GlobalGreenBooks 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 focused on the electronic assembly and publishing of books. In the first two years, their business was profitable, predominantly due to contracts from two big businesses.

Intheirthird year,theygot verybusy thanks totheir thirdmajor customer,alocalcollege thatneeded customizedeBooks. They have decided to approach this new project in a structured manner to ensure that the products are delivered on time and are of the highest quality.

ProjectsatGlobalGreenBooksPublishing

To deal with this new customer, they have hired several new part-time employees to help them with their publishing business,someofthemstudentsatthecollege,whoweregiven flexiblehours.Asthenewschool yeardrewcloser,the ordersstartedcomingin.Theyhadbeentoldhowmanydifferentprintingjobsthecollegewould need,buttheywere not all arriving at once, and orders were quite unpredictable. Some professors needed rush orders for their classes.

When Global Green Books finally got the orders, some of these jobs were much larger than they had thought. Printing these orders turned out to be very challenging. Not all of the new student hires were trained for all of the printing and bindingequipmentused toprintand assemblebooks.Some ofthemoften mademistakes,some workers werecalled off from work due to other demands, and there were often not enough people to get all the work done before deadlines.

Quality was a serious issue, as they had to provide quality textsif there were quality problems with the printed product, they would have to spend time and money fixing defects in their products. Deliveries started slipping past their requested dates and times. Global Green Books was unable to deliver eBooks to their customers on schedule. The local university wasunhappyastheireBook productsreachedcamp us latefor usebyprofessorsandstudents.Insomecases, the books were a week or two late.

Samanthahadbeenhired as aprojectmanagement assistant.Inhernewroleasaprojectmanager,oneoftheprocesses she was trying to institute was risk management. She started looking at what was happening in the business, talkingabout it with the owners and employees and heard about the college's unhappiness. As she did this, she started identifying risks and potential risks. As she went along, she started doing more proactive risk analysis and risk response planning, thus minimising issues. By talking with stakeholders and addressing their concerns, she enhanced communication with them.

LeadershipatGlobalGreenBooksPublishing

Global Green Books Publishing now has three large customers: two in traditional print-based work and the third is a local college. They produce customized eBooks for this local college. This newest line of work is growing as other customers hear of their work, and the account managers are speaking with several other colleges and professional associations about taking on additional projects in electronic publishing.

As they have grown, they have had to start implementing project management concepts to plan and manage their work. Within the first three months in her new role as PM, Samantha introduced formal project management processes, created a PM manual and trained the employees to get the work done well. Within a year, the company delivered projects on schedule, the quality processes workedand customers were happy with the products! This success led to possible new work and greater opportunities to bring on new customers.

As the growth continued, Samantha was now feeling the pressure because she had no one helping with insurmountable work.

Using her project management skills, she implemented more formal project management processes, created a PM manual, and trained the employees to get the work done well. One area where she especially felt stretched was in supporting the supervisors.

As the eBook business grew, there were more and more demands on the supervisors. Many were great print technicians who had caught the eye of the founders for their attitudes and customer service ethic. But today, they were being calledon to do more complex tasks than merely running a highly automated print copier. Supervisors are interacting with customers, as well as with internal account managers and customer service representatives. They are managing employees with a diverse set of skills, backgrounds, and motivations. It is increasingly hard for them to ask employees to take on hard challenges when they themselves do not have those skills and have not done the eBook publishing that the business is increasingly moving to.

Many of the supervisors have had a bit of project management mentoring from Samantha but still know that they have to be both leaders and managers. As project teams come together to work on eBooks, there are challenges. Some of the challenges involve knowing the status of the work, as part-time employees come in and hand a piece of a project off to

anotherworker.Some dealwithmanagingconflictsastheyarise-bothtechnicalissuesaspermissionsaredelayedand

content cannot yet be incorporated, leading to scheduling changes and interpersonal issues among staff. Some of these conflicts occur between a mostly young, part-time contingent of student workers and full-time employees. Supervisors are often drawn into mediating or resolving these conflicts. They need to meld together their staff to create highly capable, productive project teams for these fast-paced eBook projects. The staff needs to trust each other and their leadership tobe fair and to balance work priorities with the times that they are available.

Supervisors need to provide leadership, to inspire their team and be good motivators of their team members, as well asbegoodmanagers,concernedabout theday-to-dayand minute-by-minuteaccomplishmentoftheproject's goals. Beinga good motivator also means that the supervisors must be good listeners to understand what issues are confronting their team members and the needs of their team members.

The supervisors realized that, as a group, they needed two things. One was a greater grasp of people skills, or so-called "soft" skills, to help make them more effective. The other was more support in project management as they needed totrack better the details of the work and the task level scheduling and rescheduling that was happening as team members came and went for their work shifts and as permissions sometimes took longer to obtain than planned.

Samantha is starting to discuss with her management and with the human resources and training group how they can meet some of these needs. Perhaps some leadership development training for supervisors could be arranged. And she is talking with her management about setting up a project management office (PMO) to have project management staff available to help the supervisors with some of their work tracking and scheduling challenges. She hopes that addressing these two issues will make their eBook delivery much smoother.

(Adaptedfrom:ProjectManagementInstitute.(2021). Academic ProjectManagementCaseStudies:GlobalGreenBooks Publishing. https://www.pmi.org/learning/academic-research/project-management-curriculum-and-resources/academic-project-management-case-studies(accessed 5 September 2023).

QUESTION/SECTION3 ProjectManagementMethodology[33MARKS]

1. Samantha is aware that this project faces many risks. Briefly discuss risk management methodology. Then, identify and discuss at least THREE risks from the case study. In your response, you should identify the areas of impact these risks will influence. (18)

1. Project risk can have an impact on how the project is implemented. Briefly discuss the project implementation steps and how project risk can influence the implementation ofa project. (15)

QUESTION/SECTION4 Project Leadership [22MARKS]

1. Brieflydiscusstheethicaldilemmas projectmanagersmightencounterwhen embarking on a project. (8)
2. Global Green BooksPublishingwantsto develop their supervisorstobe moreeffective leaders.Samantha has been appointedas the projectmanager and has taken steps to develop some of the team members to become more effective leaders.

Discuss thecharacteristicsproject managersneedtobesuccessful.Then,identify TWO leadership qualities Samantha is exhibiting. (14)