Personal Learning Paper

This is about my internship experience at century Pulp and paper. It had various department such as
Production, HR, Finance and Maintenance. The personnel were assigned to six different plants in the
factory such as Bagasse, Board, Pulp etc. The organization had a matrix structure as the person
working in a plant not only reported to the plant head but also to his functional head. Thus, the people
were grouped by both the Function and by product. The finance and HR personals were in Separate
verticals and reported only to their functional heads. The culture and practices were different from
department to department. The HR department was highly formalized as even after getting my
internship approved it took two days and three approvals to get into the Board plant. After going into
the board plant, we got meet the plant manager who assigned a mentor for the project. While working
in the Board department I found that the people in this department are less formal as you can easily go
to meet the various managers in the plant. While in the HR department you got have a prior
appointment. This was because in production you should have Flat hierarchy to accommodate for fast
action during the case of Problems since the production target for a day is quite high and to achieve
targets quick response is necessary. The culture of different plants was different from other
departments since they worked differently. For example, some members had high degree of
Specialization and were always assigned to our plant since the specialized in the VFDs maintenance
because our plant was fully automated. The plants comprised of positions which were highly
specialized to some generalized positions. Such as some people were always assigned to a department
while others were rotated between Plants. The department such as safety were always trying to
enforce safety rules such as wearing masks, helmets but the rules were not followed as they had no
real control over the people from other department. Thus, the Safety department was there only due to
legal implications and did not had that much control. Since Safety is one of the most important aspect
they should have been given more power. The only power they had was to notify the head of that
respective department and taking action was his responsibility. Thus, I think in designing an
organization the department such as safety should be given authority directly for enforcing the safety
regulation. This can be explained in terms of force field theory as most of the employees who did not
wear were working most of the life without these safety equipments now they do not want to change
and maintain that status quo. Apart from that the chain of command was clearly defined since the
production was carried out in different cells (cellular production) and each cell was responsible for its
own target the plants were relatively independent. The head of each plant were at the same level as the
functional heads and above them Assistant General manager and the general manger. So I can say that
the hierarchy is comparatively flatter for the organization of that size.