Developing Project Managers at Global Green Books Publishing

Global Green Books Publishing has three large customers - two in traditional print-based work and a third, new customer, is a local college. For the college, Global Green Books Publishing produces customized eBooks. This new line of work is growing, and discussions are happening with several other colleges about additional projects in electronic publishing.

As Global Green Books Publishing has grown, they have implemented some project management concepts to manage their work, including hiring Samantha as a full-time Project Manager a year ago.

During this time, Samantha has introduced formal project management processes and created a Project Management manual for the staff team. The company is consistently delivering high quality projects and customers are happy with the products.

As the growth continues, Samantha is now feeling the pressure. One area where she feels especially stretched is in supporting the Team Supervisors.

As the eBook business grows, there are more and more demands on the Team Supervisors. Many of them come from a traditional print-based background, but they are now being called on to do more complex tasks than they are used to.

Team Supervisors are interacting with customers, as well as with internal account managers and customer service representatives. They are managing employees with a diverse set of skills, backgrounds, and motivations.

The Team Supervisors have had some project management mentoring from Samantha, but most know that they have to be both leaders and managers to succeed. And as project teams are formed to work on the eBooks, there have been some challenges...

One challenge is in knowing the status of the work being done. Global Green Books Publishing has a mixture of full and part-time staff, working across multiple projects, without a structured work handover process.

Another challenge is in the resolution of conflict. Technical issues plus uncertainty over content delivery can lead to multiple schedule changes, creating inter-personal issues among the staff. These conflicts mostly occur between the part-time student workers and the full-time employees.

Also, the Team Supervisors need to bring together their staff to create highly capable, productive project teams. The staff need to trust each other and the leadership to be fair and to balance work priorities.

The Team Supervisors have been working with Samantha and they have identified three areas for development:

A better understanding of inter-personal and team skills.

More project management support to help in the tracking of staff schedules and workloads.

Training in how to be effective leaders and motivators.

Samantha is in discussion with her management and with a training company on how to support the Team Supervisors. She is also negotiating setting up a Project Management Office (PMO) with dedicated project management staff available to help the Team Supervisors. Samantha hopes that in addressing these issues, eBook delivery can continue to be an area of great growth for Global Green Books Publishing.

(Adapted from Project Management Institute, Academic Project Management Case Studies,

https://www.pmi.org/learning/academic-research/project-management-curriculum-andresources/ academic-project-management-case-studies)

Questions

1. What characteristic or skill do you think is the most important for a motivational and inspiring project leader to have and why?