Harrison-Keyes, Inc Leadership

Running head: PROBLEM SOLUTION: HARRISON-KEYES, INC.

Problem Solution: Harrison-Keyes, Inc.

Problem Solution: Harrison-Keyes Inc.

“The important thing in a military operation is victory, not persistence” (Cleary and Tzu, 1988, p. 30). This quote, issued by Sun Tzu more than 2,000 years ago, defines the problem at Harrison-Keyes. This 100-year-old firm is in trouble and has decided to change its direction without following the basic steps of project implementation, including:

1. Develop a project management plan – including work-breakdown structure, network plan, baseline plan, budget, and completion criteria

2. Get agreement from all stakeholders.

3. Evaluate possible risks to the project and establish contingency plans to reduce these risks.

These, and other items in an implementation plan, are not new. The best practices for these have been developed over the last 40 years through hundreds of IT development projects.

Harrison-Keyes must get this project under control. There is no alternative to this. The following paper delves into this project and where it has gone wrong. In addition, it performs an analysis of options to resolve the issues and make the project successful.

Describe the Situation

Issue and Opportunity Identification

The publishing world is changing. The marketing staff of OCLC states, “More than ever, content consumers are �format agnostic’ in that they do not care much what sort of container—such as a book, journal, BLOG or a Web page—the content comes from. Commercial content deployers are increasingly catering to these more experimental information consumers, providing content in a variety of formats, often with different cost structures related as much to its consumption as to the content itself,” (OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., 2005).

Meg P. McGill - the chief executive officer (CEO) of the firm - after looking at the profit trends for the last few years and at overall publishing trends, observed that printed-technology books were declining in sales and that electronic books (e-books) were increasing in numbers. She and her staff put together a strategic plan to develop an e-book publishing capability and were able to get the approval of the board of directors to implement their strategy. Unfortunately, the strategic plan was looked at as being a project-management plan, and basic steps were not taken to ensure that the project would succeed.

The project, after almost a year of effort, is behind schedule and over budget. McGill was fired as CEO and William Guardo was hired to replace her. He is faced with the following issues that must be resolved. Based upon their resolution, he has to decide whether to continue this project or cancel it.

1. Risk management – Guardo’s first issue is to develop a risk-management plan. The need for this is evidenced by the firm’s necessity to find a way to digitize books after a flood wiped out the business of the only digitizer – Asia Digital Publishing – with which Harrison-Keys had established relations. He needs much more than just another digitizer; he needs a complete risk-management analysis performed for the entire project before he continues.

2. Organizational politics - Meg McGill, as a proponent of electronic container presentment, allowed the technology side of Harrison-Keyes to control the project – to the point this group has alienated the rest of the staff. It did not perform due diligence in managing this project and as a result has almost destroyed it. It was allowed to do so because of their position with McGill. Under William Guardo, all political gamesmanship has to end.

3. Development best practices – Jan Peters, head of the implementation team, and Mack Evans, chief information officer (CIO), must devise a formal project management plan. This type of plan is not new – IT development projects have been going on for more than 50 years. Over the duration of development projects, a large number of best practices for successful completion of a project has been compiled. The team at Harrison-Keyes needs to implement these practices.

4. Organizational culture – Organizations require a defined culture and without it, chaos will exist, (Gray-Larson, 2005, P. 74). The state of chaos best describes the organizational culture at Harrison-Keyes. The company must develop a common culture.

5. Project monitoring – This project, and all future ones, call for