Project Management at Global Green Books Publishing
Global Green Books Publishing was started two years ago by two friends, Jim King and Brad Mount, who met in college while studying in Philadelphia, USA. In the new business Jim focused on editing, sales and marketing while Brad Mount did the electronic assembly and publishing of books for Global Green Books. Their business was successful and profitable in the first two years, largely due to contracts from two big businesses.
In their third year they got very busy thanks to their third major customer, a local college that needed customized eBooks. They hired several part time employees to help them with their publishing business.
But by the end of third year of operation, Global Green Books started experiencing critical problems. They were:
unable to leverage all the new employees effectively
unable to deliver eBooks to their customers on schedule
unable to provide quality texts—time and money was being spent fixing defects in their products
unable to control costs—their business was not profitable in the third year.
Global Green Books saw a significant rise in issues, a lot of unpleasant “surprises” were cropping up; business was down as new resources were hired, also some of the projects were poorly estimated. The local university was unhappy as their eBook products reached campus late for use by professors and student. In some cases, the books were a week or two late. Since the courses must start on schedule and students need their books at the beginning of their courses, the new lucrative college customer was unhappy.
One of the new part-time employees hired by Jim and Brad, Samantha, had taken a project management course at college. Samantha was excited about the discipline of project management and had intentionally selected a job with Global Green Books Publishing as she saw an opportunity to polish her project management skills and implement project management as a business process.
One fine day, Jim invited Samantha, for a lunch meeting. He was aware that Samantha was familiar with project management, and wanted to hear what she had to say about the problems he and Brad were facing. Over lunch he questioned why their small business which had operated and implemented projects so successfully over the first two years was being challenged significantly now. He specifically listed the problems they were facing and asked for input to solve them.
Samantha asked for more time to research all the issues but noted that Global Green Books, while being innovative, completed projects without a roadmap or a project plan and lacked a disciplined approach to project management. She noted that Jim and Brad did not use any project software for scheduling and they did not use tools or techniques to estimate, budget or to communicate with stakeholders. Finally, they had no processes in place to manage project activities, project risks and quality.
Impressed with this and other conversations, Jim King asked Samantha if she would consider joining them as a project associate or project manager on a full-time basis to help them introduce project management practices and help them tide over their current crisis.
Samantha accepted the offer! She has several key skills—she is an excellent communicator with very good interpersonal skills and detail-oriented. Although the organization may not have been ready for project management as a business process, she could see the potential for this to happen but she understood in order for this to happen she has to start somewhere.
It appears Samantha has some really good core skills but she still has a lot to do here. There are some issues here that Samantha needs to consider. Try and help her out by discussing some strategies for the following:
1. Maturity Model Strategy (Identify where they are now and where you think they could be in your analysis)
2. Contract types (There are some liability issues with employee skill sets. They are also a young company)
3. Human Resources and Staffing (Think about the current and future state in your analysis)
4. Success (Define for this type of organization. Make sure you are clear and provide details.
5. Stress and Conflict Resolution (These two are definitely relevant here.)
6. Executives (Remember this is a young company. What needs to happen with executives? Or is this a nothing burger?)
In your answers think about the present and the future in your answers as making the transition from implementing project management to having project management as a business process can’t happen overnight or without a carefully carved crafted plan.
Your submission should be in APA format. Your references should be in APA format. There isn’t a page limit.
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