Case Synopsis:
Designed to examine the process of project management during the development cycle of a luxury condominium building for the Regency Plaza group, this case explores the issue of how the design, development strategy, project organization, and project personnel are interrelated. More specifically, it looks at how these factors shape the day-to-day operations of a development and how they affect the formal and informal mechanisms that a project manager has at his or her disposal.
Case Assignment Questions:
1. Evaluate the project definition phase of the Regency Plaza project. How do the problems that emerged during the project relate to how the project definition phase was managed?
2. Evaluate the role of the project manager (Kris Hodgkins) in the case. What skills do you think are required to be the project manager for the Regency Condominium Development Project? How well do you think that Kris Hodgkins meets these skill requirements? Do you think Kris Hodgkins was a good project manager?
3. Evaluate how well risk was managed in the Regency Plaza project. You should use the four stage Risk Management framework from the module in answering this question.
4. Given the situation that Kris Hodgkins finds herself with the Millers at the end of the case, evaluate all of the options available to her and recommend the course of action your group thinks she should take?
Guidelines for the written assignment:
- The report should contain a minimum of 2500 and a maximum of 3000 words. The word count is from the start of the Executive Summary to the end of the Conclusions sections and does not include the cover page, references and appendices.
- The required format for the layout of the report is as follows:
1. Cover page as per UCD specifications.
2. Executive Summary
- In a single paragraph, summarise the contents of the entire report. This should written last when the rest of the report is completed, so that you know what you are summarizing.
3. Introduction to the selected project
- Briefly give an introduction to the project you have chosen to analyse.
- Outline your plan to analyse the project, i.e. what topics you will use and the elements of theory or frameworks within those topics you will apply to the project.
4. Analysis of the Project
- Using the theory in the module topics, analyse the project.
- You should not spend too many words describing the theory you use (referencing it is sufficient), but devote most of the effort to applying the theory to the information you have obtained about the project.
5. Discussion and Conclusions
- In this section, you discuss your findings and explain why the project can be deemed a success or failure - what worked well and why, what didn't work and why, and what your group would have done differently if you were the project manager.
- Identify the key learning points in the project and what your group learned from undertaking the assignment.
6. References
- All third party material used in the report must be listed here using a formal referencing system such as the Harvard system. These must be correctly cited where used in the body of the report.
- This assignment will enable students to identify the challenges of Project Management in the global business environment, and to develop the following skills: teamwork due to the group nature of the task, written communication, and research skills from gathering information from multiple sources about their chosen case study.
- As this is a group assignment, all members of the group will receive the same mark for the written submission of the project. However, all members are also required to state clearly their contribution to the group project at the end of the document.
- This Assignment must be submitted to your Programme Manager in hard copy and via Blackboard. See the deadline in table 2B. It is the student's responsibility to retain a copy of any submitted assessment/project work. Please read the Grade Descriptors in the Main Assignment Grade Descriptor table.