Category: Chapter 3

Posts relating to Chapter 3

Video Tip: Project Management at Arnold Palmer Hospital

From talking to OM professors around the country, I have found that the 7 video case studies dealing with Arnold Palmer Hospital for Women and Children are probably the most popular in the video series we created for you to show in class. The other videos cover Hard Rock, Frito-Lay, Wheeled Coach Ambulance, Regal Marine, and Darden Restaurants. (But wait till you see what we have in store for the next edition of our OM texts: an inside look at OM in an NBA team!)

If you teach Project Management (Ch.3) in your course, here is a great 8.5 minute video to show– with a case full of real data to assign. Some of the points to make with the building of  the new 11 story Arnold Palmer Hospital addition are: (1) planning took place for over a year before the first dirt was shoveled; (2) there were a thousand plus meetings  to allow doctors, nurses, patients, staff, and others have a say in what the new facility should look like; (3) a warehouse a mile away was turned into a mock floor of the hospital so visitors could walk in and evaluate the placement of beds, bathrooms, windows, and even electrical outlets; and (4) MS Project was used to manage the whole project.

This latter point is important. In today’s weak job market, I encourage students to take advantage of the copies of MS Project (full-blown, but time-limited) that Pearson-Prentice Hall  provides with our book. Included is a self-paced tutorial , which together with the printouts at the end of Ch.3, can help students master this useful software–and beef up their resumes at the same time. You might even give extra credit to a student who solves the case study using MS Project, as opposed to using Excel OM or POM for Windows, the other free programs that come with the text.

OM in the News: The Japanese Nuclear Cleanup–A 20 Year Project?

When the senior Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) engineer at Three Mile Island’s cleanup compares our 1979 explosion to  the Japanese  disaster, and says ours “was a walk in the park compared to what they have”, we know we are talking about a massive project. And the TMI cleanup took 14 years! “The cores are probably very similar, partially melted”‘ he adds, but in Japan 4 separate reactors are damaged, and fixing each one is complicated by the presence of its leaking neighbors.

Today’s New York Times (April 20,2011) describes the steps project managers must follow in the lengthy cleanup. But before they even begin, Tokyo Power has only 3 weeks to patch up smashed containment units before the rainy season starts and more contamination is washed into the environment. And the company has to watch that its small staff of skilled workers  does not absorb too much radiation doing so.

Here are the 6 main steps that may take  20 years to complete:

1. Clean up the water in the basements of the buildings.

2. Install new pumps to recirculate the water in the reactors (to end radioactive releases).

3. Decontaminate the walls and floors.

4. Rebuild the containments for units 1,2, and 4, so workers can defuel the reactors. (That step took 5 years at TMI, where no buildings had to be rebuilt).

5. Remove the wrecked fuel in the core. This involves creating new remote-controlled tools to cut through the metal and get to the material below.

6. Reprocess the radiated debris (or bury it as we did in shielded casks in Idaho).

This massive task makes our project management examples in Ch. 3 (like rebuilding Iraq) look trivial. We can only hope they first read the article “What Great Projects Have in Common” in MIT Sloan Review that we reviewed last week.

Discussion questions:

1. Why is this project more complex than rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina?

2. How do the Japanese benefit from TMI?

Good OM Reading: What Great Projects Have in Common

Every once in  a while, a “great” project comes along. The last one I have memories of was the rebuilding of the Pentagon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Jay and I wrote about “Project Phoenix” in Ch.3, describing how the estimated 3-year, $3/4 billion  project was completed in 11 months for only $501 million with handshake contracts, creativity, teamwork, and ingenuity.

So when the MIT Sloan Management Review article (March 23,2011), “What Great Projects Have in Common”  just came out, it caught my eye as a good teaching tool. Authors Dov Dvir and Aaron Shenhar use the creation of the IBM AS/400 computer and the Apple iPod as their examples of “great projects”, and then ask:  “Why are such projects so rare”? 

Their answer after analyzing 400 projects: 7 managerial characteristics were held in common.

Here they are: (1)They all created a unique competitive advantage or exceptional value for stakeholders. (2) They had lengthy periods where the project was defined. (3) There was a revolutionary (and different)project culture. (4) The project leader was highly qualified and had support of top management. (5) The project maximized use of existing knowledge, often with the cooperation of outside organizations. (6) The projects had integrated development teams with fast problem-solving capability. (7) The teams had a strong sense of partnership and pride…which was indeed the case when the Pentagon was being rebuilt.

This 3-page article is short enough to ask your students read it when you cover Chapter 3 and it complements our coverage of this important topic.

To see other articles in MIT Sloan Management Review go to sloanreview.mit.edu.

Teaching Tip: Why Do So Many Large Projects Overrun?

While most OM texts cover Project Management (see Chapter 3), there is little discussion as to where the time estimates for activities  in PERT and CPM come from or how accurate they are. This question arises in, of all places, an easily overlooked article in The Wall Street Journal (Oct.16-17,2010).

Here we learn that “planners underestimate costs in nearly 9 out 0f 10 projects” and “cost overruns for building projects are typical”. From my decades of teaching MIS and working as a consultant in IT, I can add that completion times in software development projects are also regularly underestimated.

Why is this the case? Research, according to the WSJ, shows that “people allow their best hopes to dominate the planning process”. This case of  “irrational optimism” suggests that project managers would do well to keep data from prior projects. “Looking forward makes you more optimistic”, says a Norwegian researcher in the article. “Looking backward makes you more realistic”.

So when you and your students are discussing large projects that suffered major overruns (like Boston’s “Big Dig” and others they will bring up), you may want to remind students that doing PERT charts and running MS Project is all well and good, as long as the inputs are meaningful.

Finally, did you ever wonder about the  the empirical basis of PERT’s 3 time estimates and the use of the Beta distribution in project management? If large projects do consistantly underestimate activity times, should we be giving more weight in the PERT formula to the “pessimistic” time estimate, b? Perhaps the formula in Equation (3-6) in our text should be  t=(1a+3m+2b)/6  instead of  t=(1a+4m+1b)/6?

Teaching Tip: Helping Your Students Find Jobs

We all know the economy is still weak ( to put it mildly), and this means our students are  in  tough positions to find their first jobs. Where we stand in Florida, it seems as though the alligators are nipping at our economic feet. With a quarter of the economy here in Orlando driven by construction, you can buy a nice condo that sold for $160,000 in 2007 for $20k today!

So what can we do to help our OM students to be more competitive as they enter the job market?  Since everyone graduating already has the same basic set of skills (eg., Excel, Powerpoints, etc.), how can OM  add value?  Here are 2 suggestions:

1.Project management is an interesting topic (Ch.3) that is certainly useful in so many jobs. We cover MS Project lightly towards the end of the chapter. But I am convinced that mastering MS Project can give a competitive edge. Last year, I provided all 75 of my students the chance to build their resumes by offering a 1-credit independent study course called “Using MS Project in Project Management”. All they had to do was find a project with at least 30 activities, and create a series of MS Project charts, along with a 1-page report. Our publisher’s reps at  Pearson will provide you with as many free copies of the full-blown MS Project ( time limited) as you request. It includes an excellent Tutorial, which picks up where the text leaves off. Amazingly, 25 students signed up to build their transcripts/resumes. They produced some impressive reports and picked up a useful skill.

2. The 2nd hot button I like is to get a Six-Sigma Green Belt while in school. My colleague Jim Gilbert offers his TQM course every Fall semester.  As an option, Jim arranges (at an extra lab fee of  $900) for students to get certified as Green Belts. Over 30 students a year take this option and enter the workforce with a wonderful credential.

Video Tip: Project Management at Hard Rock’s Rockfest

 

          I cover Project Management and MS Project (Chapter 3) early in the semester and always show the video “Managing Hard Rock’s Rockfest” (9-1/2 minutes).    Of all the 30 videos we have filmed, this has been one of the most popular from the students’ perspective… mostly because it shows a lot of heavy rock bands and it is a rather unique and exciting nine month project.

          I would also recommend assigning the case study by the same name.  It is large (33 activities), yet easily handled by POM for Windows or Excel OM. 

          If you also want to include MS Project in your class (full-blown, but time limited copies are available free from Prentice Hall), look at the “Project Crashing using MS Project” exercise in our IRM.  Professor Gary LaPoint, at Syracuse U., has developed this excellent exercise, with data files already prepared at our website.  Thanks, Gary!