On Saturday November 8th, 2018, IsoCorp’s largest customer, HSBC Vancouver had a server crash at 23:30 PST. When their tech group called IsoCorp Vancouver for help, no one engaged them. It seems that there was a problem in the procedures to follow and a breakdown in the procedure process. The call was not addressed and the ATM system was down for almost 3 hours. Three months ago, a similar situation emerged but this was with a smaller client located in the Midwest of the United States that had their computerized cash register go down. Now with the case three months ago, the time that it took to get the server back on line was 45 minutes but there were challenges as it was not clear where there was a breakdown in the procedures to resolve issues. Some of the senior team was aware of this occurrence and wondered if the organization was growing too fast and too many clients were being brought in.

In this more recent case with HSBC, the server went down for nearly 3 hours. This led to a disaster for HSBC’s banking division, and they are now threatening a lawsuit against IsoCorp because their customers did not have access to the ATMs.

Meiline, the head of IsoCorp’s Chinese office had blamed the HSBC error on the Canadian team, since they were the primary managers of the account. She, and her Chinese team, had received the call immediately, since it was after 10pm in Vancouver, but had not forwarded it to the Canadian after-hours team, as was protocol. Instead, she had notified Pierre, head of the French office. Pierre and his team had not forwarded the message to the Canadian team either, but instead tried to address the issue themselves. Since they were short of engineers because of other projects and vacations, they failed to correct the issue on time, causing the 3 hour delay. It seems that Meiline and Pierre wanted to show the Vancouver office that they were able to address issues when they emerged and normally it did work this way except in this situation.

This situation was different because apparently, the head of the Canadian after-hours team, Nick, had not received the standard, system-issued notification, as a virus had temporarily corrupted his phone.
He was upset with the Chinese and French teams for not notifying him via his home phone, or personal email. Tempers were starting to flare and blame happening on all sides, as the team knew that an HSBC lawsuit could mean layoffs within IsoCorp.

Growing Pains: In February 2016, Jack had implemented a new global plan. He did this to be closer to the customers and employees; however, since he was based in the Vancouver, this move significantly reduced his face time with his overseas employees. When ever possible, Jack would try and get to the Tianjin and Paris office but at times, this could be expensive. As a result, Jack would try and meet with the Tianjin and Paris office once a week over teleconferencing. With time differences, it was a challenge but they were able to make it work.

Jack was also concerned about the possible perception that he favoured the Canadian team, as he himself was a Canadian, and had made Vancouver headquarters. The global plan was to try and create a more friendly environment between the offices that seemed to be slipping. The Tianjin and Paris office were starting to feel that all they did was fix problems but all the credit was being received by the Vancouver office.
The result Now Jack had to deal with this mess. There seemed to be animosity between the Canadian office and the Tianjin and Paris office. Deeper Problems also occurred emerged. Jack had originally thought that the primary issue with the HSBC fiasco was a technical failure. After all, the existing protocol would have worked if Nick’s phone had been in service. However, he soon realized there were other issues at play – issues he would have to deal with immediately.

Jack had heard rumours in late August 2016 that there were some hard feelings between the French and Canadian teams. The French team had apparently been vocal about wage disparity. Since the Canadian office handled most of the largest clients (including HSBC), they tended to get the largest bonuses, even though the French and Chinese teams handled some of the work on the Canadian accounts. The Canadian team, however, did not appreciate the same state mandated 8 weeks of vacation time that the French did. The Chinese office paid their employees a decent salary but when you consider the Vancouver and Paris office, the rate of pay and vacation time off was less than the other office. All of this led to communication barriers and a level of resentment between several members from each of the teams in China and France. To make matters worse, a cartoon had apparently been circulating recently among the Canadian team members, depicting the Chinese and French employees as incompetent and maybe not as important as they appeared (See exhibit 5). Jack did not know if the other teams had known about this or if it had seen it. He was worried what would happen to the over all morale of the offices if this leaked out. What would the other office think and how would they react?

Decision Time: Jack was feeling intense pressure from his CEO, who had given him until noon of November 25th to outline his short and long-term plans to fix things.

How should he correct the underlying problems? What steps would he have to take to open up communication channels, alleviate resentment among employees, and get his teams on the same page?

Who is at fault, and should he punish them? How could he get the teams working together like they did when there was only the Vancouver office?