...Prioritizing Projects at D.D. Williamson Jessie Bruswick July 18, 2014 Introduction What are the key components that keep a business or company afloat? Most business owners and CEOs would suggest a business plan, budget, qualified and experienced workers, goals for the business, great leadership, and maybe even trial and error. All of these suggestions are sure contributions to the success of any business, but we must not forget prioritizing. This case study will help us to see and understand that D. D. Williamson Company made prioritizing very crucial and necessary in the building, growth, and success of the company. Many companies have all the previously mentioned attributes, but without having a since of priority, the company will soon fail. After realizing some failed projects, D.D. Williamson began taking a closer look at what was really important. Prioritizing allows companies like D.D. Williamson, the opportunity to step back and see what’s important, very important, and least important. With that knowledge, the company can take its best managers or leaders and put them on projects that require more attention, skill, and knowledge, while other sub-projects can be seen after by others with not as much experience. Literature Review Critique the prioritizing process The process previously used by D. D. Williamson Company in 2004, caused a weakness that was two-fold. The company had too many projects that were considered as high importance and the projects...
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...The 9 Essential Skills of Human Resources Management - How Many Do You Have? Human Resources Management Key Skill #1: Organization Human Resources management requires an orderly approach. Organized files, strong time management skills and personal efficiency are key to the Human Resources function. You’re dealing with people’s lives and careers here, and when a manager requests a personnel file or a compensation recommendation that lines up with both the organization and the industry, it won’t do to say, “Hold on. I’ll see if I can find it.” Human Resources Management Key Skill #2: Multitasking On any day, an HR professional will deal with an employee’s personal issue one minute, a benefit claim the next and a recruiting strategy for a hard-to-fill job the minute after. Priorities and business needs move fast and change fast, and colleague A who needs something doesn’t much care if you’re already helping colleague B. You need to be able to handle it all, all at once. Human Resources Management Key Skill #3: Discretion and Business Ethics Human Resources professionals are the conscience of the company, as well as the keepers of confidential information. As you serve the needs of top management, you also monitor officers’ approaches to employees to ensure proper ethics are observed. You need to be able to push back when they aren’t, to keep the firm on the straight and narrow. Not an easy responsibility! Of course, you always handle appropriately, and never divulge to any...
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...Case Study 1: Prioritizing Projects at D.D. Williamson HRM 517 – Managing Human Resource projects Strayer University June 21, 2013 What was the Prioritization Issue at D.D. Williamson? In the case study of D.D. Williamson, it appeared the organization was successful in many ventures, but lacked the ability to manage certain projects. In fact, critical projects that required attention were left to the waste side, and as a result lead to missed opportunities, or resulted in going over the allocated budget. Within the organization of D.D. Williamson, there appeared to have been a breakdown in communication, which blinded the organization in determining projects that needed the most attention. Through the process of the organization’s investigation, which took approximately three years, leaders realized the they had no accurate system in place for marking the level of importance in each of their projects. In researching the writings of Kloppenborg, Nkomo, Fottler, and McAffee (2012), D.D. Williamson would have benefited from utilizing a project management team, whom would have identified the scope of the project, cost, and taken ownership of the schedule from start to finish. D.D. Williamson would have benefited from having developed a well-rounded project team, or several teams could have managed each project independently. Furthermore, each team could have managed the project based on the urgency of each project, the cost, and the practical details concerning...
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...Case Study 1: Prioritizing Projects at D.D. Williamson Crystal D. Dr. Donny Bagwell Managing Human Resources Projects: HRM 517 October 27, 2013 Introduction D.D. Williamson implemented a new process for project prioritization that included focusing on the vision and impact of projects and narrowing down projects by selecting the ones of high importance and assigning them to senior management teams. I will attempt to critique that process, recommend an improvement for the process, provide a scenario of why the process could possibly not be successful, and project if the process will still be successful in five years. Critiquing D.D. Williamson Project Prioritization The prioritization process at D. D. Williamson is a great improvement opposed to the previous prioritization process that was implemented. I believe that D.D. Williamson was able to finally overcome challenges after years of not having a successful process in place. Cutting down the amount of projects from 60 to 16 was a smart plan that in return helped D.D. Williamson not to go over budget, increase the success rate to over 60 percent of projects finishing close to the expected completion date, and earn better results. This process also helped to move forward the most critical projects of high importance. Simplifying the criteria ratings also helped to narrow down projects and prioritize them. By selecting a new criteria rating and focusing on the Vision Impact Projects (VIPs), it made...
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...Prioritizing Projects at D.D. Williamson HRM 517 October 23, 2011 Prioritizing Projects at D.D. Williamson This paper will critique the prioritizing process at D.D. Williamson; suggest one recommendation to improve the prioritizing process, a scenario to discuss where the implemented process at D.D. Williamson would not work, and a long term goal of five years from now speculating whether or not D.D. Williamson will be using the same process. D.D. Williamson has nine natural coloring operations on five continents since founded in 1865. With that said, it took D.D. Williamson three years; two iteration to reconcile on an approach that significantly increased the company success rate with critical projects they now call VIP (Vision Impact Projects) (.Kloppenborg, 2012 p 48) D.D. Williamson began its first approach to prioritize the company senior management team, being that it is the company major management support system. With this, the senior management teams would have a limit of two projects per senior management totaling 16 projects. According to D.D. Williamson, the company thought it was a great move ahead because the year before, the senior management teams had been challenge to monitor over 60 improvement projects (Kloppenborg, 2012, p 48). Although the company improved to well over 60 percent, there were still some problems. Some projects were not moving forward as planned and came to be a critical investment for D.D. Williamson. The company realized...
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...Critique the prioritizing process at D.D. Williamson D.D. Williamson was founded in 1865 and has grown into a multi-billion dollar global organization. It has nine natural coloring operations in five continents. With that being said this means that nothing but quality and execution is expected out of D.D. Williamson. According to Case Study 2 “Prioritizing Projects at D.D. Williamson”, D.D. Williamson uses Outlook to database to keep track of much of its project and daily work. Outlook is a great tool depending on the nature of the project because it enables D.D Williamson when using the tools in Outlook to break their many complex projects into manageable sub-projects, assign roles and responsibilities as well as break down the structure of the project. Using Outlook for their projects also can help them focus on highest-priority items and ensure that all of their resources are used to its fullest as well as help them develop and complete the project plan. This is only half the battle is using Outlook. Suggest at least one (1) recommendation to improve the prioritizing process. Successfully prioritizing the project required D.D. Williamson to have a method in which they would decide how many projects will be assigned and in which order of importance. According to D.D Williamson they had a hefty 78 projects. So far I would say that D.D. Williamson understands that prioritizing is key and they already knew the value in establishing criteria for prioritizing the project on the first...
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...Prioritizing Process at D. D. Williamson Abstract The purpose of this paper is to analyze and review the prioritizing process that D.D. Williamson created in order to better manage their projects and prevent financial loss. D.D. Williamson decided to create this process after they realized that some “critical” projects were not being completed in a timely fashion. In this paper you will also see different sceneries that D.D. Williamson’s new process may not work as well as some additional suggestions to improve their current process. Prioritizing Process of D.D. Williamson The main point of this case study was to review the process that D.D. Williamson created in order to better prioritize their projects so that all projects could be more manageable. According to our text (Kloppenborg, T., Nkomo, S. (2012). Human resource project management. (2nded.) Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning (pg 48) that the reason the first trial of the project didn’t work was because they still had to many projects and “critical” projects were not being completed and were over budget. This caused them to have to re-evaluate the current process and create yet another process. One of the ways that I would have critiqued this project would have been suggesting that everyone review a few different charter templates. They could have used one from a website like Projectmanager.com or they could have used a software like Swiftlight. I think had they used...
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...Assignment One: Prioritizing Projects at D.D. Williamson Angel Harris Dr. Jean Gordon Human Resource Project Management April 18, 2012 Critique the prioritizing process at D. D. Williamson. The prioritizing process at D.D. Williams is not that effective. One of the reasons why is that they have too many projects that requires a lot of immediate attention. How could this company complete projects on time when they have too many that are top priority? Upper management may want to consider hiring more employees so that they are not over their budget or not being able to complete the projects in a timely manner. It would be wise for them to minimize the work load or they are going to create angry employees and consumers. Also, it appears that the company is lacking in the area of been more organized. A learner should agree that being well organized is one of the best strategies to reduce stress and allows the project to run a little more smoothly. However, it appears that the company needs to spend a little more time preparing their project charter because sometimes when it is not very detailed, that could lead to important things being overlooked which may cause the company chaos in the future. Most importantly D.D. Williamson may need to focus a lot on effective leadership. A reader should agree that it takes leaders that have the capability to lead a team so that they can help the company meet and exceed their short-term and long-term...
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...Critique the prioritizing process at D. D. Williamson A company that was founded in 1865, Douw Ditmars Williamson (D. D. Williamson) has grown from a small local company owned by a Dutch immigrant to one of the world’s leading providers of caramel and natural colorings for food and beverage products. Today, they have nine natural coloring operations on five continents (DDW, 2013). The emphasis of this case study is to review the process in which the company D.D. Williamson created in order to better prioritize their projects so that all projects could be more efficiently managed. D. D. Williamson created a list of 78 projects which needed to be prioritized, organized, and selected. The company used a four step method to rate each project: 1) Establish criteria for prioritizing projects. 2) Weigh each criterion. 3) Refine the list of projects. 4) Rate each project on each criterion and total ratings. To give team members control over ranking of the projects, each member was asked to write three different criteria on three Post-it Notes. These Post-it Notes were separated into similar item groups and each group was given a name. This technique established the important criteria for selection. The criteria chosen were used to determine how well each project would fit into the strategy of the company (Kloppenborg, Nkomo, Fottler, McAfee, 2012, p. 48). To give team members control over ranking of the projects, each member was asked to write three different criteria on three Post-it...
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...Critique the prioritizing process at D.D. Williamson 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. Williamson never allowed their unsuccessfulness to prevent them from continuing on with their projects. D.D. Williamson showed enough loyalty to their employees to know that they were overwhelmed on the number of projects they had on the table they “hired a continuous improvement manager to serve as both our project office and a key resource for project facilitation.” ( pg 48) In my opinion, D.D. Williamson showed a high level of professionalism when they brought on additional employees for their company. With that being said they were able to increase their success rate to sixty percent and that was higher than the previous year. Suggest at least one (1) recommendation to improve prioritizing process. hin the 1970s with the...
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...1. Critique the prioritizing process at D. D. Williamson. D.D. Williamson (Williamson) is the world leader in caramel coloring and natural coloring for foods and beverages with global operations on five continents since founded in 1865. Over the years, the company has managed to be successful in many business endeavors, as well as withstanding the test of time by being in existence almost 150 years (DDW, 2013). In this time, Williamson has experienced many difficulties but yet has managed to overcome them all and their problem with prioritizing was no different. In this case study, Williamson had trouble managing projects that were successful, so they took a step back and pinpointed the cause of this issue. They found the cause to be the lack of project prioritization. There were projects of great importance being pushed to the side while meaningless project were being started. As a result of this, projects were gone over budget and there were probability many missed opportunities due to their disorganization. So they took time to devise a plan that would help them better select the projects that were more useful to the organization. The process took about three years to settle on a strategy that would bring success to their critical projects. With management being one of the essential tools needed for project management, Williamson’s first approach was where senior management worked together to select a maximum of two projects per senior sponsor by a set of criteria and resource...
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