Global Green Books Project Charter
Using the sample project charter in chapter 7 of Project Management (“Project Initiation”) Links to an external site.as a guide, construct a project charter for the project at Global Green Books: producing custom books for a local university. Be sure to provide some information in each section of the project charter such as “Identification Section,” “Objective,” “Scope,” etc. Use information in the first two case studies to help construct your project charter.Remember that you do not have all the information to complete the charter with every detail you might want to include. This would be true in a real life project. The project charter includes some “best guesses” because not all of the information is available yet. The information from the charter will be refined as the planning process is implemented and more information becomes available. For example, the project charter contains a “scope” section (which will be covered in more detail in the upcoming module for “planning process.”) Thus, the scope that you write for the project charter is a “best guess” that will be revised and become more detailed as you go through the planning process and write a Project Management Plan.
To complete the project charter, use the information from the case studies and from the document, “Additional Global Green Books University Text Book Project Information,” which is in the week two learning materials.
If you feel that you need some additional information, please ask the instructor.
Mini-Case Study: Project Management at Global Green Books Publishing
Global Green Books Publishing was started two years ago by two friends, Jim King and Brad Mount, who met in college while studying in Philadelphia, USA. In the new business Jim focused on editing, sales and marketing while Brad Mount did the electronic assembly and publishing of books for Global Green Books. 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 to help them with their publishing business.
But by the end of third year of operation, Global Green Books started experiencing critical problems. They were: unable to leverage all the new employees effectively unable to deliver eBooks to their customers on schedule unable to provide quality texts—time and money was being spent fixing defects in their products unable to control costs—their business was not profitable in the third year.
Global Green Books saw a significant rise in issues, a lot of unpleasant “surprises” were cropping up; business was down as new resources were hired, also some of the projects were poorly estimated. The local university was unhappy as their eBook products reached campus late for use by professors and student. In some cases, the books were a week or two late. Since the courses must start on schedule and students need their books at the beginning of their courses, the new lucrative college customer was unhappy. (Excerpt). Comment on the following aspects of the case study:a) Why did Global Green Books Publishing struggle?b) What were the specific PM solutions that were introduced by Samantha that worked?c) What kind of suggestions would you give to Brad and Jim if you were the PM?d) Are you aware of other similar start-up businesses that struggle in a similar manner? How did they overcome the challenges?e) Global Green Books Publishing is a technology intensive business, but Samantha is not technically knowledgeable, will she continue to be a successful project manager