Gap Analysis: Harrison-Keyes Harrison-Keyes is a major publisher with a long history of success with its 22,000 plus publications. Management has seen a fall in sales due to changes in distribution and new media. They have identified a new media that will help them to stay competitive in the industry. Executives believe that starting a new electronic book or e-book initiative will help solve the problem and will offer large profits. However, there have been many problems in getting this idea to fruition. This analysis will show how the lack of consistent leadership, attention to detail and the lack of reporting processes led to the failing of the project. It will finally offer some solutions to the dilemma in order to put their project back on track. Situation Analysis Issue and Opportunity Identification Several issues contributed to where Harrison-Keyes' e-book project is today. Though problematic, these issues have lead to additional opportunities that may help the situation. When one door closes, often another one will open (Parachin, 2005). There were four key issues identified in the scenario that were problematic to Harrison-Keyes. The first issue to be identified is the lack of a clearly defined project plan which causes confusion throughout the project. This issue could provide the company with an opportunity for a fresh, more organized start that is tracked and charted. The second issue identified was the lack of an adherence to a project baseline. Harrison-Keyes cut the project budget by 20%. This became an opportunity for executives to kill the project or at least re-evaluate it. The next issue was identified when Asia Digital failed to deliver due to a natural disaster. The need for a contingency reserve became apparent. This development gave Harrison-Keyes the chance to look for another qualified company that may have a better track record of being on time with their deliverables. The final issue identified was related to the time it would take the new company to get up to speed and deliver the product. It is clear that scope creep can cause problems that'll delay the completion of the project (Gray & Larson, 2005, p. 437). If the project is allowed to continue from this point, then it is an opportunity for Harrison-Keyes to put the project back on track to a successful completion. Stakeholder Perspectives/Ethical Dilemmas The stakeholders have taken an active role in the forming and the running of Harrison-Keyes' e-book initiative. They consist of the Project Team which consists of the various employees that work at different levels of the project.
Kuiper Leda Incorporated (KL) is a relatively small company that manufactures Electronic Control Units (ECU's) and Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID Tags) for the automobile industry. They focus on the quality of their product and delivery responsiveness and their clients include automobile manufacturers and Original Equipment Manufactures (OEM). Midland Motors, a well-known large company has signed a year-long contract with KL as a supplier for all their ECU's and RFID Tags. KL need to organize their structure to increase the daily capacity to handle Midland Motors order of 250,000 Electronic Component Units and 35,000 Radio Frequency Identification Device tags. KL also need to decide whether to outsource all or part of the component needed.
3. What were the unintended consequences of using the project management tools? What lessons should Teradyne take away from the Jaguar project?
The two main issues in this case are the project analysis and financial forecasting. The project should be analyzed before doing the forecasting, because any recommendations on the project will affect financial forecasting for the next two years.
Most of the decisions that HP made regarding the Kittyhawk project were fundamentally sound. For instance, the senior management was in full support of this project, including the executive vice president of the computer products organization. This ultimately increased the success within the development stages of the drive and allowed the team to seamlessly achieve milestones within the projects timeline. Secondly, the team was comprised of talent that did not possess the traditional development process that a large firm like HP is accustom to. The group was also physically segregated from the company and was given the financial backing to achieve the projects critical objectives. All of these decisions by HP gave the project autonomy from the traditional HP development procedures. This approach help the development teams operate as a sma...
Project Controls would be essential in recognizing, and hopefully solving, a situation such as this. When sales were floundering in comparison to the projected goal, a proper measurement of such poor results would have identified this ear...
David’s company Federal Mogul has a few future projects that David was able to discuss with us. The rest are confidential. The first is re-instituting a LEAN system. Federal Mogul no longer has a LEAN system in place, but David and his colleagues again see it as beneficial. This started when the new CEO recently started observation of warehouses’ OAE (Operations Assets Efficiency), which tracks down time. He saw that there was increasing down time and that they were below capacity in warehouse. The new project David is doing is trying to implement LEAN in warehouses to solve these efficiency problems. So far, he has found that there was machine problems that were causing tons of scrap metal that was not being repurposed and
In the business world, outsiders from other companies may jump in and help a company get back on its feet by introducing new concepts. In my Entrepreneurship, Marketing, and Finance class, I completed a project which implemented this concept. The project involved taking on the role of a magazine company “Pechaitis Marketing”. Classmates were paired up by the luck of the draw and were instructed to blindly pick an envelope which contained a magazine. Each group had to take on the role of representatives from Pechaitis Marketing. Their goal was to help the magazine by creating a SWOT analysis, customer analysis using market segmentation (demographics, geographics, psychographics and behavior components) and customer profile. My group selected
Most projects fail due to inattentive management, poor communication and also shifting requirements. Information Technology projects are mostly affected by such factors and it will ensure the projects failure. Minnesota’s Department of Human Services closed out its project due to organizational issues named above. The project is called HealthMatch. The organization wasted millions of dollars in the project.
Sam Palmisano's team approach and dissolution of management sets the stage for improved morale in IBM. As the decision making process is extended communication improves across the organization and a learning culture is established. A collaborative environment inspires innovation of new products as the divisions are aligned with IBM's strategic goals. Palmisano's support of open-source platforms provides the vital ingredients necessary to build the backbone of the on demand system that he envisions IBM will provide to customers. As Sam's vision blossoms a symbiotic relationship is formed that will provide enhanced business applications and services to customers and a recurring source or revenue for IBM.
Corning is a decentralized company currently being plagued by both external and internal threats, such as market uncertainty and poor communication and planning systems. The company has just recently started to recover from a large layoff in 1975, which reduced worker job confidence. The Houghton family has a preference for an informal workplace with an ambiguous leadership style that contradicts the formal and strict resource allocation system designed for their international strategy. The current strategy being employed differs with the owner’s philosophy, which is important, since the President must buy into the plan to understand and communicate it effectively. This miscommunication creates goal incongruence, which is exemplified by the confusion of corporate divisions about whether they should be focusing on reducing cost or being an innovator. Also, each officer has been described as having work that overlaps, showing no focus and a lack of efficiency. The fact that each of the over 150 businesses groups have to write up a resource allocation request and business strategy creates the issue of finding time to read each report.
Production and distribution issues will also be addressed. Many production issues will be corrected as the facility is updated. Distribution is less of an immediate problem and future growth will resolve many of these concerns.
...as a good option to fix their current existing system and expertise their employees due to which they could have got the appropriate intellectual personnel with the success of the project.
This case shall try and analyze what factors may have caused this pull out to occur, what may be its consequences, and what we feel should be done, in order to reinstate trust and confidence to make the joint venture a success.
formed project teams to look into issues and make suggestions on how to make it better. The
With advances in digital technology, there is increasing popularity of reading electronic books over traditional paper books. For example, ebooks now outsell traditional ones on Amazon. Although paper books still have tremendous values and have own market niche, as evident from the number of books placed on shelves at various retailers, e-books will be the trend of text publishing going forward. There are many glaring advantages that e-books have over traditional paper books, as e-books are more convenient to carry, have greater update capacity, have greater storage capacity, more accessible and environmental friendly. This paper will therefore elaborate on the advantages of e-books and provide a comparative analysis of e-books versus traditional books.