Gap Analysis: Harrison-Keyes
When an organization goes through strategic changes, a gap analysis is an excellent assessment tool to assist the organization to visualize the gap between the company objectives and current capabilities. A gap analysis provides the company with insight into areas that have room for improvement, and a foundation for decisions to invest in time, money and human resources required to achieve these goals. This paper, by conducting a gap analysis for Harrison-Keyes, pinpoints the gap between the company’s current assets and its strategic goal.
Situation Analysis
Harrison-Keyes (HK) is a well-known, well-established publishing company that holds about 22,700 active titles and publishes about 2000 new titles each year. The company was very innovative in the 1950s due to their specialized publications. However, this is not the case any longer. With low-cost retailers eats into profits, the company is struggling to survive. In light of this challenge, the company made some strategic changes in hope to revive the business. One of these changes is to launch the e-publishing initiative. However, due to poor planning and implementation, the e-publishing project is facing a list of problems (University of Phoenix, 2008, Scenario).
Issue and Opportunity Identification
There are several issues facing Harrison-Keyes currently. On the financial side, the budget is overrun and sales fails to meet the target of $16 million by $13 million. On the milestone side, Asia Digital Publishing (ADP), Harrison-Keyes’ outsourcing partner in Asia, is wiped out by the recent flood in India. This paralyzes Harrison-Keyes’ e-book production since ADP is responsible for the technical formatting for the e-books, and Harris ...