MS Project Scheduling

Running Head: PRIORITIZING PROCESS AT D.D. WILLIAMSON 1

PRIORITIZING PROCESS AT D.D. WILLIAMSON 7

Prioritizing Process at D. D. Williamson.

Dawn Buxton

Strayer University

HRM517

Dr. Stephen Castellese

Oct 31, 2018

Introduction

D.D. Williamson is a private corporation that operates globally offering burnt sugar, natural colorings and caramel color for the food and beverage industry. Douw Ditmars Williamson, who was a Dutch immigrant founded the industry in New York to manufacture burnt sugars for the brewing industry in 1865. The company is now headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. Taking the case study of D.D. Williamson, the prioritization process will be the point of focus. Prioritization process is an approach by which projects are defined within a portfolio on how they will be defined and in what sequence (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017).

Prioritization occurs when an organization has two or more projects that could either be dependent or independent performed in parallel. Organizations required to focus on the right projects amongst the variety to ensure that the strategic goals and objectives are attained. This review will, therefore, focus on analyzing the prioritizing process at D.D. Williamson and suggest recommendations to improve the prioritizing process. The review will also evaluate a situation where the implemented prioritization process would not work in the company and project whether in five years D.D. Williamson will be using the same process.

Analyzing the Prioritizing Process at D.D. Williamson

The case with D.D. Williamson is that it had so many projects and they identified the need to improve on their project management. Apart from having so many projects, there were others that were left inactive, and they could be late, be over budget and fail to accomplish the desired results. To solve this challenge, the company initiated a prioritization matrix. It is a useful technique by which an organization can identify the projects or problems that are most important to work on first. The matrix assists on ranking the projects depending on how important they are and narrows options down by systematic comparison of choices through the selection. D.D. Williamson created a prioritization matrix to select sixteen most essential projects in which senior leadership sponsors would be associated, and projects managers who are highly trained and capable would be included to enhance on the execution of the project. This prioritization process narrowed the company's focus, and the overall project completion was enhanced.

Despite success, having 16 projects still meant a broader scope an overall efficiency was impacted by the projects that were late and over budget. Therefore, the prioritization process was further improved to at least five Vision Impact Projects (VIPs). These projects were to get focus and attention on a higher level. More efficiency was notable resulting in the attainment of strategic aims of on target, on time and budget projects and this has positioned the company success.

From this case, the initial prioritizing process did not effectively establish teams that would deal with specific projects. The organization did not attain the desired outcomes as their emerged projects which were regarded to be of higher importance. The deficit if the aspect of organization caused late projects, over budget and failure to execute completely on growth and profitability opportunities. The purpose of project prioritization at D.D. Williamson was to eradicate or revolutionize projects that either failed or were incomplete. This can pose challenges to any organization but after a thought process, devising and implementing the process on how to manage the projects, it helped solve the situation despite giving rise to some other challenges (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017). These challenges are embedded in the process's strengths and weaknesses. Companies tend to assess by the standards of most critical projects and those that are big-budgeted. The strength associated with the prioritization of projects is a concept that requires the support of the management (Altuntas & Dereli, 2015).

At D.D. Williamson, the ability to obtain the support of the management became the actual power in projects prioritization process. This is because more attention was focused on the project's quality and a more detailed analysis and understanding of the projects was facilitated to attend to any issue that could arise. D.D. Williamson also added to its success on resource utilization criteria as well as its projects rating scale which worked well because of the different expertise within the team. Overall, the efforts in the prioritization process contributed to D.D. Williamson corporate image and its higher level of professionalism.

2 Recommendations to Improve the Prioritizing Process

Organizations run the risk of more than one area competing for the same project resources, technologies, people, conflicting goals and deadlines (Altuntas & Dereli, 2015). The process may even risk some outcomes of other projects and which may negatively impact negatively on other areas of the business. It is important to consider that organizations have limited resources, time and no clear direction and the impossibility of assessing all projects as a top priority (Costantino, Di Gravio, & Nonino, 2015). However, there are approaches by which the evaluation and prioritization of projects can be improved, and which D.D. Williamson can apply for further effectiveness.

Strategic analysis is a core aspect that the company failed to integrate. It is critical for the management to evaluate the (S.W.O.T) strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that are associated with every project. The project manager and people involved should sit down to gain a full understanding of the business direction, the timing and the overall vision. This will offer more valuable insights that would help in the decision making the process for the project prioritization. By so doing, this should have guaranteed a better resource/finances allocation and areas that needed more focus on the prioritized projects. The administration has a higher influence on the projects and other major aspects of the organization. Therefore, changes should at first obtain the support of the management through their involvement from the initial stage and should not start at the team or group level (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017). This would help the process to operate more productively.

For the prioritized projects, a scoring card should have been implemented. The success may not be attained as pre-determined, and a scoring card would serve the purpose of looking at the factors and variables that are negatively affecting the projects (Costantino, Di Gravio, & Nonino, 2015). This approach will give the insight that the expectations are still clear, and more input can be added if they are promising. The scoring card can help in the completion of the projects in their order of relevance and ensure that the projects promise mire returns over their cost.

Scenario Where the Implemented Process Would Not Work

The prioritization of a project requires its scope to be covered thoroughly for it to experience success. The management and the team in their entirety need to be engaged in the planning, execution, and progress of the process. However, what could happen if all these steps do not take place? What could have happened to D.D. Williamson if it did not carry out the name’s steps in the scope of its prioritization process?

Taking a case where the prioritization process was planned by the project manager only, not effectively communicated to the team which was not involved in the initial planning, the people involved to foresee its effectiveness would not be in a position to understand how the prioritization was carried out, the reasoning behind each project, how they are to be executed among other things. If the company had not communicated its change approach, there would be varying expectations amongst the team members.

Changes in organizational projects require that everyone who is associated is well informed to have a similar set of expectations regarding what is to be delivered, when and at what cost (Muller, 2017). Also, people would be surprised at the changes implemented, and this would create confusion as no one would know what is going on and the state in which all the projects are. More confusion would be created since the team members would not know what is expected of them in the new business approach. Failure to communicate effectively and proactively to all the stakeholders would have made the project prioritization at D.D. Williamson ineffective. The company would be setting itself to losing huge amounts of input capital destabilizing the financial capability of the business.

Another critical impact of the case is the failure to garner the support of the executives and other managers. The support of the entire management team is crucial to the success of organizational activities. This shows the relevance of prioritizing clear communication with all the stakeholders to ensure that all the members are in full support of the prioritization process as well as other activities and by so doing the success will be experienced (Muller, 2017).

Speculation if in Five Years’ Time D.D. Williamson Will Be Using the Same Process

D.D. Williamson prioritization approach has the likelihood to be used even in the future. With the realization that something needs to be done on their project management approach and the realized improvement, the company has learned to focus on vision impact projects which have minimized the drawbacks on their completion and over budget. The entire team has realized the relevance of process prioritization from the case study; it is evident that success has been realized since its implementation. The rate of success associated with the strategic projects has been enhanced, the attention from the senior management has been obtained, and they have been well aligned in the progress of the process.

Since the current working of the process is effective, the approach should continue with the entire team focusing on learning from the already completed projects on which area to improve on in future prioritization. The success rate will be progressively strengthened, and the ultimate goals of the company will be attained (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017). The company should identify the project drivers and continue to prioritize projects. Considerations of aspects like the competitive advantages that the projects will bring to the organization need to be considered (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017). Also, the financial costs and benefits, as well as the ability of the prioritized projects to ensure operational efficiency and improved quality, are considerable aspects.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the results that D.D. Williamson attained from project prioritization have been described as dramatic. The success has positioned the company strategically regarding its competitive advantages and attaining their set strategic targets. This shows the effectiveness of process/project prioritization and sticking to this process in the coming years; the company will realize more success.

References

Altuntas, S., & Dereli, T. (2015). A novel approach based on the DEMATEL method and patent citation analysis for prioritizing a portfolio of investment projects. Expert systems with Applications, 42(3), 1003-1012.