Final Class Project Case Study Essay

Submitted By sudarevic
Words: 2274
Pages: 10

BA 458 Class Project

During this course you will learn the theory and practical application of project management and accepted guidelines and processes. To fully understand the application of this theory, it is important for students to receive practical experience in the actual planning and implementation of the PMBOK Initiating and Process Planning Groups; other Process Groups, and Knowledge Areas, will be addressed through lecture and demonstration. The class project is designed to give you this experience as the course progresses. The facilitator may assist you in the creation of the project plan by providing various forms, templates, and examples required to submit a complete project plan, including the Project Charter, a project schedule with Gantt charts, project budget, and project change request forms and procedures.
Statement of Work/Business Case
Changing Times, Inc. is a manufacturer of clocks – wall clocks, table clocks, and free standing clocks. The president of Changing Times, Mr. Rabbet, has decided to expand the company’s product line to include smart wrist watches, which research shows is a new and lucrative market that has the potential to be a multi-million dollar industry for Changing Times. The new line is called the Wonderland iWatch. Mr. Rabbet is fascinated with the concept of smartphone technology and wants to incorporate app technology, especially GPS, programming into the new iWatch line that allows the wearer to display and transmit the wearer’s GPS location: A “Where Am i” function. Apple and Sony are both pursuing high tech watches, but neither have the GPS capability that Mr. Rabbet desires, however competition is fierce in the iWatch technical sector.
To implement and be the industry leader in the the new line of iWatches, the company needs to build a new state-of -art warehouse, but will sub-contract out the iWatch GPS programming to Garmin, a leader in GPS technology, and build the other iWatch components (case, band, etc.) in-house through a parallel project.
Mr. Rabbet is always in a hurry and has a chronic fear of being late, spending too much money, and getting lost. His fear of being late translates to his desire to be first-to-market with the new iWatch. He insists that the GPS program, from Garmin, be delivered in three months; the in-house iWatch components project is already underway and on schedule, and the new warehouse must be ready in four months to meet the phase gate of the next project phase: Outfitting the warehouse. Since design and prototyping of the new Wonderland iwatches (minus the GPS program) are already underway, time is of the essence.
Mr. Rabbet has stated that the Wonderland Watch projects are the most critical and most important in the history of the company and has his full attention and backing. Mr. Rabbet is also notoriously frugal and has decided that the new warehouse, when built, will be used for manufacturing, storage, and distribution of the new Wonderland iWatches, and have minimal comfort features. The new warehouse will add operational efficiency to Changing Times that no other watch provider has. It is estimated that the efficiencies of the new warehouse, alone, will reduce operating expenditures by 25%.
The current maximum proposed budget for the warehouse is $500,000, however this is just a Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) estimate, and Mr. Rabbet desires a better estimate leading to a definitive budget and a fixed price contract. Fortunately, Mr. Rabbet has worked with an architect, Mr. Lewis Karroll, during the design phase to complete the design of the new warehouse project and is anxious to get started on the construction phase. As previously stated, after the construction phase, there will be a separate follow-on project to outfit the warehouse for its stated operational purposes. Once all the separate projects are completed the company will go into the production phase for the new GPS iWatches.
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