Mini-Case Study: Project Management at Pustaka Buuks Publishing Pustaka Books Publishing was started three years ago by two friends, Jenny Chan, and Muthu, who met in college while studying in UTM. In the new business Jenny focused on editing, sales, and marketing while Muthu did the electronic assembly and publishing of books for Pustaka Books. Their business was successful and profitable in the first three years, largely due to contracts from two big businesses. In theirfouith year they got very busy thanks to theirthird major customer, a local college that needed customized eBooks. They hired several part-time employees to help them with their publishing business. But by the end of fourth year of operation, Pustaka Books started experiencing critical problems. They were: - unable to leverage all the new employees effectively. - unable to deliver eBooks to their customers on schedule. 0 unable to provide quality texts , time and money was being spent fixing defects in their products 0 unable to control coststheir business was not profitable in the fourth year. Pustaka Books saw a significant rise in issues, a lot of unpleasant \"surprises\" were cropping up; business was down as new resources were hired, also some of the projects were poorly estimated. The local university was unhappy as their eBook products reached campus late for use by professors and student. In some cases, the books were a week or two late. Since the courses must start on schedule and students need their books at the beginning of their courses, the new lucrative college customer was unhappy. One of the new parttime employees hired by Jenny and Muthu, Siti, had taken a project management course at college. Siti was excited about the discipline of project management and had intentionally selected a job with Pustaka Books Publishing as she saw an opportunity to polish her project management skills. One fine day, Jenny invited Siti for a lunch meeting. She was aware that Siti was familiar with project management, and wanted to hear what she had to say aboutthe problems she and Muthu were facing. Over lunch she questioned why their small business, which had operated and 3 implemented projects so successfully over the first three years was being challenged significantly now. She specifically listed the problems they were facing and asked for input to solve them. Siti asked for more time to research all the issues but noted that Pustaka Books, while being innovative, completed projects without a roadmap or a project plan and lacked a disciplined approach to project management. She noted that Jenny and Muthu did not use any project software for scheduling, and they did not use tools ortechniques to estimate, budget or to communicate with stakeholders. Finally, they had no processes in place to manage project risks and quality. Impressed with this and other conversations, Jenny asked Siti if she would considerjoiningthem as a project associate or project manager on a fulletime basis to help them introduce project management practices and help them tide over their current crisis. Siti accepted the of'ferl She has several key skillsishe is an excellent communicator with particularly good interpersonal skills and detail-oriented. Within the first three months in her new role as PM, she introduced formal project management processes, created a PM manual, and trained the employees to get the work done well. Within nine months Siti had fully turned things around Due to proactive risk analysis and risk response planning, surprises and issues reduced Communication with stakeholders was enhanced Muthu and Jenny noted that the company was delivering projects on schedule, the quality processes workediand customers were happy with the products