Project management achieving competitive advantage 3rd edition pdf

Operations crossed international borders: bordering areas of Laos and Cambodia were used by North Vietnam as supply routes and were heavily bombed by U. Gradual withdrawal of U. Morale declined significantly among U. Initially fielding less conventional and poorer weaponry, from onward the People's Army of Vietnam and its branch People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam had increasingly became mechanised and armoured, capable of modernised combined arms and mobile warfare and begun to widely deploy newer, untested weapons.

Direct U. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities see Vietnam War casualties. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from ,[43] to 3. The end of the war and resumption of the Third Indochina War would precipitate the Vietnamese boat people and the bigger Indochina refugee crisis, which saw an estimated , people perish at sea.

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Flag for inappropriate content. Download now. For Later. Related titles. Carousel Previous Carousel Next. Pinto Solutions Manual. Jump to Page. Search inside document. Matt Saiedfar. Jose Maria Santos. Michael Drew Prior. Matt Novak. In the event of a failure, competitors would not only possibly gain new business, but may also learn from the shortcomings of the project and avoid such mistakes for themselves.

Project team members would have direct impact on the success of the upgrade and as such would also stand to reap benefits or detriments from the outcome. Top management may be evaluated on the outcome of the project and may feel significant pressure to see that the project is a success. Ultimately, clients would stand to gain from a successful implementation in the areas of faster transactions or better service, etc. Consider a medium-sized company that has decided to begin using project management in a wide variety of its operations.

As part of their operational shift, they are going to adopt a project management office PMO somewhere within their organization. Make an argument for the type of PMO they should be adopting weather station, control tower, or resource pool. What are some of the key decision criteria that will help them determine which model makes most sense? The company should adopt a control tower PMO.

Since widespread project management is new to the organizational structure, the control tower will offer it the necessary monitoring sets standards and maintenance improvements and problem solving for a successful transition into a project organization.

It will provide support for employees and will help to focus on improvement and problem solving as the company works through the stages of implementing project management. When determining which model is best for the organization it is important to consider the structure and size of the current organization, the role of projects within the company, resources available to the PMO and the chain of command.

What are some of the key organizational elements that can affect the development and maintenance of a supportive organizational culture? The key elements that affect a supportive organizational culture are departmental interaction, employee commitment, project planning and performance evaluation systems. Departmental interaction can create supportive relationships between functional and project managers.

It promotes information sharing and increasing likelihood of project success. Employee commitment to goals is important in keeping workers motivated.

When employees feel personally committed to company goals they are will to work harder and possibly longer which leads to success. When planning out resource constraints for a project, it is important to create trust and understanding among managers and employees. Managers are often responsible for approving use of resources from their department and also consult on time requirements for specific tasks.

If managers are made an active part of the planning process they are more willing to allocate resources and give accurate forecasts of time. Workers also need to feel as though they will not be punished if time frames are not met as long as this is not a persistent problem otherwise they or their managers may exaggerate the forecasted amount of time to complete a task. Finally, a performance evaluation criterion needs to encourage initiative and risk taking in a project environment.

Additionally, rewards need to be consistent with the goals of the project. A functional organization that desires to move from an adversarial culture to a supportive, interactive one needs to consider several factors. First, the company should begin by establishing a corporate wide vision that aims at uniting and motivating workers.

Lastly, they will need to establish unambiguous policies on short lines of authority and communication. This will help provide fast and efficient decision-making.

You are a member of the senior management staff at XYZ Corporation. You have historically been using a functional structure set up with five departments: finance, human resources, marketing, production, and engineering. Create a drawing of your simplified functional structure, identifying the five departments. Assume you have decided to move to a project structure. What might be some of the environmental pressures that would contribute to your belief that it is necessary to alter the structure?

With the project structure, you have four projects currently ongoing: stereo equipment, instrumentation and testing equipment, optical scanners, and defense communications. Draw the new structure that creates these four projects as part of the organizational chart. Pressure may come from within the organization or from environmental or external sources.

There may be pressure to be innovative or pressure from a rapidly changing market. Increased consumer demands or competition also put strain on a functional organization. These factors require quick response time, high innovation, speedy development and risk-taking. Functional organizations. Suppose you now wanted to convert this structure to a matrix, emphasizing dual commitments to function and project or product line.

Recreate the structural design to show how the matrix would look. What behavioral problems could you begin to anticipate through this design; that is, do you see any potential points of friction in the dual hierarchy setup? The case also demonstrates the manner in which Rolls-Royce must identify and manage their key stakeholder group for maximum effectiveness. How would you design stakeholder management strategies to address their concerns?

Rolls-Royce also must work closely with national governments who subsidize their airlines by resorting to creative financing, long-term contracts, or assetbased trading deals.

Students discussing this case can create a large and very diverse stakeholder list. It is useful to illustrate how the desires of some stakeholders may be in direct opposition to the needs or expectations of others, making the point that stakeholder management is often a creative juggling act.

What are the benefits and drawbacks from such an arrangement? In answering this question, it is helpful to first identify the tremendous barriers to entry and risk factors associated with manufacturing jet engines. What would Rolls-Royce gain from a consortium arrangement? What could they potentially lose? The arguments can add up on both sides of the ledger so the instructor can steer this discussion to include issues of stakeholder management, corporate strategy, and even culture, by highlighting the problems with blending conflicting cultures under a consortium arrangement.

Case Study 2. Xerox should have been poised to reap billions. It invested in an advanced research center PARC , hired the best and brightest talent in this fledgling industry, and was first off the mark with a fullyfunctioning PC, including Ethernet, laser printing, word processing, spreadsheets, and so forth.

In short, the Alto was simply too much for Xerox to know how to handle it. This contradiction is one of the compelling points in the story. Discuss the difference between research for its own sake and the need to bring it to market.

Xerox had allowed their culture to become moribund and hence, their strategic focus was on making incremental improvements. The irony, as instructors may wish to bring up, is that the original Xerox innovation, the model copier, was a radical innovation for its time and led to huge profits for the company.

Thus, an organization which made its fortune and reputation on a highly successful and radical innovation, could not bring themselves to do the same thing a decade later with the Alto opportunity. Over the five years after the development of the Alto, a series of ill-timed acquisitions, lawsuits, and reorganizations rendered the PC a casualty of inattention.

What division would oversee its development and launch? Whose budget would support it and PARC in general? By leaving those tough decisions unmade, Xerox wasted valuable time and squandered their technological window of opportunity.