Project Cost and Time Management

Scenario

You are a manager at PSCHSE Manufacturing Company, a company that produces plastic storage containers and sells them to the home consumers through home sales events. At the company’s quarterly meeting, the head of marketing described a new product that is to be introduced in the first quarter of the next fiscal year, approximately 9 months from now. She also announced a major initiative to implement a new marketing and customer service program that will greatly increase market penetration and enable sales to the home consumer. Part of that project will require a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. A solution evaluation and selection project has already happened and a CRM system has been chosen. You are from the marketing department and will be managing the entire initiative, including the new CRM system. Ben, from IT, will be the team leader for the CRM application implementation.

Assignment

Discussion Board: Determining the Level of Detail in the WBS

You were talking with Ben about some of the projects he has led, wanting to get to know his management style better. You were discussing what went well and what did not go so well with one of his last projects. Ben said he had a problem setting realistic dates with the sponsor. It seemed that every time he set the date for a milestone, someone on the team would tell him about more work that needed to be done that moved the milestone out. Ben had to keep going back to the sponsor with revised dates, thus pushing the project end date out longer. You asked him for a copy of his project schedule so you could get a sense of how he builds them. You also wanted to get an understanding of the solution delivery life cycle that he will use.

Here is what Ben gave you for one of his recent vendor evaluation projects (excerpt):

Go to the Discussion Board and post a 1-paragraph response to each of the following questions I need six paragraphs all together:

• What contributed to Ben’s problems with realistic date setting?
• What should Ben do differently on this project?
• What concerns do you have with Ben as the CRM implementation team leader?

Please answer all questions above in depth and I need references inside the paragraphs and out. No plagiarism.  Please I need six paragraphs.