Prioritizing Projects at D. D. Williamson Essay

In order for an organization to remain successful, it must be able to fulfill its day-to-day operations without mistakes. If these demands cannot be met, a new project must be created in order to stay in business and ahead of the competition. If an organization has a problem, they can benefit from fixing it by following a formal process for identifying, selecting, initiating, and planning projects (Valacich, 2009).

The key to a successful project is in the planning. Creating a project plan is the first thing we should do when undertaking any kind of project. A project plan can allow a Project Manager to complete a project within a specified timeline and a specified budget.Reaching these important goals, will make the project customer happy and help the organization to build a good relationship with the customer for future projects. Project planning is fundamental in order to avoid failure and disappointment. In project management, effective planning is absolutely required if the individual or group wishes to deliver a finished project on time and on budget. From a Project Management article (http://www.brighthub.com/office/project-management/articles/40904.aspx) I read that during the project planning phase, plans are developed in the form of project baselines for schedule, cost, scope, quality and risks, all of which are components of the overall project plan. This gives the Project Manager basis for monitoring project progress and upon which to base decisions necessary for managing changes needed to help get the project back on track.

Week 6 DQ 1 Project Conflict PROJ 430 Week 6 DQ 2 Variance PROJ 430 Week 6 Track and Manage Projects PROJ 430 Week 7 Checkpoint Assignment PROJ 430 Week 7 DQ 1 Managing Project Trade-Offs PROJ 430

Developing a project charter before each project is started would improve the prioritizing process at Williamson. A project charter or contract is a necessary tool that helps get the ball rolling with any project. A charter should be a short, brief synopsis of the project that gives the project manager permission to start the project, help the sponsor and project team members develop a clear understanding, holds persons involved accountable, and screening project that have potential (Kloppenborg, Nkomo, Fottler, & McAfee, 2012). A project charter can also identify the potential of a project before it begins so the team can assess whether or not the project should be attempted at this time or another. This approach could help Williamson develop a more systematic strategy to prioritizing projects. Research has shown that only 12.5 percent of companies look at their projects to see if they align with their business and that project failure is mostly due to businesses not having a

D.D. Williamson’s prioritizing process started off not good but once they realized their mistakes they were able to sit down and rethink their prioritizing process. As mentioned, “We took three years and two iterations of our prioritization process to finally settle on an approach that dramatically increased our success rate on critical projects (now called VIPs, or “Vision Impact Projects”). ( Kloppenborg, Nkomo, Fottler, McAfee, 2012) Even though it took them a minimum of three years they realized their mistakes and were able to overcome their negatives results and turn those results into a negative. Not all projects will be successful or even start off successful, but D.D.

Quality improvement projects are selected, managed, and monitored based on a priority basis (L. Blumenstein, personal communication, May 23, 2015). Generally, the priority of the project is related to what is happening within the organization or in response to an occurrence (L. Blumenstein, personal communication, May 23, 2015). For example, the blood transfusion policy was selected as a high

In an organization, it is of utmost importance to have clear communication channels between the various departments that are functioning. In the absence of proper communication, there will be lack of clarity in thought and action. Once a project is taken up, managers across both the teams involved need to communicate adequately the strategies to be followed, the implementation and the possible issues that could arise in the future in order to ensure that the deliverables are met within the timelines.

The project priorities are in regards what should be prioritised in the project. What is to be taking in regards in terms of cost is (budget), time (schedule), and performance (scope) of the project. What is important to emphasise on here is how these three correlate with one another. In a case where time is important it would be necessary to perform faster, which will prevent a quality outcome, hence lead to reduced costs. The importance of a project manager is to control the trade-offs between budgets and scope. The project managers functions as a link between upper management and project customers. The project manager needs to have keen understanding of project scope in order to fulfil the requirements for the customers and how prioritize the demands. The customer can also add requirements and then the manager needs to prioritize the requirements in regards to the project. An important method is to use the priority matrix to identify what is worth prioritizing more. The constrain is stick and have to be obliged to the first agreements made between the customer, this includes, the specifications and scope of the project or the budget. The enhance includes time and costs. The enhance is an essential factor seeing where to emphasize on either on reducing costs or

If I were a consultant for D.D. Williamson, I would recommend various procedures that would have assisted in the improvements of the company’s prioritization. Stanleigh (2013) says that approximately 68% of organizations do not have a systemized approach to prioritizing projects within their own organization. Some things that could have assisted D.D. Williamson include, but are not limited to, creating a systematic approach to prioritizing projects, financial modeling, an approved charter, project ranking system, and senior management approval. In reference to finances, a financial tool call a scoring card should be utilized to ensure projects. The score card looks at

Defining the project scope sets the stage for developing a plan and its primary purpose is to define as clearly as possible the deliverables and to focus project plans (Gray & Larson, 2006). The team has

You may come up with a plan of how you would like project to go, but it may not necessarily play out to that advantage. Make sure there is room for errors and time to fix them.

All of the 11 projects are primarily ranked based on quantitative measurements. We have to also take into consideration of other quantitative aspects like length of the project, initial investment and anticipated payback period. Moreover, this

The nature and scope of a project is determined at the initiation stage. This involves analyzing the business needs, developing goals, budgets, tasks, deliverables, and the stakeholder analysis. The project planning stage determines the planning team, develops the scope, and identifies work breakdown structure and activities that will be needed to complete deliverables. The planning stage also estimates time and cost activities, develop schedule and risk plan, and gain formal approval for work to begin. The executing stage involves all processes used to meet the project requirement and involves managing people and resources. The process that entails the identification of potential problems and

In this case VWOA had two processes one was the old process and the other was the new process. The old process was the IT projects priorities were made by the Executive Leadership Team (ELT) with some discussion and evaluation of project and fund those were available the decisions were made. This process was not structured neither, they involved any departmental heads to discuss on the prioritization of projects. On the other hand with the new process that Dr. Use Mathulovic, Chief information officer (CIO) of VWOA implemented and thought that would improve the way of prioritizing the IT projects was “to make trade-offs explicit and link the projects and the core business

A final step involves assessing how and when (or if) to fund the lower priority projects in