Triangle Model

In real life, principal-agent model is more like a triangle than bilateral and I can think of one example that I was involved in a triangle. Currently, I am working as an consultant/intern at the consulting company and there are project director(representative of the consulting firm), 2 program managers, and the client for the project. Each of them have different interests, goals, and thinkings toward their works and I thought that this example might be a good one to explain any problem in a triangle-form principal-agent model. 

For project director, his goal would be manage that project is going well without any problem and result has to be perfect. Since the director gives consulting project presentation to the head of the client, program director will need project to be errorless, in time, accurate, and critical. Therefore, our team worked very hard (we reduced sleep and worked) to meet the deadline and make a perfect result. Because of his goal, team managers and interns have some complaints and thus have some negative effects. For 2 program managers, their goals are producing perfect and successful consulting project results in order to receive high benefits such as salary and fame. Because their benefits depend on the team's success, he would manage how team works, how project is going, and how to guide to bring a successful result. Because there are two program managers and they want to gain favor with one's superior, it is inevitable to create a competitive environment. Because of that, interns in each team would have to work very hard to make better and more successful outcome than another team. The last one would be our client, one of logistics company in Korea. They wanted us to conduct a business consulting on strategies to enter the U.S. market and get helpful consulting without spending too much money of efforts. Each of them have different goals and it is very hard to adjust and accomplish the result that everyone would favor. 

We have been working on this project for a month and I think we made a lot of progress. Our team had to make strategies on supply chain management and some new technologies to apply in logistics.  Since it was a new topic for all of us and we did not know the current status of any information about the client, we asked for RFI to make a complete proposal to begin the project. If we do not know what they transport, where to transport, what kind of technologies or systems they use, we had a hard time to even begin research of write a project scope. However, because company was too busy on what they are working and they had a lot of departments to go through to get complete RFI, we were not able to get RFI for 3 weeks. Company might thought that what they are doing is more important and consulting project by students are not so important. I do not know the reason behind a long time for RFI to come to us, but we were very desperate to get RFI to properly begin the research. Our project director tried to reach the client to get RFI but he failed to receive it in advance. But he wanted to start the project to successfully make some outcomes at the end of the month, he told our project manager to just begin research on 'logistics' and 'SCM'. It is important to learn about logistics and SCM but it was tremendous amount of research, but program director checked what we researched on, he said many of them are useless for the project. Our program manager was worried and anxious about the project because we could not work on the project well for a long time. After 3 weeks, we finally got RFI and could complete the project scope and research on what we should do.

I think there could have been some ways to resolve this problem. If program director made a video call arrangement, it would have not taken so long. Also, if people communicated to find out the sole goal and purpose of the project, we might have had a better outcome. I hope that this project goes well and make a successful outcome at the end.