Pritchard Soap Co. Samantha (“Sam”) Calderon is manager of a project that will completely alter the method of adding perfume to Pritchard Soap’s “Queen Elizabeth” gift soap line. The new process will greatly extend the number of available scents and should result in a significant increase in sales. The project had been proceeding reasonably well, but fell several weeks behind when the perfume supplier, the Stephen Marcus Parfumissary, was unable to meet its delivery deadline because of a wildcat strike. Under normal circumstances this would not have caused problems, but the project had been subject to a particularly long evaluation study and now was in danger of not being ready for the Christmas season. The major scheduling problem concerned Pritchard’s toxicity lab. Kyle Lee, lab manager, had been most cooperative in scheduling the Queen Elizabeth perfumes for toxicity testing. He had gone out of his way to rearrange his own schedule to accommodate Sam’s project. Because of the strike at Marcus, however, Sam cannot have the perfumes ready for test as scheduled, and the new test date Lee has given Sam will not allow her to make the new line available by Christmas. Sam suspects that the project might not have been approved if senior management had known that they would miss this year’s Christmas season.
What was the source of change in this project and how will it affect the project’s priority? What are Sam’s alternatives? What should she do?