PROJECT MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS AND APPLICATIONS
Lester Carrejo
PM/571
December 15, 2014
Professor Gary Olsen

Project Management Concepts and Applications Paper A past project that I was involved in was a project overseas in Afghanistan where my company was assigned as the new vendor for IP services to provide Internet at over 65 remote sites. The ultimate goal was to transition from the current vendor (who lost the contract) to the new vendor (my company) along with transporting and installing our equipment in place of the old vendor’s equipment, extracting all of the old vendor’s equipment, all the while eluding hostile forces and reducing the risk of getting attacked.

How this project met the definition and characteristics of a project as defined in Chapter 1 of Project Management was by design, “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result” (Gray & Larson, 2014). This was considered a project rather than day-to-day work because of the set milestones and proposed deadlines with set cost and multiple performance objectives as well. There was also a set start date and a definitive end drop dead date that our materials and equipment status would have to be in system by.

The organizational structure was based on strategic management process. By reviewing and defining where the organization wanted to go in the near future and how our company could help them achieve that goal. One of their goals was to reduce the cost of telephone long distance calls and fees overseas. Our company showed and implemented cost savings of over a Million dollars by switching to Voice over IP solutions. From here there were more strategies developed to provide a resilient and robust network for our client. Objectives were set in order to achieve these goals. These strategies were then planned out and a strategy was develop on how to implement those goals along with using Gantt charts and other products to track and deliver a quality product to the client. Explain how this project fits within the organizational structure. Our company fell under as a sub-contractor to a contractor for the government. Our company structure had a CEO, CIO, CTO, managers, supervisors and the overseas team had the project manager, which over saw the project team on the ground. The project also had multiple phases, where phase 1 was transition, phase 2 was support, and phase 3 was optimization.

Explain the pros and cons of the organizational structure in terms of the project outcomes. The advantages of organizational structure would be that:
“No change” (Gray & Larson, 2014), all project are done from the internal organization teams with no major changes in organization structure.
“Flexibility”, (Gray & Larson, 2014), gives the organization the ability to use different personnel from other department rather easily and quickly. Also gives the ability to use subject matter experts from other departments.
“In-depth Expertise”, (Gray & Larson, 2014), in-depth experience personnel can be assigned in the cases of narrow scoped projects in order to undertake critical phases of a project.
“Easy Post-Project Transition”, (Gray & Larson, 2014), probably the most beneficial aspect of this organizational structure is that once the project is completed, everyone can return back to their normal jobs, if not part of a detailed selected and dedicated team. The bottom line is that a dedicated team on a dedicated project can accomplish much more and a lot faster that

Some of the cons of organizational structure would be:
“Lack of focus”, (Gray & Larson, 2014) – due to existing responsibilities and obligations, the assigned project can get put on a back burner.
“Poor Integration”, (Gray & Larson, 2014) – segmented functional units that are only concerned with their portion of the project and not having total buy in for the entire project can cause a lack of integration.
“Slow”, (Gray & Larson, 2014) – having cross functional