Project Management Essay

Project Management
HR Managing Human Resource Projects
Dr. Stephen Castelles
January 25, 2015

Prioritizing Projects at D.D. Williamson Project management is quickly becoming an important part of every company’s organization management system. This is because it is linked to the organization’s strategic and tactical management (Neverauskas & Railate, 2013). There are many ways in which leaders, people, and companies can keep track of projects and daily work. D.D. Williamson uses an Outlook database that keeps tracks of this daily work related to projects. In order to determine the importance of each task and project, D.D. Williamson created a criterion to prioritize the project and then each criterion was weighted. This resulted in a refined list of projects. The final result was weighted ratings (Kloppenborg & Nkomo, 2012). The first thing D.D. Williamson did was to establish the selection criteria. This needed to result in a meaningful list that aligned with the corporate objectives. The process of doing this needed to include the entire operating team so they felt as though they owned the criteria and resulting list of prioritized projects. They used a Post-it Note and white board system which gave everyone a chance to have input and also gave each team insight into how the criteria were produced (Kloppenborg & Nkomo, 2012). This system is actually a good system to use. Too often team members are simply dictated to and given a list of tasks from higher management. This means that each team member has no stake in the final outcome other than a paycheck. When each team member is involved and given input, they can go into the project knowing that their opinion matters. In addition, having an open dialogue gives everyone a chance to see how others work. Highly successful teams will have a different way of working together, and having teams that are not as productive see that method can benefit them. This also gives team leaders and management a chance to make sure they have chosen the right people to be involved in the process. The second activity was used to determine the weight or importance of each criterion. This step is crucial because not every criterion is the same and some are obviously more important than others. The team was given the task of deciding on what task they deemed the most important and gave it a score of 10. They then ranked the remaining criterion weights ranging from 7 to 2 (Kloppenborg & Nkomo, 2012). This step is also important to the process. Each person thinks differently and sees the benefits of each criterion differently. A graphic minded person will see the marketing as the most important aspect, while those mired in production will be more interested in the day to day and production costs. By having an open and frank discussion about this, team members can play to their individual strengths, but still see how other skill sets come into play. Next, the leadership team takes a step back and looks at the big picture. They looked at which projects are considered a unique one time project, and projects that would span multiple locations. If a project is a multiple location project, is it one giant project, or really 5 small projects. Next, it was determined which projects were of the “must do” nature and then the rest were filtered down from there. After this, the remaining projects were given either 5s or 1s and then debate ensued on what needed to be done. A simple voting system was initiated; a thumb up is a 5, a horizontal thumb is a 3 and a thumb down is a 1. When there was a disagreement, or something was not interpreted correctly, an explanation usually cleared the air. If a major disagreement occurred, a compromise score was assigned and that project would be tabled for further discussion. In the end, there was a list of 62 prioritized projects with the intention of starting projects in three triads per year with the understanding that each

Show More

Project Portfolio Management And Project Management

Project Management and Project Essay

Successful Project Management And Project Management Of An Organization

Project Management and Project Essay

Project Management and Project Essay