Maximum Megaherzt Case Study

Magali Ekome Ndong MGT 4330 Dr. Margaret Shipley Tuesday November 6th 2012 Case#4 Maximum Megahertz Project Maximum Megahertz Olaf Gundersen, CEO of Wireless Telecom Company, is facing a difficult situation. He accepted a project proposed by 6 of his cleverest R&D specialist, The Maximum Megahertz project. This project is now behind. In order to get out of this “quandary” and avoid such issues in the future, Olaf Gundersen and his team should ask themselves these questions. How can they learn from their mistake? How to identify a risky project and put an end to it?
This particular case is related to chapter 14 of our textbook. This chapter deals with project closure or what to do when your project is done. Although here our project is not done, these chapters discuss the main reason why it is so. It is said on page 505 of the textbook, “the closure phase is as important as any other phase of the project. Observation tells us that organizations that manage closure and review well prosper. Those who don’t tend to have projects that drag on forever and repeat the same mistake over and over”.
It is said in our case that this project is not the first one Olaf and his company as difficulty with. Matter of fact, there were three other projects that could not be completed in the last 5 years. The CEO kept on investing resources into these projects knowing that they were dead end. We can therefore, affirm that Olaf did not learn from his mistakes. He needs to include in his future plan of action a review stage after each project completion. Here, we seem to have a “perpetual” project which is a never ending project.

For instance, completing this project will take 6 additional months when it is already 4 months late. Also, this project initially demanded $600,000 and now requires $800,000 more. The team faces numerous issues such as power reduction, speed increase and use of a new technology battery. In regard to all the information given, I will suggest that Olaf puts an end to this project. He could certainly pour more resources into the project, but doing so will not be a wise decision, in regard to his past failures.
Also, Olaf is already discouraged and unmotivated about this project “his gut feeling tell him the project will never materialize, and he should get out”. In other to avoid having the same issues down the road, Olaf and his team need a plan of action. In this plan he first needs to review past projects and identify recurring issues. For that, he should hire and independent facilitators that will review previous or current projects that will draw lessons learned and advise on future procedures.
Second, he needs to evaluate his team members and look for any issues such as effectiveness of group decision, problem solving processes, group cohesion and quality of information exchanged as suggested in our textbook page 512. Also, before accepting any new project, Olaf should make sure he understands all the parts and that his Telecom Company is fit to fulfill the project. An article by Ted Klastorin and Gary Mitchell, suggest that planning is a critical step in project completion.
We can read from this extract from the article, Optimal project planning under the threat of a disruptive event, “A critical part of most project plans is a baseline schedule (or pre-schedule; Herroelen, 2007; Van de Vonder et al. , 2007) that is frequently used for timing resource allocation decisions in supplier contracts as well as communicating with project stakeholders and setting benchmarks for project monitoring and control. The importance of defining stable baseline schedules has been recognized by the Project Management Institute (Project Management Institute, 2008)”.
Furthermore, this article adds that “Given the importance of baseline schedules in the planning process, researchers and practitioners have focused on methodologies for finding schedules that are robust to random durations”. In this article, the authors propose a model or formula to use in case of disruption as follow “In this article, we introduce a problem faced by managers who are planning complex projects; that is, how should project managers react when faced with the threat of a possible DE that would stop all work on the project for a given period while overhead and indirect costs continue to accrue?
While this problem is related to previous work on project risk, our model analyzes policies that minimize expected total costs under very general conditions”. Although we will not go in dept. into the model, but we are here assure that they ways to effectively deal with disruptions. In conclusion, Olaf should step out of this project and refrain from engaging in any new ones before he consults a review committee that will help highlight the errors he has made in the past. Also, we suggest that looks closer at his planning strategy and eview his team. Works Cited Case Megahertz Project page 530 Project Management: the managerial process Erik W. Larson, Clifford F. Gray, 5 ed. Chapter 14 Project Closure pages 504-531 Project Management: the managerial process Erik W. Larson, Clifford F. Gray, 5 ed. Optimal Project Planning under the Threat of a Disruptive Event, Ted Klastorin, Gary Mitchell IIE Transactions Vol. 45, Iss. 1, 2013 ABInform http://wj2gn4jw9z. search. serialssolutions. com. ezproxy. uhd. edu/? ctx_ver=Z39. 8-2004&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/ProQ%3Aabiglobal&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft. genre=article&rft. jtitle=IIE+Transactions&rft. atitle=Optimal+project+planning+under+the+threat+of+a+disruptive+event&rft. au=Klastorin%2C+Ted%3BMitchell%2C+Gary&rft. aulast=Klastorin&rft. aufirst=Ted&rft. date=2013-01-01&rft. volume=45&rft. issue=1&rft. spage=68&rft. isbn=&rft. btitle=&rft. title=IIE+Transactions&r