Project Management Challenges and Competencies Case Studies Paper Read the 9 mini-case study series from the Project Management Institute on the Global Gre

Project Management Challenges and Competencies Case Studies Paper Read the 9 mini-case study series from the Project Management Institute on the Global Green Books Publishing company before starting this assignment. The readings were assigned during Week 6.Write an eight to ten (8-10) page paper in which you:Describe at least three challenges that project managers face as effective risk managers at Global Green Books Publishing and provide a rationale for your choices.Identify at least three key skills/competencies project managers need to be effective risk managers at Global Green Books Publishing and provide a rationale for your choices.Describe at least three risk challenges that team members faces when dealing with risks at Global Green Books Publishing and provide a rationale for your choices. Identify at least three skills/competencies that team members need in order to be effective in identifying and managing risks at Global Green Books Publishing and provide a rationale for your choices. Use at least three (3) quality resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar websites do not qualify as quality resources. Mini-Case Study: Team Building at Global Green Books Publishing
Global Green Books Publishing is continuing to grow. As their eBook business continues to
drive that growth, they now are continuing to add staff to be able to keep up with customer
demand. Most all of the new people and many of the eBook staff have not worked together in
the original print-based business area of the company, and indeed are new to the company and
its culture.
These new employees have a diverse set of skills, backgrounds, and motivations. Their
supervisors know how to manage their projects, but do not always have the expertise to step in
and do each of the unique tasks assigned to team members. Most of the employees that have
been around since the beginning of the eBook business have been trained in their project
management techniques, so they can get the work done well; but not all of the newer
employees have had this training. There is just too much work that needs to be done to take
time out for training.
Supervisors need provide leadership, to provide inspiration for their team and to be good
motivators of their team members, as well as be a good manager, worrying about the day-today and minute-by-minute accomplishment of the project’s goals. Being a good motivator also
means that the supervisors must be good listeners to understand what issues are confronting
their team members and the needs of their team members.
Beyond this role as leaders, supervisors need to be a good manager. They need to identify the
skills that they need for their projects. Supervisors at Global Green Books normally do this as
they start from the standard job template for eBook projects and build the Work Breakdown
Structure (WBS) for their eBook project. Next, they need to identify team members that have
those skills, and work with their current project managers and with human resources to make
sure that they will be available to support the new project. Based on the lessons learned
analyses, a supervisor might also identify a person as a back-up for a critical role on the project,
in case they run into difficulties or assigned staff are not available as planned.
Once the team is assembled, challenges can arise. Some of the challenges teams face have to
do with knowing the status of the work, as part-time employees come in and hand a piece of a
project off to another worker. Some deal managing conflicts as they arise – both technical
issues as permissions are delayed and content cannot yet be incorporated, leading to
scheduling changes, and inter-personal issues among staff. Some of these conflicts occur
between a mostly young, part-time contingent of student workers and the full-time employees.
Supervisors are often drawn into mediating or resolving these conflicts. They really need to
meld together their staff to create highly capable, productive project teams for these fast-paced
eBook projects. The staff needs to trust each other and their leadership to be fair and to balance
work priorities with the times that they are available.
Supervisors are finding it is very important to make sure every team member understands the
goals of the project, the roles of each team member and how they inter-relate, and the sense of
urgency about completing the project. This urgency comes from understanding the intense
schedules for completing eBooks and from understanding why it is important that all of the work
come together to create a finished eBook – any part not completed keeps the final eBook from
going into quality check and release. Because of the issues around employee absence and the
use of part-time employees, they are also trying to make sure that employees are able to do
their role, but can also help out in related roles as needed.
To help build a common understanding of the project work and minimize some of the conflicts,
Samantha is working with some the supervisors to hold a project kick-off meeting where the
team reviews the goals and plan for the project, and develops and agrees to a project team
charter. Letting the team develop their charter gives the supervisor an opportunity to observe
how the team works together, and gives the team the ability to set ground rules for how they will
work together. The team charter starts with the project goals. The team may set their goals in
order to accomplish these project goals. Other topics that the team might address in their team
charter include agreed-upon guidelines for how they want to participate in the project, conduct
(or behavior), communications among project members, communicating status and problems,
problem solving, and holding meetings. This charter and its guidelines that they team have
agreed to can then serve as a basis for team building and team behaviors during the project.
Comment on the following aspects of the case study:
a) What are some of the challenges facing project teams? Have you encountered any of
these problems in teams that you have been part of? What other team problems have
you experienced?
b) Are there skills that team members need to be effective team members in a project? If
so, what are these skills?
c) Why is it important that team members understand the goals and scope of the project?
d) Think about creating a team charter. What categories of guidelines would you you’re
your team to agree on before beginning work? Why would you include these
categories?
e) Brainstorm and identify some guidelines that you would suggest teams follow for each of
these categories?
 Team member participation in the project
 Team member conduct (or behavior)
 Communicating among project members (including communicating status and
problems)
 Holding meetings
f) What are the advantages of a kick-off meeting? What are the advantages of developing
a team charter?
Mini-Case Study: Quality Management at Global Green Books Publishing
Global Green Books Publishing is growing its eBook business, satisfying demand for
customized eBooks for the college market and for a growing number of commercial customers.
These customers expect a high-quality product that works in each of the environments that
there users use – various operating systems, eBook readers, and hardware (desktop
computers, tablets/phablets, and smartphones).
As part of the standard development process, each eBook goes through several quality checks.
When the order is received, a customer service representative checks the order and a more
senior customer service representative verifies the order. During the Production Phase, a quality
assistant will check the eBook against the job order and customer order to make sure it is ready
for production, and once approved by quality, each of the requested eBook formats are created.
A second quality check is performed by the customer service representative who is assigned to
the customer to make sure that each requested format is ready to release to the customer.
Some customers (and their eBook users) are complaining about quality problems in the eBooks
they have received from Global Green Books. Sometimes the eBooks do not work correctly in
the intended environment. Sometimes, content is not clear or fuzzy. Sometimes, a quality check
will find that not all parts of the requested order have been included in the eBook. This causes
rework before the eBook can come back for a second quality check before being released to the
customer service representative for the final quality check. In each of these cases, the “cost of
quality” is the cost of NOT creating a quality product. Every time the project has to rework an
eBook to correct a quality defect, the cost of quality increases.
Samantha and her project managers met with a key group of supervisors who are managing a
critical number of the eBook projects. They reviewed the lessons learned data and brainstormed
from their experiences with producing eBooks to identify some of the quality problems that they
were seeing in the eBook projects. They identified a number of issues:



The customer’s quality requirements are never discussed within the project team. They
are dealt with by the customer service representatives at the beginning and end of the
eBook production process. This means that team members do not know what the
customer expects and just do the tasks assigned without knowing what is “good”. They
may have a very different or no understanding of what the customer’s quality needs are,
unlike the customer service representatives.
The standard job template doesn’t suggest that supervisors plan into their project any
reviews or checkpoints at which quality can be verified. The only quality checks come
after the eBook is finished. This does quality checks of the whole eBook, but doesn’t
allow for checks on each component –content formats, correct conversions or desk top
publishing checks.
These two factors lead to a perception among team members that quality is just simply
some testing by some other groups (quality and customer service), rather than a way of
working and reviewing or checking work as they proceed. Further, many team members
don’t even see quality as their responsibility, because it’s something done by someone
else.

One of the challenges facing the customer service representatives is that they do test
each eBook, but they cannot always check each eBook in an environment that is the
same as that used by the end users of the eBook. Sometimes users have different
equipment than the customer service representatives have to use for their testing. There
are times when this causes surprises after the eBook is released. This leads to external
failure costs for dealing with processing customer complaints, dealing with rework to fix
the eBooks, and releasing a revised eBook. Luckily the customers handle distribution to
their users, so Global Green Books is not bearing the cost of customer returns and
warranty claims that they might have if they were selling a consumer product directly to
consumers.
The group agrees that they would like to make some changes to bring their total quality costs
below the costs of quality that they are currently incurring. This means that they want to reduce
the costs of failing to meet customer requirements or expectations, and reinvest those savings
into preventing problems as they go that do not meet the customer’s requirements, and
checking to make sure that the eBook and all of its components conform to the customer’s
requirements. Catching some of the quality problems sooner, before the entire eBook is
produced will also reduce the internal failure costs that they are experiencing. These internal
failure costs are rework and re-checking following the quality checks by Quality and the
customer service representative.
Comment on the following aspects of the case study:
a) Consider the problems that Samantha and the group identified. What do you think are
the causes of these problems?
b) What would you suggest they do differently to eliminate these problems?
c) Who should be responsible for quality? What would you recommend be the specific
responsibilities of each identified role?
d) What prevention activities would you suggest to prevent poor quality in the eBook
products? Examples could be planning for quality activities or team building activities
focused on improving quality
e) What appraisal activities would you suggest to evaluate the eBook product to ensure
that it meets quality standards and customer requirements? Should they add in-process
checks of eBook components in addition to their current final inspection/tests? If so,
who should do these?
f) What would you suggest they do to involve team members more in pursuit of high quality
eBooks for their customers?
Mini-Case Study: Managing Change at Global Green Books Publishing
Global Green Books Publishing is producing customized eBooks for a local college. It has just
received a large order for a new eBook on Strategic Human Resource Management in a Global
Context from a senior professor in the business school. This distinguished faculty member is
dissatisfied with the current textbooks, and wants a customized eBook for use with her oncampus courses, graduate seminars, and her executive education courses. This is the most
complex eBook that Global Green Books has undertaken. Because this project is so important
to the professor, and will be used in so many different settings with different schedules, the
professor made sure that she had her complete eBook request in early to allow sufficient time
for production. She had selected a broad set of the best papers and had written an introduction
and background, along with discussion questions for each section. This meant that this project
was going to have an extensive set of permissions to acquire before production could happen,
as well as a large amount of desktop publishing for the new materials written by the professor.
She was quite certain that she had given Global Green Books more than enough time to have
her eBook ready before the first class needed it.
This large eBook went through the check and verify order step with a bit of back and forth with
the professor to verify the information needed for the extensive number of permissions, so that
started the project off with a bit of a delay. Because there were so many permissions, the
Supervisor who planned this project, accelerated the work on obtaining permissions to make
sure that all the permissions were received before they needed to start assembling and collating
the eBook in production.
As the Publishers Liaison worked through the extensive list of permissions, the Customer
Service Representative for the business school at the college started receiving several inputs
from the college about this project. One set of inputs was a continuing series of requests from
the professor. As new papers were released, she wanted to make a number of additions to the
eBook. Also, as time went on and she had more time to review her eBook plans, she started
identifying some changes that she wanted to make to her planned eBook.
Another input came from the business manager at the college bookstore, as he was quite
concerned about the projected cost of this eBook. Because this eBook included so many
reprints of existing articles and chapters, the estimated cost of the book was quite high. The
college expected their eBooks to be delivered at a low cost, as its bookstore costs had to cover
the bookstore overhead (servers for sales and distribution of the eBooks and marketing costs)
and the bookstore’s markup, as well as the costs of the eBook from Global Green Books. The
Global Green Books costs had to incorporate all the permissions costs, as well as all of the
desktop publishing and production costs.
The Customer Service Representative communicated these issues to several people within
Global Green Books: the account manager for the college account, the supervisor managing
production for this eBook, the Publishers Liaison obtaining permissions for this book. The
account manager was concerned about upsetting this important customer, the supervisor didn’t
know how these various requests could all be accommodated or how it would impact his project,
and the Publishers Liaison was worried both about added costs for new permissions and the
time it would take to get them and the costs they had already expended for permissions no
longer needed.
And the professor’s requests just kept coming, at an increasing rate as it got closer to her
deadline for needing this eBook.
The supervisor was starting to make some estimates of what each change requested by the
professor would cost




An extra $500 for each new permission needed, in addition to the $500 already spent for
each permission already acquired that can no longer be used
Two hours of Publishers Liaison effort for each new permission needed at an
unburdened cost of $22 per hour (loaded cost is $55 with a 1.5 overhead rate)
One hour of supervisor time for replanning each change at an unburdened cost of $28
per hour (loaded cost is $70 with a 1.5 overhead rate)
Sales commission of 20%
This continuing series of requests for changes from the professor is quickly adding to the
upwardly spiraling cost of this project. The supervisor feels that something must be done about
this scope creep – continually changing scope.
Comment on the following aspects of the case study:
a)
b)
c)
d)
Who are the stakeholders of this project? Who are the key stakeholders of the project?
What impacts could these requested changes have on the budget?
Could these requested changes also impact the schedule? If so, how?
What is Global Green Book’s process for dealing with changes from their customers?
Do you see any possible issues with this process?
e) How would you recommend that Global Green Books handle these changes? Who
should be involved?
f) What should Global Green Books do about the conflicting inputs from their customer –
the bookstore manager who wants inexpensive eBooks and the professor who wants the
best and most up-to-date collection of readings possible for her courses?
Mini-Case Study: Developing Project Managers at Global Green Books
Publishing
Global Green Books Publishing is continuing to grow. They now have three large customerstwo in traditional print-based work and the third is a local college. They produce customized
eBooks for this local college. This newest line of work is growing, as other customers hear of
their work, and the account managers are speaking with several other colleges and professional
associations about taking on additional projects in electronic publishing.
As they have grown, they have had to start implementing some project management concepts
to plan and manage their work. The founders hired Samantha as a project associate or project
manager on a full-time basis to help them introduce project management practices and help
them tide over the crisis they were experiencing with rapid growth. Within the first three months
in her new role as PM, she introduced formal project management processes, created a PM
manual and trained the employees to get the work done well. Within a year, the company was
delivering projects on schedule, the quality processes worked—and customers were happy with
the products! This success was leading to possible new work and greater opportunities to bring
on new customers.
As the growth continued, Samantha was now feeling the pressure. She was only one person.
And there was so much more to still do.
Using her project management skills, she had implemented more formal project management
processes, created a PM manual and trained the employees to get the work done well. One
area where she especially felt stretched thin was in supporting the supervisors.
As the eBook business grew, there were more and more demands on the supervisors. Many
were great print technicians who had caught the eye of the founders for their attitudes and
customer service ethic. But today, they were being called on to do more complex tasks than
merely running a highly automated print copier. Supervisors are interacting with customers, as
well as with internal account managers and customer service representatives. They are
managing employees with a diverse set of skills, backgrounds, and motivations. It is
increasingly hard for them to ask employees to take on hard challenges when they themselves
do not have those skills and have not done the eBook publishing that the business is
increasingly moving to.
Many of the supervisors have had a bit of project management mentoring from Samantha, but
still know that they have to be both leaders and managers. As project teams come together to
work on eBooks, there are challenges. Some of the challenges have to do with knowing the
status of the work, as part-time employees come in and hand a piece of a project off to another
worker. Some deal managing conflicts as they arise �…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment