Introduction
OpenText is a software product company that specialise in enterprise content management solutions. The company is involved in several implementation and consultancy projects across the globe to provide business specific solutions and technology to manage and utilise content.
Over the past 4 years, there has been an exponential growth within OpenText as an organisation through acquisitions. OpenText has been acquiring at a rate of 3 companies every year and this has resulted in several unique challenges within the organisation in the form of different cultures, products, processes and resources. Such diversities bring in ineluctable requirements to consolidate and integrated such differences as a single working unit to make sure corporate strategies are accomplished. This unique challenge has resulted in several internal projects within the core departments, like Research & Development, Human Resources, Operations Management and Customer Support, to come up with business processes that will allow identifying and accessing existing processes and validate any changes and improvements needed to facilitate easy integration with current and future acquisitions. This was vital for the business considering the stake involved for every business unit to have uniformity within the organisation so as to reflect a commonality and company direction for the stake holders and end-users.
I am currently involved in a project to carry out process improvements within Customer Support organisation. Customer support is a high visible business unit for customers and is usually the first point of contact. So the project involves implementing business management strategy like Six Sigma to find and improve areas in customer request, escalat...
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...MAIC project methodology.
Since the teams involved in this project works very closely, a strict after-the-fact integration step will not be required. If we can make sure the teams communicate effectively then the integration needs can be reduced when producing project integration plans. I will suggest trying “Mock Objects” as a hybrid to existing Gantt charts, since there are several intangible and can change behaviour as project progresses. Mock Objects will reduce the heavy handed dependencies of Gantt-charts for every object to be4 completed. Introducing these steps will risk increasing the amount of work involved and also run the risk of parallel tasks being performed at the same time, but this will help in reducing the overall cost and time.
The project is currently under planning phase and is scheduled to kick off in the 3rd quarter of this financial year.
Problem solving becomes systematic and horizontal as discussed in the process oriented section of the previous week (Taylor, 2013). Problem solving becomes preventative instead of reactive. The delivery of products and services are value driven and customer focused. The elimination of non-value added activities and waste improve the quality of products and services. Using a pull system reduces costs because of low inventories, using a JIT methodology (Russell & Taylor, 2011). Continuous improvement should be pursued, improving the quality of products and services to customer.
Adapt to externalities. Correct evaluation, however additional analysis is required. The IT department needs to collaborate with the business to better understand how organization changes impact applications and systems. Moreover, IT needs to strengthen the IT-business alignment to stay abreast of future changes. One methodology that may assist here is business architecture, a blueprint of the business that supports aligning strategic objectives and tactical demands.
With teams trained and all processes in place, the Six Sigma expert moved on to other projects, and the responsibility for reporting to upper management was left to the team leaders. Without the help of a trained process improvement leader, some teams became confused when analyzing their progress. Others committed so much time to the process improvement project that their work suffered. The middle management leaders soon were reporting only their successes, and began to emphasize what they intended to do rather than what was actually happening. Upper management, assuming that the project was goin...
Initial projections show that the current schedule will take 50 weeks to finish with a final budget estimate of $3.152 million. Although the project estimate comes in under budget, the time frame for completion extends beyond the acceptable 45 weeks. Therefore, the following discussion takes a closer look at the project's conditions by developing a project priority matrix, project network, and a Gantt chart to help Bjorn Ericksen and his team reduce the project duration. The author then offers a project closure approach.
Putting together a project from start to finish is an enormous amount of work and there are steps to follow to make sure nothing is left unnoticed. This research will cover the majority of those steps.
The Six Sigma approach was designed by Motorola in 1986. The primary objective of the concept was to develop a tool for tallying the process defects and, as the result, improving business operations. The foundations of the approach are the customer needs, statistical analysis of data and facts, and timely execution. The method promises numerous benefits such as increasing performance and profitability of an organization, improving product or service quality and employee morale, decreasing costs, the growth of market share, the higher level of satisfying customer needs, etc. (Meredith & Shafer, 2013). The primary advantage
Business improvement techniques such as Six Sigma, Lean Management, Theory of Constraints (TOC) and Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) are successful and accepted worldwide. Many successful firms, for instance Toyota uses production planning techniques to achieve world class quality output. AGI in this paper illustrates the before and after stages by implementing various business improvement techniques to achieve the desired output. Also, high end business such as, U.S Navy implements the integrated blend of TOC, Lean and Six Sigma approach- “AIR” to eliminate the problems arising from uncertainty and inefficiency. Furthermore adding speed and direction to their project. On the other hand, Youngman demonstrates the production planning using
Planning & implanting are the next steps in producing a team project. We also evaluated our individual strengths & areas for improvement. This will help the team when it comes to planning for our goals & objectives.
- This project should have started on 8 July 2011 and was planned to be completed by 2013, but due to some issues the starting date of the project was postponed to the year 2013.
Managing capacity is an on-going effort in the industry by reducing cost through repeat business from existing customer and by engaging new potential customers; This while managing customer expectations and ensuring quality of service. Customer engagement and service delivery are key to OpenText’s economic competiveness in the market. Employee development and attracting highly skilled individuals to the organisation are essential in delivering quality service. When considering potential projects, OpenText need to know the resource availability to perform the tasks. This demand for resources is weighted against who is available (capacity) to determine if additional resources are required to meet the demand and if required what types of resources are needed...
In the latter half of the twentieth century a burst of electronic technology occurred and developed an astounding amount of information via the Internet that is growing with more information by the minute. Most of the information that is publicly available is gathered by a resource known as open-source intelligence (OSINT). Due to budget cutting and having to eliminate one “INT”, the OSINT must be considered for the following reasons.
Effectively integrating information technology (IT) into an organization’s business processes is critical if the organization wants to increase productivity and remain profitable. IT includes items such as the systems software, application software, computer hardware, and the networks and databases that help manage the organization’s information. When implementing quality standards and processes that are forever changing in the IT world, organizations must balance these changes while continuing to rapidly implement new systems technologies in order to stay competitive.
In past few years, companies and industries of various sizes have become aware that they need to improve business processes such as product development, order fulfilment, planning, distribution, and customer service. So everybody is now focusing on doing process improvement or redesigning.
For a business to grow into a more profitable one, the manager should emplace measures to insure that customer service is made number one priority. After implementing a structure, it is recommended that the customer service representatives, along with other employees in the business, undergo continuous training in order to maintain the standards set out by the customer service model. Having the right structure in important in any business entity and will have positive implications on its profits.
The first and most crucial step is to create a solid plan. Plan should include the techniques, tools and data that are going to used in the project. The responsibilities of all the members should be distributed at this step. The utilization of resources and budgeting of the project should be done here. Management tools such as probability and Impact Matrix, FMEA are useful at this point.