QuestionAssignment 1Read the case study and answer the questions .As soonas graduating from the Project Management post graduate program at a community college, Dave Kumar landed in his first project management job at a book publishing organization: “Howdy Publishers”. Dave has an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering and worked in the Pulp and Paper industry for 6 years before pursuing his project management designation. His appreciation for process, logical cognitive ability and an understanding for project management best practices were the highlights that influenced him to become the top candidate for this particular job. Howdy Publishers was founded in 1958 at Brampton Ontario and has been a successful publisher, who has their own manufacturing plant to print books and magazines. They have always differentiated them as the low cost provider for printed material. However, the recent environmental concerns of unsustainable deforestation and Canada’s pulp and paper industry slowly losing its leverage in manufacturing efficiency to Asian players have brought pressure on the Howdy executive team to re-visit their business strategy. After completing a detailed market analysis, Howdy executive team devised a 5 year plan to slowly migrate their existing books and magazines to “e-books”. Dave Kumar was specifically hired to manage a pilot project for this strategic initiative. Dave became a bit concerned as he has never worked in the software development industry and converting to an electronic medium (e-book) requires professional software development life cycle. However, Dave still maintains a very good relationship with his co-learners from his project management program and a number of them come from solid Information Technology (IT) background; even more, they have worked in a number of different countries around the globe. Armed with this support group and consulting with a number of subject matter experts within the organization, Dave had come up with a list of activities, their predecessor relationships and possible resources that will work on this project. His intent is to ultimately create a detailed schedule. Projects are conducted in a matrix structure at Howdy Publishers and part of the organization structure and functional accountabilities are depicted in “Appendix B”. Resources are allocated from the functional teams for all projects and it is mandatory that the Managers of respective departments be kept informed of all tasks where resources from their departments have been assigned. Department heads (Directors) have the ultimate accountability for signing-off on all tasks and artifacts relevant to their specific functional areas (Functional department accountable for each set of phase is indicated in brackets under the “Resource Name” column in the project schedule – Appendix A). Chuck Beavers (Chuck) has been with the organization for more than 20 years and is considered very knowledgeable. It is prudent to seek his guidance (consult) for all “Initiation” and “Requirements” phase activities. In addition, all issues during “Testing” activities must be resolved in consultation with the development team member Tzu Wi (Tzu). All staff members indicated under “Resource Name” will be responsible for completing the respective tasks. Howdy Publishers follow the standard work schedule and each resource is expected to work from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM with a 30 minutes lunch break (work hours = 7.5 hours). No work is performed during the weekends (Saturday and Sunday) and during any statutory holidays honored in the province of Ontario (Appendix E). Questions:1. Complete the “Start Date” and “Finish Date” for all activities for the project schedule attached in “Appendix A”. (Note: All rows must be filled) – Marks: 40%2. Identify two milestones from the project schedule. – Marks: 5%3. Complete a RACI chart for the given project. A template is produced in “Appendix C”. Please note that, if a particular individual is assigned multiple roles, indicate all role assignments (even if one role supersedes the other). – Marks: 25%4. Analyze the RACI chart and point out two issues that could impact the project execution negatively? – Marks: 5%5. Once the project scheduling is completed, Dave has been working on the post production tasks. He worked with an external Consultant to sequence the activities and produced the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) published in “Appendix D”. Please re-draw the DSM to represent the least “re-work” to the post production activities. (Only re-ordering the task sequence should be considered for this question). – Marks: 20%6. Were you able to completely avoid “re-work” based on your restructuring (question #5)? If not, what alternatives do you have to minimize the remaining tasks that could cause potential re-work (state one alternative)? – Marks: 5%BusinessManagementProject Management
