The high definition digital versatile discs (HD DVD) first entered the global market in the 1990's. They were high-density optical discs that were primarily used for data storage before the invention and the manufacture of more technological devices like flash discs that are in circulation in the present world. The HD DVD had a storage capacity of 15 gigabytes for a single layer disc and a size of 30 gigabytes for a dual layer (Wang, Trappey, & Trappey, 2015). The Blu-ray discs, which came later, had higher storage and higher quality than the HD DVDs and therefore the latter reduced in popularity. Poor project management brought about consumer confusion when it came to the products. Due to the consumer confusion, Warner Bros announced publicly, that it would provide its customers with HD titles only on the Blu-ray discs. Warner Bros suggested that it would stop supporting HD DVD stating that HD DVD lacked the sufficient high definition software sales (Wang, Trappey, & Trappey, 2015). That move led to the eventual collapse of the HD DVD after January 2008.
Ineffective leadership is another reason that was attributed to the failure of the HD DVD models across the globe. Toshiba, a former champion if the DVD changed its focus to the more advanced high definition content, which the HD DVD did not offer, and Blu-ray discs did at that time. The decision by Toshiba to stop advertising, developing and manufacturing the HD DVD players and recorders was after the project did not make any developments to appeal to the customers more over time. The changes in the market, fueled by the rapid increase in the level of technology, also led to the decline in the Toshiba's support of the DVD versions. Nonetheless, the company would keep on providing the customer support to its worldwide clients who owned the Toshiba HD DVD products. Toshiba was aimed at pioneering innovation in the field of technology and had to seek therefore more convenient and at the same time affordable methods of serving their customers concerning storage. The ineffective leadership in the HD DVD project, thus, curtailed the ability of the program to adopt the latest forms of technology, which would be beneficial in competing with the other players in the industry such as Blu-ray.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
The other way in which the HD DVD failed in the project management was the failure to track the progress of the project by the administration. The sales of the HD DVD reduced for a period before eventually halting. The company could have found the corrective measures to ensure that the progress of the company remained high and that the DVD was attracting more customers across the world. The failure of the tracking of the progress also led to the ceasing of the supporting companies in the project in their help. Such companies included Toshiba and Warner Bros. The withdrawal of the companies was a significant blow to the performance of the HD DVD due to the lack of a firm foundation in the marketing of the products against those made and improved by the chief competitor, Blu-ray. The failure to track the growth of the customers and the revenue generated from the manufacture, sale of the HD DVD angered the supporting companies such as Toshiba, and their disappointment in the project led them to secede from the production of the HD DVD content for their worldwide customers.
The HD DVD was a project with a poorly defined scope. The management of the projects was accused of coming up with a range of the project that was rigid thus discouraging innovation from the team players. Unlike the primary competitor for the HD DVD content, Blu-ray, the DVD had a constricted approach to the customer requirements in the HD content. Therefore, the project did not make any substantial efforts in the betterment of the HD products, which discouraged most of the prospective customers and organizations such as Netflix, which preferred the HD content with higher storage such as from Blu-ray. The management was also discredited for having a narrow project scope. Once the project, the project did not have any significant milestones and had little changes to attract more customers. The HD DVD also had poorer performance compared to the Blu-ray discs that soon increased in circulation due to their higher disc storage space and the high-density performance, which was averagely better than that of the HD DVD. Therefore, the poorly defined scope of the project is discussed as one of the primary reasons that led to the decline of the high-density digital versatile discs.
The expectations on the performance of the HD DVD were narrowed. Toshibas management reported that the company had lost more than fifty billion Japanese yen in the dealership of the next generation DVDs. The HD DVD players were said to have faults in their production, which primarily altered their performance thus incurring the losses for Toshiba. The customers for the Toshiba HD DVD players had significantly reduced and were slowly migrating to the companies, which offered the Blu-ray players. After the announcement, a Japanese retailing firm Edion Corp offered to exchange the failed HD DVD from Toshiba with the Blu-ray players. Such a blow on Toshibas side led to the reduction in the prices of the shares of the company being traded at an amount significantly lower than the other financial years. The replacement of the HD DVD with the Blu-ray discs by Edion Corp on behalf of Toshiba was the other single-handed blow that affected the HD DVD and led to their eventual discontinuation from the consumer market across the globe.
Project Management Techniques that Broke Down/Were Not Used
The first project management that HD DVD did not use, and it would have been beneficial to the company's performance, in the long run, was the implementation of the competitive advantages of the players (Jayachandran & Subramanian, 2016). The project's managers involved in the DVD players including Toshiba would have found ways to increase the consumer awareness of the HD DVD, introduce adjustments that would change the performance of the players and ensure that they fulfilled the customer requirements, and the use of technology in the marketing(Jayachandran & Subramanian, 2016). The introduction of the Blu-ray discs in the world later on after that of the HD DVD was a massive contribution to the downfall of the HD DVD. For instance, the Blu-ray discs were based on a significant innovation that involved the use of a blue laser diode that was a hallmark in the film and television sectors around the world (Jayachandran & Subramanian, 2016). The use of technology in the marketing of the Blu-ray players among the companies that produced them across the world such as Sony was also another milestone that such companies used against the HD DVD companies such as Toshiba. That led to the reduction in the competitive advantage of the HD DVD projects that led to the decrease in their worldwide popularity.
The project managers in the HD DVD projects could also have integrated the latest forms of technology to ensure that the players have a continually increasing market. The stagnation of the technology used in the HD DVD players did not allow the various manufacturers, mostly Toshiba, to make adjustments that could benefit the customers by allowing them to venture into the world of entertainment. The storage of the HD DVD compared to the Blu-ray counterpart was lower which did not go well with the customers who had increasing demands on the roles of the HD DVD in storage and general entertainment (Jayachandran & Subramanian, 2016). The dual-layered Blu-ray discs could hold up to fifty gigabytes of data while the same specifications for an HD DVD would hold up to thirty gigabytes of the same. The picture and sound quality although similar to that of the Blu-ray disc, for the HD DVD was lower than the consumers' expectations as they had expected a player with higher qualities in both pictures and sound. That would have increased the unpopularity of the HD DVD among the target customers in the different countries around the world.
The other project management technique that broke down in the projects regarding the HD DVD players in the world was the traditional project management. In as much as the classic model to project management is appropriate to most scenarios involving the programs run by a company, the technique did not favor the production of the HD DVD. The traditional project management approach encouraged the leaders of the projects to overlook the specific progress areas that they needed to look into to make the businesses more beneficial and attract more customers. That is because the conventional project management technique requires little assessment of the tasks that the project is made up of such as in the HD DVD. That led to the reduction in the evaluation of the employees involved in the plans as well leading to the occurrence of mistakes such as the one that cost Toshiba fifty million Japanese yen shortly before the company stopped supporting the HD DVD projects. The project managers were also unable to coach the team members in the manufacture and the sale of the HD DVD models thus leading to the production of the low-quality HD DVD players.
The HD DVD projects would have integrated the waterfall project management approach (Conforto, Amaral, da Silva, Di Felippo & Kamikawachi, 2016). The waterfall project management technique builds upon the traditional project management plan. In this kind of project management approach, each on the team in the case of a project is focused on, and his or her roles are reviewed (Conforto et al., 2016). Had the HD DVD integrated the waterfall approach in project management, the programs would have avoided the premature failure and increase their sales to the potential customers across the globe. The waterfall project management technique also encourages the team members to contribute to the common goal that the project has (Calcei & Ohana, 2017). One of the goals of the HD DVD was to revolutionize the entertainment industry by providing a technological disc that enables the user to store information as well as play it back at any time they would wish (Conforto et al., 2016). Thus, if the projects had integrated the waterfall project management technique, the team players in the manufacture of the devices would have come up with more innovative plans to attract the customers.
Time management was another factor that contributed to the downfall of the HD DVD project. The tracking of the progress and the time is taken in the manufacture and sale of the DVDs would have been quickly done using the PERT project management. It is a state of the art technique that embraces the use of a chart to enable the project managers identifies the source of the project and the targeted destination (Meredith, Shafer, Mantel Jr, & Sutton, 2016). The charts are also useful to the managers in indicating to them their progress compared to the time they have taken in handling the project (Meredith et al., 2016). The technique also provides the program managers with the ability to identify the difference between events and activities in that events measure the progress of the project while actions are the aspects of the business that get the things in a project done(Meredith et al., 2016). That further contributes to the advancement of the time tracking skills that the project managers need to have in every project they undertake. The PERT Project management would also have worked in the case of the HD DVD projects by estimating the amount of time spent in the manufacture of the HD DVD players and the time of their upgrading.
References
Calcei, D., & Ohana, M. (2017). The Influence of the Adult Entertainment Industry on
Technology Standards for Computer, Video, and Smartphone Applications. Global Business and Organizational Excellence , 36 (3), 14-20.
Conforto, E. C., Amaral, D. C., da Silva, S. L., Di Felippo, A., & Kamikawachi, D. S. L. (2016).
The agility construct on project management theory. International Journal of Project Management , 34 (4), 660-674.
Jayachandran, C., & Subramanian, R. (2016). Dimensions of Technology Standards Battles:
Sony and Blu-Ray. Rethinking Innovation: Global Perspectives , 261.
Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Mantel Jr, S. J., & Sutton, M. M. (2016). Project management in
Practice . Wiley Global Education.
Wang, Y. H., Trappey, A. J., & Trappey, C. V. (2015). Life cycle analysis of the optical disc
Industry market innovation and development. Innovation , 17 (2), 196-216.
