Problem:
Your company, HLR Inc., is about to implement a major initiative that will impact many aspects of the organization and that will have a significant cost. This is the largest project ever undertaken by the company, and it must be completed within 18 months. It will involve the people at headquarters, as well as two remote sites, one of which is in a foreign country. It will be led by the information technology (IT) department. You have been assigned to lead the entire project.
Until recently, HLR has not been very disciplined in its IT project management. In the past, IT projects have not been completed within budget or on time. Though you have the support of the CIO, who understands the value of project management, not all the business units that will be affected by this project share this understanding. For many of them, project management is viewed as limiting and unnecessary. You know that one of your first major battles will be to get the business units and IT managers to understand your role and the value that project management brings to the organization.
Implementing this project "standard customer relationship management processes" involves business process reengineering and a large system implementation. Staff resources have been allocated for this project from IT and from the following major business units:
Sales (Chicago Headquarters and Ottawa, Canada): Establishes and maintains the relationship with the lease customer and needs to be aware of the status of lease arrangements and customer problems
Product fulfillment (Denver and Ottawa): Processes, evaluates, and approves development and leasing contracts; recommends change requests to customers, and updates project scope information if approved by change control board
Customer service (Denver): Resolves problems for customers by implementing conflict management process to handle customer issues; updates approved changes to customer information
Billing (Chicago): Deals with rental payments, invoice issues, and follow-ups; updates approved changes to customer information; provides financial information to sales and executive management
Marketing (Chicago): Reviews sales and future development data and determines marketing opportunities
Currently, each business unit uses a different information system and set of manual processes. Customer information is stored in several databases and is not consistent across systems. Marketing must gather information from multiple systems and does not feel that the data are very accurate. Significant business and future development opportunities are consistently lost because of these data problems.
Within the organization, there is a lack of experienced and skilled human resources available to successfully complete this project. The software vendor to be selected will need to provide many of the technical staff because IT has focused solely on maintaining legacy systems in the past. The current business unit managers are primarily responsible for defining new processes and data requirements and are not very knowledgeable about the project groups. They do not realize that expert knowledge is possessed by the lower level staff members who execute the daily tasks.
During annual strategic planning, senior management identified this project as critical for the entire organization. HLR has experienced a 25% growth in sales development over the past year. Growth for the next year is hoped to be over 35%. Growth will be achieved through targeting new markets, expansion, and the introduction of several mall and development plans. To achieve this growth, aggressive project forecasting will be needed to provide realistic, accurate project data to achieve these goals.
Develop a 20-minute presentation that you will give to your manager and the project sponsors. The presentation should cover the following:
the benefits of project planning
project management within the various types of organizational systems
how your approach to project management will affect the success of the project outcome.