Organisation Analysis of Waltersmith Ltd
Waltersmith Petroman Oil Limited was incorporated in 1996 as a Joint venture between Waltersmith and Associates Limited, a Nigerian company and Petroman Oil Limited of Calgary, Canada to operate as an oil exploration and production company. In 2001, Walter Smith Petroman Oil Limited became a wholly owned Nigerian company with the divestment of Petroman Oil Limited.
The company subsequently participated in the Marginal Oil field licensing round for indigenous companies and was awarded the Ibigwe field located in Oil Mining Lease 16 by Federal Government of Nigeria in 2003. The award was on a Joint interest basis with
If it is to survive in this environment, the organization should somewhat retain its boundary. Open system interact with their environment and must engage in this kind of interaction if they are to survive.
A closed system on the other hand, does not interact with the environment. operates an open system that interacts actively with the environment for its survival. It takes people, information, natural resources and finance from the nvironment as input and processed same through crude oil exploration and production to render energy resources to its various customers as output.
Subsystems are the ‘building blocks’ (Davis & Olsen, 1985, p. 277) of the entire organisation’s system. The sum of all the subsystems constitutes the entire system.
The departments and divisions shown in fgure 3 below are subsystems of the WALTERSMlTH’s organizational structure. The boundary spanning subsystems that are close to the organisation’s boundary are directly responsible for the interaction with the environment e. g. the crude oil production subsystem charged with the roduction of crude oil from the oil well.
The researcher agrees with Mintzberg definition of organization structure as it conforms to researcher’s organization Mintzberg mention that organisation is made of five basic elements, or group of individuals, any of which may predominate in an organization.
The design parameters determine individual positions: 0 Operating core: Employees who perform the basic work related to an organisation’s product or services Strategic Apex: Top-Management responsible for running an entire organisation. 0 Middle Line: Managers who stand in a direct line relationship between the strategic apex nd the operating core. Techno structure: organizational specialist responsible for standardizing various aspects of organisation’s activities 0 Support Staff: Individuals who provide support to an organisation outside its operating workflow. Mintzberg identified five organizational confgurations: 0 Simple Structure which heavily relies on direct supervision and finds its key part at the strategic apex. 0 Machine Bureaucracy which relies on standardization of work process with its key part in techno structure where the planners of the organisation reside. 0 Professional Bureaucracy which deals with standardization of skills and has he operating core.
