Project Management - Select a specific industry context

Section1: Project Management

Select a specific industry context that will then be used in your analysis below. Examples might include an IT deployment in a large hospital setting, physically moving a large auto dealership, major systems change in a financial services organization, or a major office remodeling project. Pick a project context of interest to you and one with which you have at least some familiarity. This case context could be a project you have experienced yourself or you can sketch out a hypothetical project context.

1. Briefly outline the major features of your selected hypothetical project (scope and intended outcomes of the project, relationship of project to a larger organizational context, rough estimate of project budget, staffing complement and project completion date.

2. State your specific industry context. What project management tools and methodologies would be most useful in your chosen context? Would you use a traditional "waterfall" project methodology or a more iterative "Lean Start-up" approach?

3. State your specific industry context. What key project documents would be required? Briefly describe how you would specifically use these documents to produce an effective and well managed project.

4. State your specific industry context. If you were chief project manager for this initiative, what would be your role in this effort? What would be the most difficult aspects of this managerial and leadership role in the project context you have chosen. (You may want to provide some hypothetical details to your case that will make this example more realistic).

5. State your specific industry context. What tactics would you use to make sure that costs were controlled in the project and the project was implemented on schedule?

6. State your specific industry context. Beyond issues of cost and schedule, what other risks might arise in implementing your project in the context you have chosen? What would you do to manage such risks?

7. State your specific industry context. What methods would you use to measure project success? What would be some of the key strengths and weaknesses of such success measures?

Section 2, Project Organization & Integration:

1. What kinds of managerial and leadership actions and processes are needed to assure that projects are well integrated with the primary functional areas in the organization (e.g. finance, HR, IT, marketing etc.) Feel free to either answer this question in general terms or you can link your response to the mini-case your developed in question 1 above.

2. What are typical problems that exist in the working relationships between Senior Executive Management and Project Managers? What practices can be applied to prevent such problems?

Section 3, Project Control:

1. Describe 3 best managerial practices useful in project control.

2. Separately identify organizational dynamics that often impede application of each of the best practices you have noted in the previous question. What are the typical ways in which these best practices underperform in the real world? What could be done to raise the probability that this project control methods actually produce their intended results?

3. What are some of the human issues in relation to the behavioral impact of project metrics? Where do we find that people may ignore project metrics and why might they do so? What could be done to improve the performance of project metrics?