OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and the situation

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Name and describe your organization.

The name of my organization is Starbucks Coffee Company, mostly known as

“Starbucks”. Starbucks is a retail coffee chain that is predominantly located in North
America, but has a significant presence in Asian (predominantly Japan and China),
Central & South America, as well as Europe and Africa. Today, they have more than
36,000+ stores located in ~84 countries (Starbuck Stories & News, 2019). Founded in
1971 in Seattle, WA by three business partners who knew each other from college, and in
1987 sold to Howard Schultz (Wikipedia, 2024), who has become synonymous with the
brand and elevated the company to its current standing. Starbucks started out as a retailer
selling whole bean coffee, tea, and spices and then ventured into quality crafted espresso
drinks (hot & cold) along with many other offerings (other beverages and food options).

2) Describe your role in the organization (it can be an internal or external role).

I am a technical product manager responsible for retail hardware in the Retail

Infrastructure Technology organization that is part of the broader Starbucks Technology
org. My team is responsible for evaluating, selecting, and implementing new technology
hardware, such as POS (registers, both fixed and mobile), printers (receipt, desktop,
label), digital displays, scanners, etc.

3) Describe the situation, including information you think the will help the reader
understand the most important elements of the situation. (This will require
selectivity: part of the art of case writing is separating the essential facts from the
mass of information that might be included).

Shortly after starting in my role as a technical product manager on the retail hardware
product team, I was given a product that was being introduced into our stores that was
replacing a piece of technology that was 30+ years old. Aside from the fact that the

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 exiting technology being significantly outdated, its ability to function with other systems
within our stores was being impacted by upgrades that we had planned that would
provide additional functionality. The solution that was selected was Android based,
which was something at scale that our retail technology team did not have a ton of
familiarity with and there was a ton of cross collaboration between multiple teams that
would need to take place for this implementation. The product selection was done by a
peer of mine a couple months prior, but the product was being passed to me because my
peer was on a contract assignment and his contract was going to be ending soon.

As soon as I was told I was going to be taking over responsibility for the product, I
started to set up immersions with key people who were a part of the project across all the
different teams that were part of the project team. I quickly learned that there was some
dissatisfaction around how the project was being led by both my peer and the project
manager. The one thing I heard repetitively, because of all of the teams that were
involved with this project, from the start there were no clear and concise roles and
responsibilities identified, along with no clear ownership of who was responsible for
what work and how that work should be completed. We had a good amount of project
meetings weekly to provide status of work and to troubleshoot any risk/blockers we were
running into, but the outcome of those meetings and conversations were most often met
with confusion on next steps and as mentioned above, who was responsible to complete
the tasks that needed to be completed, and when it should be completed by. The project
team experienced a significant amount of turn over in key roles throughout the entirety of
the project. About a year into our implementation, with around 1000 stores already
receiving the new hardware, we came to a pause. While the new hardware and
implementation was not impacting stores, our support teams were being impacted in a
number of a different ways. To name a few issues, we did not have a remote support tool
that would allow our support teams to remotely connect to the devices to be able to see
error messages as they appear and to see hands on exactly what issue the stores were
seeing. Additionallly, we had devices deployed that were on different versions of
software deployed, so there was no consistency across devices which was hard to know
what was causing issues/errors that were occurring without knowing for sure it was a
result of the various software versions deployed. As a result of the above mentioned
issues, a project that was planned/scheduled to complete within a year and half (with a
buffer factored in) was extended another six months.

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 Reference or References

Company Profile. (2019, January 24). Starbucks Stories & News. Retrieved March 15,
2024, from https://stories.starbucks.com/press/2019/company-profile/

Company Timeline. (2019, January 24). Starbucks Stories & News. Retrieved March 15,
2024, from https://stories.starbucks.com/press/2019/company-profile/

Starbucks. (2024, March 8). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starbucks