Question

1. Sally Williams does not currently have a project management office (or various titles used to describe a delivery office). How would I go about helping them set one up?
2. What characteristics would make the establishment of the PMO for the insource/outsource a project and why?

Case

Dries Pretorius, national sales manager of Sally Williams Fine Foods, a small manufacturer of luxury nougat, was furious. It was May 2007, four years since Sally Williams had first appointed its distributor and the thermostat at the distributor's warehouse had failed. As a result, his product had spoiled and he had to recall almost all of it. This was not the first mistake the distributor had made and Pretorius knew he had to make a change. Should Sally Williams bring distribution back in-house or continue to outsource it, he wondered. And if the decision was to outsource, what should the company look for in a new distributor?

The Sally Williams company was named after its founder, at the time well-known for her Johannesburg-based Sally Williams Cookery School. She and her family were nougat lovers and, in the mid-1990s while on a culinary tour abroad, she tasted a nougat in the souks of Marrakech, Morocco and took it to her two sons to try. They remarked that she could do much better so, once she got back to South Africa, she started experimenting in her kitchen. The results, however, were not to her liking, being either too soft, too chewy or too hard. So she shelved the idea for a while. Approximately one year later, while visiting a market in Hammamat, Tunisia, Williams tasted what she thought was "the perfect nougat". She insisted on meeting the maker and was taxied to his home where he was making the nougat in his garage. He would not sell his recipe to her, but eventually shared a few tips. This was a turning point for Williams and she started experimenting again in earnest when she returned home.

This time, there was further impetus for her to get the recipe right. Callard and Bowser, a UK-based firm, had stopped producing the family's favourite brand of nougat. Williams was therefore aware that there was gap in the market for a top quality nougat.

Many batches later - her students acting as guinea pigs - Williams finally came up with a recipe that they all agreed was just right. One of her students was married to Mervyn Brittan who ran a chain of sweet stores, Brittan's Sweets. Once he had tasted her nougat, he placed an order immediately and referred her to two other companies, another sweet chain, Sweets from Heaven and the upmarket grocery store, Thrupps. Both placed orders straight away. The first order of 100 packets was sold out in two days and another order for 500 packets was placed.

Williams marketed her product herself, going from door to door offering tastings of her nougat and the orders started to roll in. Her manufacturing operation moved from her kitchen to the garage but this only helped for a couple of months. Within 18 months the company had to relocate to a factory and in early 2003 it moved into new 2 500 square metre premises that were custom-built for making nougat.

It was also during this time that the company won gold medals for two of its flavours at the Great Taste Awards in the UK. This was regarded as quite an achievement for such a relatively unknown brand.

Williams retired in 2003, and sold her shares to her husband, Colin Williams and her son-in-law, Mark Sack. A couple of years later, Sack bought out the entire business.