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
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.
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
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.
Planning is probably the most complex and hardest part of project management, and its where Lockheed Martin has its biggest downfall. How does one establish correctly how long it will take to complete something that has never been done? When do you start working on part C of the project when you’re on part A. All of these issues are resolved with proper techniques in project management such as Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), Statement of Work (SOW), and proper preparation throughout numerous meetings. Every single player in the project has a major key in some form, may it be the sponsor with the funding or the line manager with resource allocation. Proper planning will account every single person, object, goal, and action to be performed. It
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).
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
This document is an annotated outline for a Project Management Plan, adapted from the PMI Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and IEEE Standard for Project Management Plans. The Project Management Plan is considered to be a “Best Practice” template by the ETS Enterprise Program Management Office (EPMO).
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.
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.
Based on the project lifecycle model you choose in section 4 above, develop a project plan and:
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
Project Management is all about managing your tasks and goals with the best use of available resources within a fixed frame of time. To achieve the fixed time, the project manager would need the proper coordination of all possible inputs required to carry out the task successfully. One of such inputs is the project management maturity model which allows for improvement of project management processes and systems (Crawford, 2006). Project management maturity is the progressive development of an enterprise-wide project management approach, methodology, strategy, and decision-making process. The appropriate level of maturity will vary for each organization based on specific goals, strategies, resource capabilities, scope, and
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
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.
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.