Opportunities Facing Harrison-Keyes Harrison -

opportunities facing Harrison-Keyes

Harrison - Keys is facing continuous and increasing competition on the publishing market, especially from low-cost retailers, which meant that it needed to find different potential approaches for its operational activities, in the sense of opening up new segments of business, innovate, discover new sources of income and increase effectiveness.

The new CEO proposed that e-book publishing be tackled as a mean to increase distribution, be more adapted and flexible to the new digitalized era and enter a new segment of growth, which could bring the company up to 102 million USD over the next three years. The opportunities in this segment are thus incredible and a constant growth is expected over the next period of time.

However, there were several challenges in this case. First of all, some established authors had a problem with the e-book publishing, believing there work wouldn't be properly protected against intellectual theft and that they would be losing out on royalties. Second, turning the books into e-books implied that there would be a third party working on this. Harrison - Keys chose, due to lower costs, a company from India, but things like a delayed schedule and general lack of reliability from the Indian company brought additional problems. Third, the media was keen to speculate and highlight some of the problems that the publishing house was going through in its attempt to turn to e-book publishing, news which might have also affected the market and the company's stock. Fourth, the CIO and his team, which should actually be leading this new technological step, are not prepared for the job, the CIO having no education in technology.

Given the opportunities in the e-book industry, as well as the challenges faced by the company in the traditional publishing industry, the problems are definitely worth solving.

2. Strategic planning and strategic implementation form the two most important phases of a project. In the strategic planning phase, the project is evaluated in terms of the solutions it can bring with the companies, its positive vs. its negative effects, the way the negative effects can be countered etc. The strategic planning phase will also determine the number of resources needed for the realization of the project, what the implementation phases are and what each phase implies (the difference here between the planning and the implementation phases being that in the strategic planning phase, the leader will actual define the implementation phase, but not start implementation) etc.

On the other hand, the strategic implementation occurs once the project is actually started. The challenges that a manager faces at this point are numerous, mainly due to the fact that while the strategic planning was a theoretical, probabilistic evaluation on things that had not occurred, the implementation phase will bring about real challenges, to which the manager must find solutions. The leader needs to be able to react to real-time event, many of which may be unexpected and not identified in the strategic planning phase.

Project management principles are important because they provide a theoretical background for implementing and planning a project, which could be helpful in terms of determining the success of a project. They will not provide a recipe for success, but will be a good starting point in the lifetime of a project.

3. If successful, the opportunities of implementing its new strategy are important. First of all, they will move away from traditional publishing, not necessarily in the sense of completely abandoning that trade, but more in the sense of diversifying the company's activity and moving it into a direction that is likely to bring growing profits over the next years. As the studies from the members of the company have shown, the market for publishing e-books is starting to form and to become extremely profitable.