Introduction
The work highlights the areas that will be covered such as Disney’s SWOT analysis and its market trend research, the objectives it had made, ways of measuring the project success and evaluating the project’s value, and the identification of the project’s metrics, timeline, and the responsible parties.
Organization’s Information
Disney mission strives to be one of the best brands that entertain, inform and inspire people around the world. Its mission is enhanced through its strategy to use storytelling, creative minds, iconic brands, and innovative technologies. Being in the industry of entertainment, its mission strategically fits as entertainment is all about making people united and inspire them.
The vision of being the leading producers and providers of entertainment and information is strategic to its future. Disney wants to be the leading entertainment company in the whole world. Its vision keeps it in track as being a leading company requires a great mind that see further than leading in one country.
In order to achieve its mission and vision, Walt Disney has established values. The values include optimism which it employs in its work whenever a new project is undertaken. Another value is quality and the company has been excellent in this as it always try to provide the best for its customers. Community as a value is projected in its actions as Disney strive to include families in their plan by providing contents that suits them hence considering the community.
Moreover, Disney’s culture involves storytelling to spread information and entertainment to the world.
SWOT Analysis and Market Trend Research
The SWOT analysis indicates the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The Walt Disney Company’s biggest strength is that it is a diverse company with several business units. It does not rely on Disney movies alone since it also has theme parks and consumer products. Disney has several offers for consumers including its most popular streaming service, Disney +. As a result, the company is very successful and continues to grow.
On the other hand, the organization has major weaknesses in their financial planning. It has been seen to make poor financial decisions especially when it comes to company acquisitions. For instance, the firm put in a lot of money to acquire Fox, a company that would be unable to compete with other strong competitors such as Netflix.
Among the firms opportunities are a chance to expand its streaming services globally as this would also give them the opportunity to expand their market share and gain more subscribers. The company can also expand its borders by building new theme parks worldwide.
The biggest threat for the company is the issue of increased privacy as people are always looking for ways to watch and stream movies for free.
Project Objectives
The Walt Disney Company needs to increase the rates of customer engagement especially during the current pandemic season. As a result a great project to help the company achieve this is to come up with an interactive application that is suitable for both iPhone and android users. The application should also have elements of augmented reality in order to drive the consumers’ creativity and engagement.
This project will provide new entertainment methods through the use of Augmented Reality which can enable customers to get a full experience of attending a Disney park or simply taking a rollercoaster ride.
The first objective of the project is to come up with a draft of the application. This includes a plan of action on the resources needed to implement the project including time, finances, and human resources.
After this, the software will then be presented to a group of users for testing and customer feedback. This will enable the company to analyze how the app influences the company’s products and services within this group and establish areas of improvement.
The final step is to initiate the launch of the app to the company’s clientele worldwide.
How the Project Objectives Will Advance the Organizational Goals
The project objectives will help promote Walt Disney’s organizational goal of increasing customer experience by increasing the responsiveness of the customer. Through developing and launching the application to the market, the company will be able to improve the clients’ ability to respond through providing feedback through the application. In addition to this, the application’s objective to launch into the global market will spark the interests of new and existing customers. In turn, this will also aid in increasing the company’s market share. If all project objectives are followed through and successfully achieved, the organization will be able to increase it market share and interact with a wide range of consumers. This will also influence the company’s sales growth for its products and services. Through conducting a customer-experience follow-up for the application, the company will be able to identify areas of improvement as well as the application conversion rates which will help improve the organization’s brand portfolio.
Measuring the Success
The business performance metrics focus on the revenue, bookings, and customers’ lifetime value. It assists the company in understanding how the project is helping the growth of the business. The metrics that can be used in this case include retention rate, customer acquisition rate, and monthly recurring revenue.
Customer satisfaction metrics assist the company in understanding whether the team can meet end-user expectations and how it correlates with brand perception.
Product engagement investigates whether the new project is acceptable in the market. A project will be considered a success when the customers are satisfied with it.
Agile metrics will measure how the team form decisions and plan themselves. For the project to be a success, the team fostering it must be well organized and competent in forming solutions that will best fit the project. The metrics that can be used include cycle time, lead time, and velocity.
Value of the Project
The success of the project will create opportunities for the company resulting in profits. When the company achieves profits, it will be able to retain employees and afford its expansion rate to other countries. Alternatively, by achieving profits and expanding to other areas, the company will be accomplishing its mission and vision. As the company puts it, it wants to be the leading globally within its industry. Therefore, having enough capital will help with the expansion into new territories. Additionally, the success of the project will lead to competitiveness.
Project Metrics
Project metrics consist of key indicators that make it possible for the organization to track the performance of the project. They play a critical role in ensuring the projects success since it is easy to ensure something is done when it keeps on being measured. It keeps the project and everyone responsible for the project on track to ensure that the project objectives are met and successfully completed. Through this, project metrics ensures corrective measures are determined early in the project and easily implemented in the event that the numbers do not go hand in hand with the expectations.
One of the project metrics that can be used in this project include on-time completion. This highlights the fulfilment of deadlines and act as a performance indicator for the client and project manager since adhering to timelines is a serious concern in project management.
On the other hand productivity metric draws attention to the overall capabilities of the organization and its use of resources. In this case, the ideal outcome is to ensure more is created for less ( product output is greater than input).
Similarly, return on investment looks at the amount earned from that which was invested in the project.
Timelines and Responsible Parties
The project timelines are based on the tasks to be completed under each project objective. For instance, the first objective, developing the application draft, involves several tasks such as conducting preliminary research, developing a project proposal, creating a budget, and developing a beta version of the app. Each of these tasks has a timeline based on the amount of work to be completed. Overall, the project is estimated to take a period of 8 months.
The responsible parties for this project includes almost every department in the organization (marketing, finance, R&D, customer service, sales, business operations, and UI and UX design) as different tasks will require the aid of different professionals. Therefore, this will require a lot of teamwork.
Potential Risk Factors
One of the potential risks identified when the company fails to meet its objectives is failing. For the project to work, the company’s objectives of researching, developing a functional beta app and creating a budget for the project must be met.
Another potential risk factors is loss of funds for the company. Losing funds is brought by the company’s failure to research on existing technologies thus ending up spending on technologies that will not meet the needs of the customers.
Additionally, the above failures may increase the likelihood of losing customers. In order for the company to succeed, it has to have customers who support the project. Also, failing to get the feedback of the customers, will result to developing a project that may dissatisfy them hence losing the customers to the rivals.
Furthermore, failing to spread globally is a potential risks that the company faces if it does not meet its objectives. This include not fixing the bugs, not boosting the marketing campaign, and failing to achieve the rest of its set objectives.
Contingency Plan
Employing a financial manager will help streamline the employees and bring insights into what the company can do to save the cost and time used in the project. The manager will reset the company’s financial object and make it achievable by creating a realistic timeline and teaching the employees what is expected resulting in a new set of objectives that will save the company.
Allowing the investors to fund the company project will cut the cost used by the company if it fails its objectives. This will reduce the economic shock that the company is likely to experience and help it get back on its course.
If the plan fails of expanding to other regions within the globe, the company can focus on the already formed market. This will prevent further losses that it can incur during expansion and increase the time to recollect and start from where they had left.
Additionally, learning from the previous project will make the next project successful. Also, when the project fails, the next project can be prolonged to give ample time for strategic planning and recovery of the losses.
Conclusion
The work highlights the importance of a contingency plan as it uses the contingency plan for each of the failed objectives to assist the company to have a backup plan incase things do not go as planned. It gives the company a second chance of correcting where they went wrong and improve on new strategies while learning on the previous mistakes.