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Overview
Global Green Books Publishing (GGBP) was started two years ago by two friends, Jim King and Brad Mount, who met in college while studying in Philadelphia, PA. In the new business Jim focused on editing, sales, and marketing while Brad did the electronic assembly and publishing of books for their new company. Their business was successful and profitable in the first two years, largely due to contracts from two big businesses.
In their third year, they got very busy thanks to their third major customer, a local college that needed customized eBooks. They hired several part-time employees (mostly students) to help them with their publishing business.
But by the end of third year of operation, Global Green Books Publishing started experiencing critical problems. They were:
inability to leverage all the new employees effectively
unable to deliver eBooks to their customers on schedule
problems with providing quality texts; time and money were being spent fixing defects in their products
lack of cost control; their business was not profitable in the third year
Global Green Books Publishing saw a significant rise in issues, and several unpleasant “surprises” were cropping up; business was down as new resources were hired, and some of the projects were poorly estimated. The local university was unhappy as their eBook products reached campus late for use by professors and students. In some cases, the eBooks were a week or two late. Since the courses must start on schedule and students need their eBooks at the beginning of their courses, the new, potentially lucrative college customer was unhappy.
One of the new part-time employees hired by Jim and Brad, Samantha, had taken a project management course at college. Samantha was excited about the discipline of project management and had intentionally selected a job with Global Green Books Publishing as she saw an opportunity to polish her project management skills.
One day, Jim invited Samantha for a lunch meeting. He was aware that Samantha was familiar with project management, and wanted to hear what she had to say about the problems he and Brad were facing. Over lunch, he questioned why their small business, which had operated and implemented projects so successfully over the first two years was being challenged significantly now. He specifically listed the problems they were facing and asked for input to solve them.
Samantha asked for more time to research all the issues and later reported to the owners that Global Green Books Publishing, while being innovative, completed projects without a roadmap or a project plan and lacked a disciplined approach to project management. She noted that Jim and Brad did not use any project software for scheduling and they did not use tools or techniques 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, Jim asked Samantha if she would consider being reassigned as a project manager to help them introduce workable project management practices.
Samantha accepted the offer. As her new bosses had figured out, she has several key skills; she is an excellent communicator with very good interpersonal skills and is 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 successfully.
Within nine months, Samantha had fully turned things around. Due to proactive risk analysis and risk response planning, surprises and issues were greatly reduced. Communication with stakeholders was enhanced.
Brad and Jim noted that the company was delivering projects on schedule, the quality processes worked, and customers were happy with the products!
Instructions
Comment on the following aspects of the case study:
Why did Global Green Books Publishing struggle initially? What were the specific PM solutions that were introduced by Samantha that worked?