Case Study: ( Subject : Portfolio Management )

In the middle of an equipment design, build, and test project for an offshore oil platform, the

president of Alpha Holdings company came to your office and explained to you that the

company had a shortage in cash flow during the coming months. He asked you if you could

bring in the customer design review and design drawings approval phase of your project, which

was due in eight weeks, by two weeks so that the company could get paid 10% of the total

project funding two weeks earlier. You told the company president that you would work on his

request with your team members and with the customers project manager and get back to him

in three working days. This was quite a challenge that was thrown in your lap on top of all your

other project management responsibilities. The company presidents request went to the top of

your action item list because the companys cash flow health meant a lot to the morale of your

team members and to yourself. Another twist on this issue was the inner workings of your

customer who was Finnish. This was our first project for them. You had no idea if the

customers project manager and finance department would entertain such an earlier design

review and phase 1 payment to you. Your team had to design, check, and release close to 40

drawings, 15 calculations, a structural interface drawing approved by the customer, and the

control panel software code before the design review meeting. You had to cut our tasks

duration by 25%. The first step was to discuss the situation with your team members. You had

a team meeting with them the next day. You explained to them the company presidents request

to accelerate the first phase of your project by two weeks. You had six full time engineers

working on the project. You went over every task, 140 of them, that had to be completed and

over all the task interactions. The team members had good suggestions. One of them was to

bring into your project a senior engineer from the manufacturing department full time for six

weeks to check the design calculations and drawings. Another suggestion was to get two more

workstations assigned by the IT department full time to our project for parallel finite element

scenario runs. The third suggestion was to put in an extra hour a day to complete all the tasks

before the design review.

The fourth suggestion was to deliver the structural interface drawings in four weeks to

our customer. I had to ask our customers project manager to commit to review and approve

structural interface drawings in two weeks by the design review meeting date. All these

suggestions came from your team members. Nothing was forced down their throats. They all

had a can-do attitude. You issued the meeting minutes in a controlled fashion through your

document control and made sure that the company president got a copy. Overall the design

review meetings went well. The managerial team members accepted all of the minor

modifications the customer requested. Toward the end of the meeting, you arranged for your

company president to come into the conference room and give a short appreciation and thank

you talk to your customers team. Alignment of the portfolio with the organizational changes

strategy serves two purposes. Most importantly, it gives rigor to the project selection process

that favors projects in which expected results will contribute the most to achieving the strategy

at the best cost. Analyze FIVE (5) key areas of Project Portfolio Change Management to be

implemented by Alpha Holdings Company.