Volkswagen Of America 's New Process For Managing Priorities

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).

Q7. How did the new project selection process handle non-numeric type project? risk? How did this new process alter new project proposals at hp?

The paper is divided into three sections, the first of which will establish a timeline of events. This project background will serve as a case study for the analysis in the following section that will be structured such that each of the previously mentioned facets will be independently analyzed and contrasted with project management principles. Finally the paper will conclude with a summary of the analysis and recommendations based on

PM within organizations is gaining momentum and an indispensable component of the work flow procedure. Improving organization project management can effectively improve an organization use of resources. Nevertheless, if an an organization does not possess a clean target and does not follow project phases no one willing enters into the transformational journey. The issue is the bottom line in PM, whether it is to better the organization financially, ethically, or for standardization of procedures. Constitutions must be cognizant of the elements and competencies required to receive a successful PM outcome. In the closing, business should have an active strategy to revise and adapt to the shifting marketplace.

i. The new information systems project for an enhanced network firewall appeared to be on a very aggressive implementation schedule. When interviewed, the IT manager said that even if he put all the IT employees on the project full-time for the next two years, the project still couldn’t be completed on time. The IT manager indicated he had spoken to upper management about the issue, but upper management did not take any action.

In today’s competitive economic climate, most project managers and organizational leadership has concluded the importance of the positive impact that project management leadership has contributed to the organization and on their projects and programs. This positive impact has caused most organizations to implement Project Support Offices (PSO). Within the Project Support Offices (PSO) there will be an understanding of the importance of the as-is and the to-be process is to managing projects and programs. The Project Support Office (PSO) uses this very effective technique in transforming vision into results. This technique is used to develop and populate an As-Is and To-Be diagrams. The As-Is diagram depicts the present state of the organizations, project or program process, culture, and capabilities. The To-Be diagram depicts the desired future state of how the organizations process, culture, and capabilities will look in the future. This case study reviews the goals confronted by the Pizza Delivered Quickly (PDQ) business while further developing the multiple related sub-systems to achieve the Pizza Delivery Quick (PDQ) requirements and be able to manage the project (Wysocki, 2012).

* What organizational structure, management processes, and philosophy will foster superior performance from the company’s business units?

The Volkswagen Group follows a cost leadership and differentiation strategy. The Volkswagen Group achieves low cost leadership by sharing automotive parts amongst its products and as well as sharing vehicle platforms amongst the other 12 brands under the Volkswagen Group, such as Audi, Bentley, Porsche and Volkswagen Passenger Cars. The Group improves product differentiation by focusing on the product quality improvement, innovation and sustainability. This differentiation strategy helps ensure that the customers are satisfied with the products, and that the customers will be willing to pay a premium for the product.

The PDQ project will take a detail process that will help launch the appropriate software technology along with existing processes in order to implement new cutting edge innovations. Although technology is not the only leverage for improving project management, modern technology is an important element (Kendall & Austin, 2013). Today, businesses depend on technology to produce more in less time and with minimal resources making modern technology a critical component to a successful business. In today’s high tech world, it is important to develop and execute effective project management strategies that will place the company at a competitive level. Companies must continue to work on projects that will drive their business to innovate and change for the better (Shenhar & Dvir, 2997).

Because of the limitations and failures of this process, VPs were frustrated with the fact that everything with IT took longer than promised. On the other side, IT blamed the business for their lack of prioritization and planning about the projects. The lack of coordination in this situation was not sustainable in the future because the stability of the relationship between IT and the business units was in danger.

As the new CIO of Volkswagen of America (VWoA), Dr. Uwe Matulovic brings an impressive resume that includes ample experience in aligning business process management (BPM), business process re-engineering (BPR) and the insights necessary to create the Business Process Technology Organization (BPTO). As the IT projects within VWoA have lacked governance and are facing a severe budget shortfall of $150M, Dr. Matulovic has a formidable challenge. He must first align all existing IT projects to strategic initiatives, which is the essence of effective IT governance (Huang, Zmud, Price, 2010) and then he must define processes to stabilize these strategies yet ensure integration still occurs at the process and system level (Korac-Kakabadse, Kakabadse, 2001). All of these factors need to be taken into account as VWoA is evaluating up to 22 new models with will have an exponential, nearly chaotic impact on their existing IT systems and their ability to respond. Further, the VWoA business has continued to suffer from a lack of unified focus of IT spending to overall strategic initiatives. This lack of governance has created a process of defining IT priorities more defined by the persuasive ability of managers, their ability to build compelling Return on Investment (ROI) arguments, and

IT projects. The challenge with this council was to align IT related projects with business goals

As according to the AtekPC Project Management Office case, the purpose1 of a PMO is to fulfill the need for greater discipline in managing IT projects. Moreover, it establishes or enhances project management skills, process, and governance structures within an organization (Applegate Pg. 462). The director of Application Development, Richard Steinberg, described AtekPC’s PMO’s purpose as a “methodology” for managing projects with standardized practices. As stated within the case, the main purpose of the PMO is to provide standardization in managing projects of large, complex scales as well as gain improvements in planning and performance of initiatives (Applegate Pg. 465). The case generalizes

Uncertainty has been identified as the underlying cause of the common mismanagement of projects. In response, many approaches to project management have been developed in order to mitigate the adverse effects of the inevitable ambiguity. However, many of these methods fail to address erroneous assumptions that are often made at the management level. In the novel “Critical Chain”, Eli Goldratt presents effective methods that challenge such assumptions. The novel follows multiple stories in order to demonstrate the benefits of this management philosophy as they apply to several project types.

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