Case Study Assignment – Macon, Inc.
1 Where will the greatest resistance for excellence in Project Management come from? In the process of going from a non-project driven firm to a project-driven one, the greatest resistance might come from the executives including the board members, company owners and the vice president. The strong and rigid culture has been instilled in the company since 50 years and as a result, the president's preaching fell on deaf ears. Authoritative support is necessary to execute such strategies and it seems that for Macon Inc., that will be the most difficult one. Resistance will also surface among other groups like the line managers and engineers as there is a lack of accountability and
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c After the acceptance of all stakeholders is achieved, actual growth begins and a project management methodology needs to be selected based on the major areas seeking improvement. A project tracking and monitoring system has to be in place for improved estimation of project life-cycle.
d In the last step of maturity, continued training and refining is inevitable for good project management practices. Educational programs should be embedded as a part of employee and executive level training.
e Excellence in PM goes beyond the maturity phase, where all the improvement areas have been addressed and the experience from mature PM combined with the deduced KPIs now allows the company to lead projects with a customer-focused approach.
3 How long will it take to achieve some degree of excellence? Implementing an efficient PM system requires some initial investment in developing the methodology and support systems for planning and scheduling. However, these costs will be offset by the additional benefits that it generates in term of efficiency and customer satisfaction. Only at this point, PM can be said to have benefited the company. This stage is called the maturity level where the processes and tools are in place to achieve successes in PM. With immediate support from the executive level, Macon Inc. could take close to 2 years to achieve a maturity phase. Built on the learnings and KPIs from the maturity phase, a degree of excellence follows. If PM
Project management is managing the work to develop and innovate or even change within an existing operation. There are five steps in this management: Initiating the project, Planning and controlling all activities to keep the project on schedule, executing every phase of the projects process, monitoring/ controlling reviewing and regulating the progress and performance of all phases of the project, Closing process this is where all processes are finalized and completed to officially close the project out.
According to the comprehensive review of Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies' (FM&T) efforts to develop and implement a Program Management Maturity Model, published by Project Management Professionals (PMPs) Laura Hartwig and Matt Smith, the company's motivation to make the transition to a maturity model was based on an internal assessment which identified a number of correctable program management deficiencies (2008). Before beginning any analysis of Honeywell FM&T's organizational structure, including the processes and procedures that precipitated its Level 1 program management rating, it is essential to ground the discussion in a sober explication of the Program Management Maturity Model (PMMM) from a conceptual standpoint. According to J. Kent Crawford's rigorous analysis of PMMM and its theoretical foundations, the concept of utilizing maturity models to enhance organizational performance emerged from "extensive, government-funded research into how to evolve and measure an organization's effectiveness at developing software, which resulted in the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) first Capability Maturity Model (CMM)" (Crawford, 2006). The essential function of maturity models like CMM and PMMM is to identify a series of project management knowledge areas, such as scope, time, and cost management, while also providing a five-level hierarchy of managerial maturity to guide the direction of each area.
As far as schools, Macon County has many different schools available. According to the government website of Macon County, IL, there are seven public school districts within Macon County. The schools that are within a ten minute driving range of Maroa-Forsyth Grade School are: Warrensburg-Latham, Decatur Christian School, Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School, and the Lutheran School Association. Of those schools, only two are located in the village of Forsyth. Three of them are private schools while only one is a public school. There are two hospitals located in Macon County.
As could be predicted, each company had different levels of maturity in PM. Alpha had an EPM system and believed that their PM implementation was better than Honicker’s. Beta Company was just learning PM and did not have an EMP; they did have some templates that used for status report. Gamma and Delta did not know about project management. Additional to these PM differences, laws of the four company’s locations
As according to the AtekPC Project Management Office case, the purpose1 of a PMO is to fulfill the need for greater discipline in managing IT projects. Moreover, it establishes or enhances project management skills, process, and governance structures within an organization (Applegate Pg. 462). The director of Application Development, Richard Steinberg, described AtekPC’s PMO’s purpose as a “methodology” for managing projects with standardized practices. As stated within the case, the main purpose of the PMO is to provide standardization in managing projects of large, complex scales as well as gain improvements in planning and performance of initiatives (Applegate Pg. 465). The case generalizes
Several adaptations to the traditional approaches like agile, interactive, phased, extreme, etc have been made but each will be expected to meet the requirements of the project objectives, timeline, resources, and deliveries of the stakeholders. Other industry standard certifications like ISO9000 and regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley have also influenced methodologies and processes used by several organisations (Kerzner, 2003). Generally, managing projects should involved five major process which include the project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and then project closing. See Fig. 2 below.
This is achieved by setting expectations for those that practice project management globally, which will set the tone when individuals in the business execute them as prescribed. By understanding the expectations of the CEPC and putting them into practice, the field of project management will become an example of consummate professionalism. Other professions may seek to utilize some or all of the elements of the PMI, CEPC (PMI, 2006).
Note. From Flynn, D, Pan, G, Keil, M and Mähring M. (2009). De-escalating IT Projects: The DMM Model. Communications of the ACM, vol. 52, no 10. doi: 10.1145/1562764.1562797.
The paper rates each of the four phases using the following project management knowledge areas: Scope, Time, Cost, Quality, Human Resource, Communication, Risk, Procurement, and Integration Management. An Excellent (5) rating was provided to the project management areas where the project management team were so successful. A Very Good (4) was given for the areas in which the project management team performed very well. A Good (3) was given for the areas in which the project management team performed well. A Poor (2) was given to the areas which had just applied new procedures. A Very Poor (1) rating was given to the project management areas in which either were not achieved the needed goals or were implemented unsuccessfully. In the fifth phase “Lessons Learned” we have studied the whole project, identified the area of improvements and learned how such adjustments can be used in coming
Based on the project lifecycle model you choose in section 4 above, develop a project plan and:
The PM system must be "user friendly" to facilitate effective training and operations in a fast paced environment. The consultants will help clearly define “user friendly” so this requirement can be included in the RFP and objectively evaluated during the selection process.
However, many of the deficiencies are not software capability issues per se but rather process, configuration, and training issues associated with how the system was implemented. The current implementation is driven by the processes and business rules that have been defined and configured to date. As it specifically relates to PM, it appears the approach and initial attempts to implement the module were incomplete and related process decisions did not consider maintenance needs at the time. As a result PM is not and cannot be properly/fully used to its potential at this time.
Project management is fundamentally part of every facet of life rather we have the education to realize that we are implementing it in our world or not. For everyone to understand the fundamental project team concepts and principals to have a solid understanding, it will be explained here. We will describe the five parts of the project life cycle, describe the three most important criteria for team success, describe the fundamentals of team structure, and finally list and describe the stages of a team’s life cycle.
In the past the project manager (PM) mostly focused on standard procedures, but the growth of project dimension and complexity have requested new skills and approaches for delivering successful
Project Management is one of the key features on which the success of a project heavily depends upon. No matter what the type of project whether its IT or an industrial, the techniques, skills, tools and knowledge to meet the final delivery remains a common requirement in all. But it doesn’t mean that they should be applied uniformly on all projects. Here comes the importance of project management methodologies. A methodology is a model, which project managers employ for the design, planning, implementation and achievement of their project