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Tiffany Colon
BUS 531
Professor Niccoli
April 6th, 2020
Teaming at Disney Animation
1. What is the problem Geibel was trying to solve at Disney Animation?
Disney Animation Studios has been in business for almost 100 years. It began as
a small company then evolved into a larger company which dealt with more
complications, different structures, and a hierarchical organization. As the company
began to grow, the work processes that involved multiple departments began to
prevent Disney Animations from making innovative products effectively. One of the
major changes was the change from films that were manually made which has evolved
as technology took over and changed the way films were made. The problem that
Disney Animation had was that they needed to find a way to deal with the changes of
technology as it became a lot more complex. Creating a new organizational structure
was needed at Disney Animation to allow everyone to produce the great content, that
Disney Animation was known to make, while still being efficient. This is critical for
Disney Animation, because if a better organization structure was not found, then it
could affect the quality and the efficiency of Disney’s productions, which in the end
could lead to a downfall.
2. What changes were made at Disney Animation? Compare and contrast old and new
structures and roles.
Disney Animation had many changes within the organization. Both Geibel and
Ron Johnson had a lot of experience in engineering and management which gave them a
great deal of knowledge about the difficulties and perspective in the systems
department at Disney Animation. In order to for them to make improvements in the
systems department, they both sought out different ideas from various sources. Some
examples of these sources were startup companies as well as management concepts
including the Matrix Model.
The structure that Geibel and Johnson chose to initially attempt was a “startup”
style. In order to achieve this, changes needed to be made such as removing the
hierarchy and the boundaries between the teams at Disney Animation. All the
restructuring needed to follow a clear and relatively safe approach. The first step was to
come up with a hypothesized change that would be beneficial to the overall
organization, then they would need to test each change one at a time. This should be
done in small groups prior to implementing it to the whole organization, as this would
allow to see if the change was successful or not. If a major change was given to the
