Questions and Answers

Question 1. Where will the greatest resistance for excellence in project management come from?

Most resistance to excellence in project management comes from middle level management, especially supervisors and heads of department. The reason they resist is because they feel they are in competition with the other departments rather than the market competitors (Kerzner, 2013). Autonomy of departments contributes to the resistance because there is no external authority to synchronize the activities or to transition processes smoothly between departments. Departments play the blame game instead of taking responsibility for failure and delays.

Question 2. What plan should be developed for achieving excellence in project management?

The plan for achieving excellence should be to employ appropriately professional managers to head the departments, for example an electrical engineer to head the electrical department. The other plan should be to have a customer relations department to handle all customer complaints, so that customers do not blame individual departments for problems faced. The company must retrain the staff to work as a team in project management, so that processes follow a timeline instead of a “gut feel” (Kerzner, 2013). Finally the company should institute a process audit system through which weaknesses in the whole system may be identified and rectified.

Question 3.  How long will it take to achieve some degree of excellence?

A degree of excellence will take as long as the time needed to complete a retaining course on integration and interdepartmental synergy, which could be a month or so. It will also be necessary to introduce a new reporting system to handle transition between processes and audit the processes so that any problems and delays can be addressed. This would take a few weeks to implement.

Question 4.  Explain the potential risks to Macon if the customer’s experience with project management increases while Macon’s knowledge remains stagnant.

            By involving customers in “watchdog” role, the customers get to know the workings of Macon, in effect exposing them (Kerzner, 2013). If customer experience increases relative t Macon’s, they are likely to start rival companies or defect to the better suppliers. Customers are also likely to pressurize Macon to change their system or lower their prices.

Reference

Kerzner, H. (2013). Project management. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.