It was Tuesday morning and the clock started ticking 11 am, John Gillon looked worried as he skimmed through delivery timeline for various projects in his portfolio. He was wondering how he can ensure smooth deliveries from the “Institutional-Billing” group.

Background

TeleMeck has been a small but renowned IT service and consulting company in the Telecommunication industry. A company loyalist John Gillon headed its Billing and Payment, practice group. Having consulted many telecom companies in US and Europe for more than 20 years, John was known as a manager with thorough domain knowledge and hands-on experience of various billing systems and payment processes.

The growth record

Under John’s leadership, the Billing & Payment Department has grown multi-fold: revenue was tripled and team size has grown from 60 members to 350 resources. Looking at the strong financial performance in past few years and current size of projects in the sales pipeline, senior management has entrusted John to expand his practice-group.

The sub-practice group:

Thomas McGill joined Billing and Payments department six years ago as a consultant; since then he worked closely with John. Having exhibited high level of commitment, Thomas easily entered into circle of people trusted by John. It was not surprising to see that Thomas was promoted over the years and now as a project manager, he is leading a sub-practice group ‘Institutional-billing’ and in turn a team of thirty people (Direct + Indirect). Sarah, Silton and Jason are directly reporting to Thomas and they in turn, are managing team size of approximately ten members each. Sarah, Silton and Jason shared very good rapport with Thomas.

Project delivery issues

Though all other things apparently were looking good, since last couple of years, John Gillon started sensing some problems in the project deliveries. Couple of clients also complained about lack of sound project management practices in his department e.g. A vice president at Erricsson Corporation and a sponsor for couple of projects for ‘Institutional-Billing’, voiced problems regarding stakeholder updates, slippage of delivery schedule, quality audits, etc. John Gillon was aware of these concerns. After consulting his colleagues and senior managers, he concluded that his department lacks the expertise in project planning and deliveries. Current team members who have got promoted as project manager were assigned this role purely because department has grown and company needed somebody to manage bigger teams

His department needed experienced and certified project managers to streamline project management practices and in turn deliveries. These project managers would also guide current team about best practices in project management.

Solution devised

Hence, a year ago, John decided to hire experienced and certified project managers and one such hire was Alex. Alex was certified PMP who has worked in CMMi level five compliant organizations and holds considerable work experience in the financial sector. Alex joined ‘Institutional-Billing’ – the sub-practice group sharing project delivery responsibilities with Thomas. Thus, ‘Institutional-Billing’ has two project managers. Alex was an experienced project manager but he was not an expert in ‘Billing and Payment’ in telecom domain.

As couple of months passed, Alex realized that he was not able to get correct information about deliverables, resource utilization, their availability, project plan, actual progress & state of deliverable. Sarah, Silton and Jason were not sharing the complete picture of what their teams were working on, who was working on what, when would they deliver certain deliverable to the client. As Sarah, Silton and Jason were directly reporting to Thomas, they were not paying much heed to Alex’s requests. Alex strongly suspected that Thomas was deliberately preventing his team from sharing/passing on the information.

If the PMO or John Gillon ask for specific project data, Alex would remain unsure of the inputs he had provided whereas Thomas was able to provide precise details to the same requests. Yet Alex and Thomas’s sub-practice-group started facing delivery issues even more prominently – delayed deliveries, increased attrition rate, instances of non- compliance with PMO guidelines.

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When Alex complained about these issues to John, John advised him to understand the domain well and indicated that Alex has not been able to tackle team properly. Alex was in a fix, that neither he was well aware of the technology, domain, etc to argue about, in the meeting nor was he able to manage the deliveries properly.

Six months later, the same issue prevailed; despite of the fact that Alex tried hard to break silos. Alex has come to conclusion that he is at a wrong place and he would look out for another job. He even indicated the same to John. Source: Zilicus, http://blog.zilicus.com/project-management-practice-a-case-study-on-team-management/

Important:

The case study provides a broad overview of the TeleMeck project. Students are requested to read widely and answer the following questions on project management relating to TeleMeck. Furthermore, students are required to integrate theory and practise in their answers. The examiner will take into consideration the links to theory and practice and finally the synthesis of the discussion. Students should support their discussions with tables, figures and graphs where possible.

Consider the scenario that you are a project manager at TeleMeck. You have been appointed as a project manager to ensure that the projects are managed prudently in light of the past non-deliveries. Management has provided you with an incentive bonus if you successfully delivered the projects. Analyse the following questions and develop your response to each one by clearly showing how you will manage the projects using sound project management principles.

As the project manager in whom there are high expectations, the CEO of TeleMeck has summoned you to his office to enlighten him on the considerations that you are planning to take in managing the projects assigned to you. You are face to face with the CEO, now discuss the key characteristics of projects. You are required to refer to the main attributes of projects, the common elements and the trade-offs involved in project management. Once you have discussed the theory as your foundation, you need to convince your CEO that the theory will assist you in your mandate to deliver on the projects at TeleMeck.

John Gillon as your leader at TeleMeck called a meeting with you and your project team. He has expressed his concern that there is little clarity to the length and activities of each phase of the projects under your control. He further indicates that there is a risk that this lack of clarity may result in your projects failing before maturity. You are required to do a presentation to John and to convince him that the project life cycle approach that you are adopting is ideal for the successful tracking and delivery of the different phases of the projects.

Your project team has approached you and seem to be confused on the exact deliverables (work required) coupled to your projects. You have studied project management extensively and have realised that project scope management is an effective process to follow in order to ensure an organised management of the project. Take this opportunity to showcase your advanced knowledge of project scope management and convince your team to use it to deliver on your projects at TeleMeck.

Your projects at TeleMeck have all various constraints attached to them. You have scrutinized each of them and found that the constraints need special attention or else if may result in scope creep. Consequently, you summoned your team to discuss these constraints. Present the constraints as you know them and convince your team to invest special attention to the constraints in order to successfully deliver on your projects.

As your projects at TeleMeck progressed there were some delivery dates that were missed. However, you worked hard with your team to make up for the time that has expired. You continuously try to analyze the project delivery and have eventually come to the realization that you may be lacking certain project management skills. Discuss the project management skills that a competent project needs to have and what skills you may be lacking in order to raise your project management delivery level if those skills are improved.

Project Guidelines Format:

Mark

 Title page 2

 Table of contents 2

 Introduction 2

 Project attributes, common elements, and trade-offs 18

 Project life cycle 18

 Project scope management 18

 Project constraints 18

 Project manager skills 18

 Conclusion 2