ECOVETA Publishing Case Study

**NO PART OF THIS CASE STUDY MAY BE COPIED OR DISTRIBUTED WITHOUT THE AUTHORS CONSENT**

Planning Risk Management for Ecoveta Publishing

Ecoveta Publishing is a successful printing and publishing company. Just two years old, it has taken on a great new customer, a local college that needs customized eBooks. To deal with this new customer, they have hired several new part-time employees to help them with their publishing business, some of them students at the college with flexible hours.

As the new school year drew closer, the orders started coming in. They had been told how many different printing jobs the college would need, but they werent all arriving at once, and orders were quite unpredictable in arriving from the professors at the college. Some professors needed rush orders for their classes. When Ecoveta Publishing finally got the orders, some of these jobs were much larger than they had thought they would be.

Printing these orders turned out to be very challenging. Not all of the new student hires were trained for all of the printing and binding equipment used to print and assemble to books. Some of them often made mistakes, some workers called off from work due to other demands, and there were often not enough people available to get all the work done before deadlines. Quality was a serious issue, as they had to provide quality textsif there were quality problems with the printed product, they would have to spend time and money to fixing defects in their products.

Deliveries started slipping past their requested dates and times. Ecoveta Publishing was unable to deliver eBooks to their customers on schedule.

The local university was unhappy as their eBook products reached campus late for use by professors and student. In some cases, the books were a week or two late.

Samantha had been hired as a project management assistant. In her new role as a project manager, one of the processes she was trying to institute was risk management. She started looking at what was happening in the business, talking about it with the owners and employees, and heard about the colleges unhappiness. As she did this, she started identifying risks and potential risks. As she went along, she started doing more proactive risk analysis and risk response planning, and as she did surprises and issues were reduced. By talking with stakeholders and addressing their concerns, communication with stakeholders was also enhanced.

Team Management at Ecoveta Publishing

Ecoveta Publishing is continuing to grow. As their eBook business continues to drive that growth, they now are continuing to add staff to be able to keep up with customer demand. Most all of the new people and many of the eBook staff have not worked together in the original print-based business area of the company, and indeed are new to the company and its culture.

These new employees have a diverse set of skills, backgrounds, and motivations. Their supervisors know how to manage their projects, but do not always have the expertise to step in and do each of the unique tasks assigned to team members. Most of the employees that have been around since the beginning of the eBook business have been trained in their project management techniques, so they can get the work done well; but not all of the newer employees have had this training. There is just too much work that needs to be done to take time out for training.

Supervisors need provide leadership, to provide inspiration for their team and to be good motivators of their team members, as well as be a good manager, worrying about the day-to-day and minute-by-minute accomplishment of the projects goals. Being a good motivator also means that the supervisors must be good listeners to understand what issues are confronting their team members and the needs of their team members.

Beyond this role as leaders, supervisors need to be a good manager. They need to identify the skills that they need for their projects. Supervisors at Ecoveta Publishing normally do this as they start from the standard job template for eBook projects and build the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) for their eBook project. Next, they need to identify team members that have those skills, and work with their current project managers and with human resources to make sure that they will be available to support the new project. Based on the lessons learned analyses, a supervisor might also identify a person as a back-up for a critical role on the project, in case they run into difficulties or assigned staff are not available as planned.

Once the team is assembled, challenges can arise. Some of the challenges teams face have to do with knowing the status of the work, as part-time employees come in and hand a piece of a project off to another worker. Some deal managing conflicts as they arise both technical issues as permissions are delayed and content cannot yet be incorporated, leading to scheduling changes, and inter-personal issues among staff. Some of these conflicts occur between a mostly young, part-time contingent of student workers and the full-time employees. Supervisors are often drawn into mediating or resolving these conflicts. They really need to meld together their staff to create highly capable, productive project teams for these fast-paced eBook projects. The staff needs to trust each other and their leadership to be fair and to balance work priorities with the times that they are available.

Supervisors are finding it is very important to make sure every team member understands the goals of the project, the roles of each team member and how they inter-relate, and the sense of urgency about completing the project. This urgency comes from understanding the intense schedules for completing eBooks and from understanding why it is important that all of the work come together to create a finished eBook any part not completed keeps the final eBook from going into quality check and release. Because of the issues around employee absence and the use of part-time employees, they are also trying to make sure that employees are able to do their role, but can also help out in related roles as needed.

To help build a common understanding of the project work and minimize some of the conflicts, Samantha is working with some the supervisors to hold a project kick-off meeting where the team reviews the goals and plan for the project, and develops and agrees to a project team charter. Letting the team develop their charter gives the supervisor an opportunity to observe how the team works together, and gives the team the ability to set ground rules for how they will work together. The team charter starts with the project goals. The team may set their goals in order to accomplish these project goals. Other topics that the team might address in their team charter include agreed-upon guidelines for how they want to participate in the project, conduct (or behavior), communications among project members, communicating status and problems, problem solving, and holding meetings. This charter and its guidelines that they team have agreed to can then serve as a basis for team building and team behaviors during the project.

a) What risks can you identify? Why are they a risk to Ecoveta Publishing?

b) What kind of impacts does each of your identified risks have? Can you categorize these as low impact, medium impact, or high impact?

c) How probable is each of your identified risks? You can think about something simple like categorizing these as not very likely, likely, and highly likely to occur.

d) What would you advise Ecoveta Publishing are their three most critical risks? How might they plan to avoid these risks?

e) What would you suggest that they do about these three risks? Are there specific actions to deal with these risks? What might be appropriate contingency plans to carry out if these risks occur?

2. Team Management

a) What are some of the challenges facing the project team(s) at Ecoveta Publishing? Have you encountered any of these problems in teams that you have been part of? What other team problems have you experienced?

b) What might be the some of the specific skills team members will need to be effective on an ebook project?

c) Why is it important that team members understand the goals and scope of an ebook project?

d) What are the advantages would there be for Ecoveta in developing a team charter?