Project Leadership (MGT5PLS) 

Workshop 2 (Week 2) – Module 1 
Leadership Theory and Project Management 
 

In‐Workshop Activity 3: Project Leader Competencies – Case‐Study 2 

Seeking an effective project leader: A Case study of Open Cricket

Open Cricket is a modern & innovative cricket company manufacturing gear to take your game to the next level. This
company competes in a highly competitive and fast‐paced industry against better known competitors, such as RAW
CRICKET COMPANY and Sovereign Cricket Co. Among the keys to success in this industry, there are the continuous
introduction of new club models, innovative engineering and design, and speed to market. As a smaller company trying to
stay abreast of stronger competitors, Open Cricket places great emphasis on the project leadership in order to remain
competitive and profitable for a long‐term. At any time, the company will have more than 40 project teams developing new
ideas across the entire product range.

Open Cricket prefers to find promising engineers from within the organisation and promote them to project leaders. It feels
that these individuals, having learned the company’s philosophy of competitive success, are best equipped to run new
product introduction projects. For many years, this company relied on volunteers to move into project management but
lately it has realised that this ad hoc method for finding and encouraging project leaders is insufficient. The failure rate for
these project leader volunteers is over 45%, too high for a company like Open Cricket. With such steady turnover among
the volunteers, successful managers must pick up the slack – they often lead six – seven projects at the same time. Top
managers are concerned about burnout among these high‐performing project leaders and so they have decided that the
company needs to develop a coordinated program for finding new project leaders, either through creating a career path in
project leadership within the company or finding someone out of the company with high quality experience.

Q1: What competencies support a higher possibility of success as a project leader?

Q2: Based on your own experience, what qualities and personal characteristics would make it difficult to be a successful
project leader?

Q3: Assume you are a HR at Open Cricket who has been assigned to develop a program for recruiting new project leaders.
Design a job description for the position and prioritise the project leader competencies to help the company overcome its
potential issues.