What Work Gets Done in the “Down” Season?

What Work Gets Done in the “Down” Season?
by AJC Senior Consultant Janell Hosch

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 blog, and sign up for our newsletter online at: http://andreajonesconsulting.com/blog.aspx