IntroductionOpenText is a software products company specializing in enterprise content management solutions. The company is involved in numerous implementation and consulting projects around the world to provide business-specific solutions and technologies to manage and consume content. Over the last 4 years, there has been exponential growth within OpenText as an organization through acquisitions. OpenText acquires at the rate of 3 companies each year and this has resulted in several unique challenges within the organization in the form of different cultures, products, processes and resources. Such diversity leads to the inevitable need to consolidate and integrate these differences as a single working unit to ensure the achievement of company strategies. This unique challenge has led to several internal projects within key departments, such as Research and Development, Human Resources, Operations Management and Customer Service, to come up with business processes that will help identify and access existing processes and validate any changes and improvements necessary to facilitate easy integration with current and future acquisitions. This was vital for the company, considering what was at stake, for each business unit to have uniformity within the organization to reflect a commonality and business direction to stakeholders and end users. I am currently involved in a project to make process improvements within the customer support organization. Customer support is a highly visible business unit for customers and is usually the first point of contact. Then the project involves implementing a business management strategy such as Six Sigma to find and improve areas in the customer request, intensify...... half of the document... MAIC project methodology. Since the teams involved in this project work closely together, a rigorous after-the-fact integration phase will not be necessary. If we can ensure that teams communicate effectively, integration needs can be reduced when producing project integration plans. I will suggest trying "Mock Objects" as a hybrid with existing Gantt charts, as there are several that are intangible and can change behavior as the project progresses. Simulated objects will reduce heavy Gantt chart dependencies for each object to complete. Introducing these steps will risk increasing the amount of work involved and also running parallel tasks at the same time, but this will help reduce overall costs and time. The project is currently in the planning stage and is expected to start in the 3rd quarter of this financial year.
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