. Answer FOUR questions only. No more than TWO questions in Section A. No more than TWO questions in Section B. Additional materials:  Open book

Introduction to the case

Read through this case study from Accenture carefully and then use it to answer the questions that follow.

Accenture CEO Julie Sweet – How We’re Dealing With Coronavirus and How It’s Impacting Our Clients’ Needs

By Stuart Lauchlan

Services behemoth Accenture turned in a strong set of Q2 numbers yesterday, but lowered guidance for the rest of the year as the Coronavirus crisis continues, although CEO Julie Sweet argued that the firm is well-placed to ride out the storm.

For Q2 FY20, total revenues were up 8% year-on-year to $11.1 billion, more than 65% of that coming from the so-called The New, Accenture’s catch-all terms of digital, cloud and security services. By sector, Products accounted for the largest chunk of that at $3.2 billion, but Health and Public Services showed the highest annual growth rate, up 15% to $1.9 billion.

But across all of this hangs the spread of Coronavirus and the still-unknown impact that it will have on spending decisions. For her part, although guidance, has been lowered, Sweet picks out (…) key factors that she believes positions Accenture well:

(1) Virtual team structure

Our global management committee already operates our business as a virtual team. We do not have a headquarters; our top leaders are spread across the globe and Accenture has operated this way as a management team for over three decades. And so, mobilizing to address this situation has been seamless.

(2) Virtual working expertise.

We are deeply experienced in working virtually and already have deployed at scale in the normal course in our business collaboration technologies and infrastructure for remote working. For example, we are the largest user of Teams by Microsoft in the world and in the last few weeks as we rapidly ramped more people working remotely from home, Teams audio usage has almost doubled from our typical 16 million minutes per day to almost 30 million minutes per day. We are using our deep experience of working together virtually across Accenture and with our clients to help adapt how we work together from home.

(3) Staff retention.

Our strong corporate functions and investments we have made to digitize Accenture have always been key to our attracting and retaining talent and operating Accenture with rigor and discipline. Our top-notch professionals in Finance, HR, Operations, Geographic Services, Marketing and Communications and CIO, enabled by these significant investments in our own digitization, are making the critical difference in how we are responding agility to the crisis and we are deeply grateful for their dedication and hard work.

(4) Knowledge transfer

With organizations forced to come to terms with remote working at a rate outside of their own control, there’s also the questions of skilling up workforces and knowledge transfer to be addressed. This again Sweet pitches as a strong point for Accenture:

Because we are so familiar with how to do virtual, what we have done is rapidly look at…how do you do knowledge transfer remotely? Some of it is already there and to be honest, we have had a lot of that. Oftentimes our clients have wanted to do it onsite even though we said it could be done much more efficiently [remotely]. This is really going to be helping accelerate also the digital transformation of our clients, because clients…who don’t themselves work remotely, who aren’t using collaboration technologies, are now being forced to. The upside for them is really the opportunity to accelerate the cultural change and the digital transformation.

Section A

1. Please read carefully the case study above. What is the role of “flexibility” and its different types (Blyton and Morris 1992) in relation to the virtual working experience in place at Accenture? Please explain the benefits and disadvantages of flexibility in light of the presented scenario. [30 %] (Get answer HERE)
2. Please read carefully the case study above. Building on the case and extending it with further examples of your liking to support your argument, critically discuss in what ways change management practices can be seen as useful tools to address issues related to staff turnover. [30 %] (Get answer HERE)

Section B

3. Please read carefully the case study above. In what ways a shift to remote working patterns may affect the psychological contract of employees with their organisations? [20 %] (Get answer HERE)
4. Please read carefully the case study above. Critically elaborate on possible deontic and consequential ethical implications in relation to productivity and engagement for Accenture’s workforce. [20 %] (Get answer HERE)
5. Please read carefully the case study above. Discuss a potential transformation leadership strategy aimed at responding to the challenges in fostering knowledge transfer for Accenture’s clients. [20 %]
6. Please read carefully the case study above. Discuss in what ways the concept of resilience is likely to manifest in remote working. [20 %] (Get answer HERE)

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