Project Management Major Facts from the Case Study

This case study demonstrates how a project manager spends a busy day in her office by overseeing the routine activities and discussing the ongoing project with her fellow managers and lower-end staff. Rachel is the project manager of a large information systems project. She is responsible to supervise the job responsibilities and the progress of project activities and report them to her boss on daily basis.

Sometimes, she has to come earlier in the office in order to handle the excessive burden of work. She experiences an encouraging and supportive organizational culture in her office where all organizational members -- from top level managers to the lower level staff work collectively and whole heartedly for the achievement of organizational goals. The whole project is being supervised by a number of project managers; including Rachel, Neil, Victoria, etc. Other project team members include Mary (senior marketing manager), Chandra (analyst), John (corresponding person/counterpart to Rachel), Eddie (finance officer), etc.

Major Issues in the Case Study

Rachel experiences a number of issues at her office. From overall organizational structure to the simple routine project activities, she finds inefficiencies that must be encountered on immediate basis. First of all, she has found that majority of the activities are not being performed on their set schedules. Including Rachel herself, most of the organizational members do not consider it important to define work priorities...

As a result, some activities remain unperformed while others are done prior to their set schedules. Moreover, it has come to her knowledge that one of her team members uses stimulants on the job.
Among various other notable things in her office, she observes that there is lack of coordination among all organizational members. This thing results in an inefficient functioning of different departments within the office. For example, when she went to follow up on an issue that had been identified in the status report meeting, she came to know that the actual project does not entail some features which had been communicated in the marketing campaigns of the project. This thing gave rise to frustration and disappointment among various clients of the organization.

Moreover, due to her busy schedule all the day, Rachel was unable to respond to the emails and voice messages which needed immediate reply. Another big issue which Rachel projected for her organization was the job switch by Jonah Johnson (the director of systems projects). Since Johnson has always been a strong team player, Rachel felt that it will be a big loss to the organization if he leaves his job for good.

Rachel's Day in the Office

After analyzing the case study, it can be said that Rachel has spent a quite busy day in the office. She made a number of quick decisions while keeping a lot of things unattended. She went to the office earlier in order to catch up some important project activities; but failed to do so…