The Blue Spider Project

YVONNE MILES

Managing Projects

Case Study: The Blue Spider Project

1. Discuss the project management organization on the project.

The use of the matrix organizational structure in project management gives organizations leverage in the form of using the skill pool that is available in the different functional areas of the business, while maintaining their cost base. With the same view point, Parks Corporation had adopted the structure with the use of the multi-disciplinary team members such as R&D, Engineering, Quality Control, Manufacturing, Purchasing and Finance.

a. Strengths: The qualified engineers the company has and the successful projects made are some of the factors contributed to the company’s good name. The other strength I see is the R&D infrastructures the company possesses; material test and other experiments were made at home, in the company’s laboratory. Besides, the company operates in diversified sector, R&D as well as production, this enables the company to enjoy the benefits of diversified strategy.

b. Weaknesses: The lack of clarity or authority provided to the project manager, Gary Anderson, to be a full fledge project manager clearly indicates the lack of a proper definition of the roles and responsibilities of the individual members of the project team as the attainment of the individual phases of the work to be accomplished still remained with the functional managers, who retained the last say on who will be involved in the project team, that created a void as the members could be changed depending on the pressures of the functional work area. Additionally, the accountability of the project manager to be focused on the cost and quality of the project, while the assistant project manager focuses on the technical area and reports to the engineering manager, indicates a further gap in the clarity of the organizational structure to meet the project objective. What is unusual is for a high ranked...