Harrison-Keys

Gap Analysis: Harrison-Keyes

A global publisher of print products, Harrison-Keyes specializes in scientific, technical and business books and journals, professional and consumer books, textbooks and other educational materials for all levels of study. In recent years, Harrison-Keyes has suffered the woes plaguing the entire industry. As competition from low-cost retailers eats into profits, publishing companies are finding success -- or even survival -- a challenge. In an effort to revitalize the company, the Harrison-Keyes has started an e-publishing initiative to capture market and increase profits. This paper will scan the internal and external environment to identify potential challenges and opportunities with this initiative, will identify all key stakeholder perspectives and any ethical dilemmas. This paper will identify the gap between the current state and the desired end state. This paper will develop a set of goals that will define the desired future state.

Situation Analysis

Issue and Opportunity Identification

Table 1 provides list of issues and opportunities identified during analysis of the current situation for Harrison-keys e-publishing initiative. For Harrison-keys, there is a huge gap between projected and actual sales figures from e-publishing initiative. Initial market research indicated wide adoption by business and tech users and marketing team geared their campaign towards this skew. Slow sales could be related to faulty market research or customer non adoption of e-publishing model. Implementation team has missed production timeline two times due to Asia Digital vendor issues. Due to massive floods, Asia Digital is out of business for the foreseeable future. Harrison-keys marketing team launched major book campaign parallel to the e-publishing initiative which put resource constraints on e-publishing project.

Stakeholder Perspectives/Ethical Dilemmas

The key stakeholders in this scenario are customers, Authors, senior leadership and employees. Stakeholders' rights, values and ethical dilemmas have been presented in Table 2. The main ethical dilemmas include: (a) for consumers, Cost Effective and quality solution for their needs, (b) for authors, maximize wealth by reaching maximum number of readers (c) for senior leadership it is to maximize wealth for all key stakeholders and, (d) for employees, how to keep high morale and contribute 100% in this difficult situation.

End-State Vision

The desired end state for Harrison-Keyes would be "With the support of all stakeholders, Harrison-Keyes becomes a profitable and reputed global publishing leader in the industry by offering new and innovative products and services." The goals that would reflect the attainment of this end state could include the following:

Ð'* Implement entire e-publishing initiative within next 6 months.

Ð'* Implement e-publishing initiative within 10% of the allocated budget.

Ð'* Increase sales revenue by 100 Million dollars by end of three years.

Gap Analysis

The end state vision is to implement entire e-publishing initiative within next 6 months within 10% of the allocated budget. Currently, Harrison-keys are running behind the schedule on the implementation. To achieve end state vision, Harrison-keys needs to put some project control processes in place. Harrison keys needs to set a baseline plan and measure progress and performance against the baseline plan. The baseline is derived from the cost and duration information found in the work breakdown structure (WBS) database. Measurement of time performance is should be done by evaluating critical path status i.e. early, on schedule, or late. Also, is the slack of near-critical paths decreasing to cause new critical activities? Measuring performance against budget is a more complicated process and Earned value is necessary to provide a realistic estimate. Earned value will be defined as the budgeted cost of the work performed (EV). If deviations from plans are significant, corrective action will be needed to bring the project back in line with the original or revised plan. Harrison keys should use standard Gantt charts (bar charts) and control charts to communicate project schedule status. Gantt chart is the most favored, used, and understandable and can easily be created using Microsoft Project application. Control chart is used to plot the difference between the scheduled times on the critical path at the report date with