Case Analysis – Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUN) is a U.S. based complete information technology solutions
provider company. Due to higher competition in IT service industry and global clients
tendency, SUN formed global teams in order to provide excellent and effective support to
its client at any hour of the day. Greg James, a successful engineer and “Outstanding
Manager Award” winner was appointed as global manager in SUN located in Santa Clara,
US. He leads a global team of 45 people composed of members in US, India, UAE, and
France. And James’ team serves clients in Asia and Europe.
James sets out to meet with his entire team spread across India, UAE, France, and US to
solve a second time customer system outage of HS Holding, whose system went down for
two hours, and lead to a disaster of their online banking business. HS Holding support
team had contacted SUN for support but nobody engaged promptly. They were furious
about James’ team customer services and required a response from SUN. HS Holding
required a $300K service contract money return and pay the loss of the system turn down
due to inefficient customer support. Further they threatened a lawsuit because SUN
violated their service contract. Through the incident, James realized something wrong in
his global teams.
The main problem that James’s team faced is a virtual team management. The reason
leading to the crisis of HS Holding should divide into two parts: James’ individual
management, and global team cooperation.
