My Florida Regional MLS (MFRMLS) is a regional Multiple Listing Services provider based in Orlando, Florida. Its service area covers central Florida and the most densely populated area along the state’s west coast. The company provides services to a subscriber base of more than 50,000 real estate agents and brokers across 14 shareholder associations. It lends some services to three others. MFRMLS is one of the largest providers of Multiple Listing Services in the world. MFRMLS also has a team of project managers led by Patrick Williamson. Williamson earned a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute.

Overview

While MLS providers have varied staffing capabilities in the United States, only the largest MLSs in the nation seem to be able to afford highly trained full-time project managers. For the most part, these project managers collaborate between the MLS and its vendors. Appreciating this, Williamson provided one example of a project plan developed to launch

ePropertyWatch, a product offered by CoreLogic as a free service to MLSs. The project management techniques applied in the scheduling and launch of eProperty Watch can be considered a best practice applicable to MLSs of all sizes. Even if your MLS may not have a dedicated project manager, your organization is still involved in project management. A common critical component of successful project management, for example, is defining what needs to be done and how it is going to be done. Once these items are defined, someone has to develop a plan and manage the scope and schedule of the project,

especially as inevitable changes occur.

Like most management models, Williamson identified processes that serve to organize the ongoing activity of the project — planning, executing, and controlling. Each process may also include additional steps within the project, such as initiating and closing, but each must be clearly defined.

ePropertyWatch Plan Outline

Initiation and Planning

Create Charter and Stakeholder Assessment

Identify and Document Requirements

Scope Work and Conduct Risk & Opportunity Assessment

Create High Level Plan

Conduct Project Kickoff Meeting

Executing, Monitoring and Controlling

Implement in Staging Environments

Create QA Plan

Conduct QA

Review QA Results Report from Staging

Implement in Production Environment for QA

Conduct QA in Production Environment

Review QA Results Report from Production

Create Training Documentation

Create Support Center Documentation

Create Marketing Plan and Materials

Conduct Go/No-Go Meeting

Send Association Staff Coming Soon Communications

Conduct Staff Training

Send Customers Coming Soon Communications

Send Association Staff Pre-Launch Notice

Launch Day

Expose Product Links to Customers

Conduct Post Launch QA

Send Launch Day Communications

Closing

Conduct Lessons Learned

Defining Timelines

Every step in a project needs to be clearly defined and assigned an estimated time of completion in advance of the project launch. The overall timeline for this project is 83.75 hours. Time estimates were based in part on experience. Here are the some details of how each step in the ePropertyWatch project are defined, assigned to a responsible party, and provided a time estimate. In addition to this information, MFRMLS scoped the work effort and conducted the risk/opportunity assessment, which was critical to the success of implementation.

As you can see from the detail of this project, many responsibilities were shared among the various departments at MFRMLS. These responsibilities were overseen by the executive in charge, which MFRMLS identifies as a “sponsor.”

Along with the sponsor, a project manager serves as the lead orchestrator of the daily activities. He or she acts as a supervisor over all aspects of a project, ranging from the initial task assignment to final accountability. In this case, the project also includes a vendor. Those responsibilities belong to CoreLogic, developers of ePropertyWatch. Another principal player is the marketing coordinator. This person is responsible for all creative and communication materials that will be required to launch the project. This would include simple collateral material such as flyers or larger promotional efforts, such a digital campaign, as needed. The trainer is responsible for developing an ePropertyWatch training program. Such programs are typically divided into training programs needed at the onset of a project launch and are needed to sustain the product as a valued member benefit. The quality assurance technician is responsible to make sure that the product is properly tested before the launch. The support centre manager is also involved to ensure the proper handling of the product’s implementation and operations.

Tracking Projects to Completion

While most plans are written to assume a perfect world, reality requires certain contingencies are built into the plan. One way to handle a contingency event is to create a predecessor, which is defining what needs to happen before something else happens.

Flexible Schedules

One of the principles of project managing is called team calendaring. Since most people who own tasks endeavor to schedule their work and stay on track, changes in the timing of predecessors have a waterfall effect on the planning and scheduling of future tasks. For example, if a user has a task that is due on the Friday before an event but the predecessor

task is not complete, then the entire project timeline will be altered. It is important to allow for not only the additional time to complete the predecessor, but also other scheduling conflicts (such as a project manager being out of the office or another previously scheduled project). This means a one day delay could potentially delay a project for four or five days as the waterfall effect impacts tasks and timelines down the line. An important best practice in project management, and the hardest thing to manage, is not only planning your work but working your plan. The best project managers are able to work with an agile, elastic workflow. In real life, things happen faster or slower than estimated. A key job of the project manager is coordinating changes that impact scheduling and timelines. In the case of MFRMLS and other MLSs, this can be very complex when managing multiple projects at the same time. Expect from the onset of any project that assignments, deliverables, and dates are likely to change on a daily basis. By observing the best practice of agile planning,

uncontrollability and flexibility are factored into the plan and adjustments are made on a daily basis. Feel free to download this spreadsheet of the full project plan for launching ePropertyWatch. You can use this as a template for other projects.

Conclusion

Project management best practices are key to operating an efficient and effective multiple listing service. Recognizing that every organization is structured differently, with varied staff and capabilities, MLSs may have to establish a benchmark suitable to their structure rather than the one set by MFRMLS. What is important to remember is that the key principle of

successful project management requires proper planning, communication, and execution. Thinking through the project plan in anticipation of a product launch is an imperative foundation for setting expectations around product or service delivery. When organizations fail to set the right expectations, even projects that require months to complete will begin to feel long and drawn out under the best of circumstances. By communicating expectations up front and then keeping subscribers or members up to date on the progress being made — whether by daily messaging services or newsletters — project stress is typically reduced, performance improved, and the question “when will it be ready” never asked by those who know the answer.

Source: https://cdn.ymaws.com/members.councilofmls.org/resource/resmgr/files/CMLS-PMCaseStudy18f.pdf

QUESTION 1 (20 Marks)

As a competent project manager, discuss the various definitions of projects that you are familiar with. Make reference to the key characteristics of projects, the main attributes of projects, and the common elements that all projects have. Use the theory to discuss the My Florida Regional MLS (MFRMLS) project in detail.

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

A project can be defined as a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end undertaken to create a unique product service or result Projects are distinct from ongoing operations and are typicall... View the full answer