11:44 Done Project Management Ca... Q By June 2003, Corwin Corporation had grown into a $950 million-per-year c poration with an international reputation for manufacturing low-cost, high-quality rubber components. Corwin maintained more than a dozen different product lines, all of which were sold as off-the-shelf items in department stores, hardware stores and automotive parts distributors. The name "Corwin" was now synonymous with "quality" This provided management with the luxury of having products that had extremely long life cycles LTE Corwin Corporation Organizationally, Corwin had maintained the same structure for more than 15 years. (See Figure 1) The top management of Corwin Corporation was highly conservative and believed in using a marketing approach to find new market for existing product lines rather than exploring for new products. Under this philoso phy, Corwin maintained a small R&D group whose mission was simply to eval ate state-of-the-art technology and its application to existing product lines Corwin's reputation was so good that it continually received inquiries about the manufacturing of specialty products. Unfortunately, the conservative nature of Cor win's management created a "don't rock the boat atmosphere opposed to taking any type of risks. A management policy was established to evaluate all specialty product requests. The policy required answering yes to the following questions 230 Will the specialty product provide the same profit margin (20 percent) existing product lines? Is there a chance for follow-on contracts? WMaking Ge PROJECT MANAGEMENT CASE STUDIES Provide The !!! QUESTIONS 1. What were the major mistakes made by Corwin? 2. Should Corwin have accepted the assignment? 3. Should companies risk bidding on projects based on rough-draft specifications? 4. Should the shortness of the proposal preparation time have required more active top management involvement before the proposal went out of house? 5. Are there any risks in not having the vice president for manufacturing available during the go or no-go bidding decision? 6. Explain the attitude of Dick Potts during the proposal activities. 7. None of the executives expressed concem when Dr. Reddy said, "I would never have assigned him [West] as the project leader." How do you account for the ex- ecutives' lack of concern? 8. How important is it to inform line managers of proposal activities even if the line managers are not required to provide proposal support? Corwin Corporation 239 9. Explain Dr. Reddy's attitude after go-ahead. 10. How should West have handled the situation where Pat Ray's opinion of the test data was contrary to that of Corwin's engineering personnel? 11. How should West have reacted to Ray's informing Delia that the first five tests were failures? 12. Is immediate procurement of all materials a mistake? 13. Should Pat Ray have been given the freedom to visit laboratory personnel at any time? 14. Should an in-house representative have the right to remove a functional employee from the project? 15. Financially, how should the extra tests have been handled? 16. Explain Dr. Reddy's attitude when told to assume control of the project. 17. Delia's letter, stating the five reasons for canceling the project, was refuted by Frimel, but with no success. Could Frimel's early involvement as a project spon- sor have prevented this? 18. In retrospect, would it have been better to assign a marketing person as project manager? 19. Your company has a single methodology for project management. A powerful cus- tomer offers you a special project that does not fit into your methodology. Should a project be refused simply because it is not a good fit with your methodology? 20. Should a customer be informed that only projects that fit your methodology would be accepted