Many companies experience seasonality
in their industries. Upon conclusion of
that peak time, do you ever take the opportunity to reflect on what could be
improved before the next peak occurs?
Project Prioritization:
The first step is to gather your key
team members and collect everyone’s thoughts about issues or inefficiencies
they have encountered. Then, discuss
specific projects that could be done to address these issues. This list may be too long to reasonably tackle
in the amount of time or with the resources available, and that is where
Project Prioritization comes in. We
recommend using the AJC Project Prioritization Matrix. When performing your own Project
Prioritization, you can easily customize the approach to fit your specific
needs. Determine which evaluation
categories are most applicable to your current situation, (e.g., cost impact,
production volume impact, time line for implementation). You can further modify the method for your
specific situation by applying the appropriate weight to each category. If reducing costs is your primary concern,
give that category a higher weight that the others. This is a very objective approach to
determining which projects will benefit your particular situation the most.
AJC
Case Study – Project Prioritization & Execution
The following is the story of a client who
AJC helped guide through the Project Prioritization process from concept
to implementation. These efforts resulted in vast cost and efficiency
improvements during their next seasonal peak. After you have prioritized
the projects and determined which ones to execute, how do you begin to tackle
these projects? Develop a project team for each one and get started by
laying out all of the milestones necessary to get from where you are today to
full implementation. A dedicated project manager to oversee all of the
projects works well to ensure continuity and resource balancing. The
project teams can then create detailed schedules for their projects, assign
owners for each task and associated timelines. Task owners can get started
immediately on project execution.
We encountered some challenges during
the implementation phase, as is common with efforts such as this. One issue was that many of the projects
required IT support, and this additional work overloaded the IT
department. They were unable to support
their daily obligations and the additional workload from the projects. This required specific priority and timeline
setting within the IT department to ensure they were providing reasonable and
achievable timeline commitments to the project teams. We were also working with project team
members across multiple geographic locations.
This required a structured approach to file sharing and communication,
as well as video conferencing for effective team meetings.
The AJC client that was going through
this process also wanted to develop in-house project management expertise. As part of this project, AJC provided project
management training to an internal employee while actively managing the
projects. As the project teams were
making progress, the AJC consultant slowly transitioned PM responsibilities to
the internal PM and was able to phase out of the project over time. Getting the PM fully trained and all of the
teams executing per the project plans was the end point of the project for
AJC. The internal PM carried the project
through to completion and the next peak season was vastly improved over the
previous one.
Our advice to you is, after the peak
season has concluded, take the time to brainstorm with your team about what
didn’t go well and any possible fixes to improve your processes before the next
peak occurs. If this list is too long to
tackle all at once, use a Project Prioritization Matrix to determine which
projects will have the biggest impact and can be implemented the quickest. If the team collectively rates the projects,
the best projects will rise to the top of the list.
Read this article and more on AJC’s
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