Big Spaceship
Big Spaceship
Big Spaceship
How do the organizational design, the corporate culture, and the human resources practices of
Big Spaceship support the firm's value proposition?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the company's new team-based organizational
structure?
Big Spaceship came on the scene to accomplish discrete, high-profile tasks. The firm insisted on
planning and executing those tasks in a fashion that would ensure optimal performance. The firm
organized the core production staff into multidisciplinary teams of people who stayed together
from project to project. The Big Spaceship explore a client’s goals, and even when a client came
with an overall campaign for its product already in place, the agency insisted on approaching ant
potential digital project from the standpoint of a bottom-up strategy. For instance, the agency
subjected Nike’s project brief to a rigorous review - despite the pre-existing “More World”
campaign. To sustain its ambitious, highly differentiated strategy, Big Spaceship had to muster
and marshal an array of uniquely skilled professionals. It organized those professionals in a way
that allowed them not only to work well together, but also to work within the culture of constant
innovation. In building its system of human capital, Big Spaceship focused on finding and
nurturing talent, on creating a suitable culture, and on developing an effective leadership team.
The strengths of the company's new team-based organizational structure enables each team
develop its own personality. It makes staff flow much easier. It makes it easier to manage how
much availability they have to take on work and who’s doing what. Meanwhile, it improves cross-
disciplinary communication. The weaknesses of the company's new team-based organizational
structure is that it brings risk of organizational rigidity as every production employee is locked
into a team, which means economic inefficiency for the firm. The misalignment between team
size and project size left team members without enough work to do. The biggest problem is its
adverse effect on employee development because the team system reduces the sharing of
knowledge and best practices among the members, which is vital for a company staying at the
cutting-edge of its industry.