Assignment : Case 2....Last Remaining Sections

Project Team

In this section, students can write about the importance of the project members to work as a team in order to plan and implement the project. Refer to my notes on the differences between a 'team' and a 'group'.

Students can write about what makes a team and the characteristics of a team in the context of this assignment as well as what kind of stages a group of people go through before becoming a team.

Additionally, as the PM you can also recommended ways to speed up the transition of the group of your team members into a team. This can range from a team-building exercise; re-location of project members into a shared work space; to giving the team with a name for a sense of identity....

Project Leadership

In any project, leadership is very important as project work is usually very stressful and most of the time; team members tend to lose focus of the 'big picture' as they are too focused on the details of the project.

A good project leader (i.e. the Project Manager) will have the ability to ensure his/her team members are always directed towards the common goal of ensuring all project deliverables can be completed within the time, cost and quality constraints.

Points that students may write about in this section include:

i.) What kind of leadership style is required in managing this project? What are your reasons or justifications of selecting this leadership style against the other styles?

ii.) What are the possible concerns / problems that will arise should the Project Manager does not have the desired leadership qualities?

iii.) What are your possible suggestions / recommendations to address those concerns / problems that you have highlighted above?

Project Team Motivation

As most of you may have found out in real life, hiring people and just giving work to them does not guarantee that they can perform the work up to your satisfaction. Employees generally need some form of motivation to push them to perform both individually as well as a team.

In your assignment, you will need to highlight various issues of motivation:

i.) What are the risks / dangers to the project completion and delivery of quality if the team members are not adequately motivated?

ii.) What are the reasons that project team members may not feel motivated during the life cycle of the project?

iii.) What approaches or strategies can be implemented to motivate the team members throughout the whole project? Remember that motivation can come in many form; money, satisfaction, recognition etc.

iv.) How can the team members be motivated to work as a single team rather than individually? In other words, how can 'synergy' be achieved in the project team under you?

*Students are advised to look for books on management on the topic of team motivation to get more ideas on this section.

Project Risk Management

In this section, students can write about the following issues:

i.) Risk Identification - What are the possible things that can go wrong during the planning and execution of this project? As I have mentioned earlier, use your WBS to identify the risks in each tasks that need to be carried out in this project.

For example, what possible risks are there in the construction of the depot? The risks may include:

- Depot layout or design may not suit intended use - Construction plans not approved or delayed by local authorities - Construction delayed by non-performing contractors / sub-contractors vendors - Construction delayed due to weather conditions

- Construction runs into cost-overruns and financing problem

As a guide, go through my notes on the various categories of risks e.g. market risk, technical risks, environmental risks, financial risks etc. Please take caution not all is relevant to your report, use your own judgement and knowledge to select and highlight the important ones.

ii.) Risk Evaluation / Analysis - Here, you evaluate the risks that have been identified above by giving a quantity (say, 1-10) on the likelihood of that risk happening as well as the impact of the risk to the success of your project. This is where you can map out your all your risks in a Risk Matrix diagram (optional).

iii.) Risk Response - In this last part, you will write on what do you recommend to handle each of the risks identified and quantified above. Remember in my lecture that you have four options for each risk i.e. mitigate, transfer, avoid and accept.

Back to the example in (i.), use of different option will yield different recommendations:

Mitigate - You may choose to employ an experienced engineer to oversee the whole job Transfer - You may choose to appoint a turnkey contractor for the construction

Avoid - You may choose to rent or buy a ready-made depot instead of constructing one Accept - Take no action but monitor the risk during the whole project life cycle

Each response option will have their pros and cons, costs and benefits; you may discuss about that if you want to make that extra effort in your assignment.

*Students must also remember that the topic of risk management is a broad management discipline by itself. Therefore, do not get too carried away and list down too many risks to address. Selected few is good enough to show that you have address this concern in your project plan development for this assignment.