Responding to student writing requires an honest reader whose observations, questions, and suggestions show that s/he wants to help a student develop ideas, build on existing strengths, and revise successfully.

• An assignment from Scarborough's TECH 394: Industrial Project Management
• A student's sample draft
• Your response

Formal Paper: Develop a paper about projects, teams, and/or project leadership; develop issues and solutions in greater depth. What strategies, techniques, processes should be used to have a more successful project or team? Draw conclusions and describe effective project management and effective project management teams. End with very specific recommendations to guide your project team. Use APA writing style manual. Identify all sources in the paper's text using APA style format. Writing skills are seriously graded on this product. See writing rubric, Paper Outline & rubric, Group Process.

Paper Outline:

• Introduction (define project mananagement & state puprose of paper)
• Body (APA citations & broken into major topics of project management)
• Analysis (anticipated areas of concern about the class project)
• Discussion (what strategies, techniques, processes all teams should use)
• Conclusions (what should happen, overall--goals)
• Recommendation to Team (what your team, specifically, should do to be successful)
• Bibliography

Introduction:

Q. Have you ever missed pen/pencil/notebook/calculators/eraser in the exam?
A. If “No”, than you understand importance of planning and resource allocation.

Q. What if you have all the stationeries and you reach late in the exam?
A. We need to understand and believe in punctuality of time.

Q. What if you reach in time, with all stuff you might need in exam and do not understand questions?
A. You might have communication problem.

Q. What if you can’t answer all questions in the time limits?
A. You might be facing “deadline gun”.

Q. What if you complete al questions before time limit and answer many wrong?
A. You are not meeting quality standard and metrics.

Q. What if you go in the class and there is not any desk, chair, table or board?
A. You might say, “improper work set up”.

Q. What if your examiner leave the class after handing over your exam?
A. You are not being monitored and you might consider that as special circumstances and opportunities.

Q. What if you spend lots of money to bribe examiner (if possible!) to get good grade?
A. You are going over budget.

    We need to overcome all the hurdles, mistakes to get good grades. The more we get trapped the less we would be effective to accomplish our task(s), in this example good grade. Now the question is, “How can we manage to accomplish our task(s) efficiently?”

Body:

 Managing project requires planning, organizing, and monitoring of resources. A project is an undertaking extensive task to change currently existing stuff, which requires concentrated efforts. Planning is nothing but an advance development of scheme, program or method, which may include drawings, charts and tables, and brief outline to accomplish tasks successfully. Organizing is to arrange resources orderly, systematically and functionally whole as a structure. Monitoring is an act of closely examining and rectifying for quality and / or contents. Project management requires planning, organizing and monitoring resources, such as materials, equipments, facilities, manpower, money and various stakeholders, to accomplish project successfully.
 Three basic factors, time, money and specifications for change, shapes future of the project. Time to complete project is reflected in Project Schedule. Money needed to finish project is reflected task wise in the budget depending on the estimation of resources. Specifications of changes required are reflected in quality standards and metrics and project deliverables.

[A]Project Problems:

 Hurdles involved in industrial project are not as simple as in the introductory example of getting food grades, but rather complex.

(a) Monetary Problems:

(I) Cost – competence problems:

 “Thanks to the global economy, we’re not only competing with the shop down the street, but also with firms in south America, India, England…the world,” adds Cheryl Schraut, head of quality control for the firm (Rakowski, 2001).

The high level of productivity obtained with the Project 7000 Stainless Type 303 let the shop reduce its per-part cost and offer more attractive pricing (American Machinist, 1997.)

The implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can provide a manufacturing firm with a comprehensive internal architecture by lower in total cost in the complete supply chain and automating many of the company’s basic processes, from finance and accounts receivable operations to those on the shop floor (Leland, 2000).

(II) Market growth problems:

The U.S. market for maintenance and construction coatings, despite it reputation for steady growth, was flat in 1991 and early 1992, a victim of the recession and reduced public works budgets (Kemezis, 1991).

The Shreveport, La. Area had been traditionally dependent on the oil and gas industries, and every time there was a downturn, local businesses suffered. “When the oil companies caught a cold, all of the rest of us caught pneumonia,” said company president Bob Hamm (Hall, 1999).

(III) Lack of fund problems:

 To help raise the funds, businessman Alan L Gornick donated land to the district , which sold it for $480,000 (Flesher, 2002)

Non-monetary project problems are technical problems, policy or decision-making problems, performance based problems and political problems too.

(I)Technical Problems:

These new warehouses use advanced technologies, such as radio frequency tracing systems, automated storage and retrieval and software that integrates accounting, purchasing, inventory and billing. The technologies yield faster product turnaround and more-efficient supply chain models-especially relevant in the e-commerce skakeout (Rogers, 2001).

While Canadian Tire’s new distribution center has, with good reason, attracted international attention, with in the corporation it is never the less only part of a far-reaching logistics project that has a staff of 30, including several senior-level managers committed full-time to development and implementation of strategies and initiatives to lower the total enterprise cost of getting products from source to consumer. Strategies include a variety of programs designed in conjunction with vendors and dealers to reduce collective inventory and lead times and improve service quality (Allen)

On the one hand, users are demanding greater speeds from their conveyor equipment. “Not only does increased speed exponentially increase the requirement  for maintenance on the equipment,” Ewing says,”but the cost of downtime for the customer becomes much higher because he’s losing more production per minute than he used to. We’ve also got conflicting pressure because the increasing speeds make it noisier, but at the same time the demands are for quieter and quieter conveyors.” (Allen)

(II) Policy or Decision-making Problems:

Says Alterman: “Ultimately, what I see for our employees in this plant is greater job security, by having the flexibility to respond to the market’s needs in an instant, and not adding unnecessary cost to inflate the price of our beverages. That’s the key to how we want to run this facility.” (Allen)

They cannot tell, for example, what physical work they have accomplished for the funds spent. They cannot tell whether or not their cost performance is getting better or worse, and by what rate. Yet most projects and their managements today relate their planned expenditures against their actual expenditures as a way of monitoring cost performance.

In the article Sonoco, Wellman combine for carrier project both companies merge in ordre to share expertise to improve quality, resources, cut down cost by eliminating unnecessary transportation etc.

   "We knew a partnership like this would both strengthen our business and benefit our customers," says Jimmy Fisher, Wellman purchasing agent (Textile World, 1997).

NOTE: THE DRAFT CONTINUES IN THIS MANNER, INCLUDING THE DIVISIONS BELOW:

(III) Performance based problems....
(IV) Political Problems....

Analysis:

     All project vision should logically support company vision.
Why do we need projects?
We need projects for the following reasons.

- To bring changes in product, process or infrastructure
- To increase efficiency or performance
- To improve quality of product, process or infrastructure
- To enhance human living standards
- To create facilities
- To increase/improve production capabilities
- To meet the need of people
- To keep ourselves busy

-To utilize scarce resources effectively
-To study feasibility of the project
-To recognize potential problems and develop contingency plan
-To evaluate use of resources
-To develop systematic approach to accomplish task
-To break down major or complex task into manageable pieces of work
-To assign dependencies of the task and sub tasks
-To allocate required resources in a manner to increase productivity and quality
-To specify and meet quality standards and metrics
-To establish linear / circular responsibilities and accountabilities
-To manage changes in a way to increase well being of people

Conclusions:

Recommendation to Team:

-Jones, A. A portfolio of published works from a freelancer with more than 25 years of editorial experience. A dilemma in large scale distribution.  Retrieved February 24, 2003 from the World Wide Web: http://www.home.golden.net/~snooker/index.html

-Jones, A. A portfolio of published works from a freelancer with more than 25 years of editorial experience. Manufacturing and maintenance beyond millennium. Retrieved February 24, 2003 from the World Wide Web: http://www.home.golden.net/~snooker/index.html

-Jones, A.  A portfolio of published works from a freelancer with more than 25 years of editorial experience. Pepsi gives up speed for maneuverability. Retrieved February 24, 2003 from the World Wide Web: http://www.home.golden.net/~snooker/index.html