Reported by: Mohammad Majid 1

1. QESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Question 1: What recommendations would you make to Rosas about organizing the Juguar Project and why?

Answer 1: The following are the recommendations that we would like to impose for raising the performance
expectations of Jaguar project regarding the completion time, quality, reliability and cost.

1. According to the traditional plan of the ORION Systems, Design team and the Manufacturing team work
sequentially one after another which might be one of the causes for significant project delay. In addition, in
the project charter only the design teams were working under the influence of the PM; it seems that the PM
didn’t have any control over the production process or might be the production teams were being neglected
throughout the project life cycle. These lead to some sorts of uncertainty about the completion time of the
final product. Besides, there was a lack of co-ordination between these two teams which was also
responsible for higher production cost. These need to be changed. There should be someone from the
production team who would be in charge of building the production line and would work under supervision
of the PM. Moreover, the design teams should co-ordinate with the production team so that the production
team could work in parallel with them which could eventually decrease the period of project life cycle.
Finally, the manufacturing team involved in the production line will develop the pilot manufacturing
equipment for making the prototype. The same equipment if proven to ideal can then be scaled up and
used for mass production. This will cut down on the duration of the project as the manufacturing engineers
will have already developed ideas of the expected equipment needed to mass produce the product. Redoing
the exercise is duplicating efforts, time consuming and expensive.

2. Quality control should be done periodically starting from the design stage of the product. It seems that
ORION was compromising with the quality by limiting the scope of the project only to design and
development phases and dealing with the quality issues only after the completion of the production
processes. This of course made quality control harder to achieve in the later stages and led to poor quality
of finished products and thereby, raising customer dissatisfaction. Besides, ILS team used to work
independently without any co-ordination with the design team and consequently failed to address all of a
customer’s concerns while preparing the technical documentations. Normally they start to work around the
time testing starts. This is a major setback for ILS.

Under these circumstances, we might recommend that at the very beginning of the project, the Marketing
team would collect all the necessary requirements from the customers and send it to the design team. The
ILS team would work closely with the design team while producing the technical manuals; they should
monitor the whole project starting from the design stage so that they may understand how things should
work. On the other hand, Quality Assurance (QA) team should assure the quality in each and every phases
starting from the design and development phases till to the end of the production and delivery phases.

3. ORION systems were dealing with projects based on matrix structure. One of the major problems of that
structure was the engineers split time across multiple projects. In other words, the personnel were shuffling
back and forth across multiple projects. Therefore, they could not concentrate fully on single projects which
could cause significant project delay. As the jaguar project was one of the high profile projects, project
delay due to this mention causes wouldn’t be acceptable. One of the solutions would be to adapt pure
project structure for this jaguar project where staff members would be solely dedicated for this project only.
However, it wouldn’t possible to change the company policy over night as there might be some hidden
costs involved for that drastic change; e.g. might not have enough manpower. Therefore, the other key
alternative would be to implement strong matrix structure by allocating some resources/engineers from
each of the individual design/production teams who could work in full time basis under the supervision of
the PM whereas the team leaders of each team would be consulted on a need basis. It is natural that If
members in each team change frequently, the completion and the continuity will be negatively impacted. It
is not positive for developing the project. Conversely, if some members remain at the same team, they can
give some suggestions and help to the new members who are responsible for some-part jobs. These
members are very helpful to keep the project running effectively and avoid waste resources.

Reported by: Mohammad Majid 2

 4. Manufacturing engineers might be de-motivated if they remunerated lowly compared to design engineers.
Besides, the existing imbalance in the salary structure would sow the seeds of Projectitis which means
giving special perks to the design teams only could intensify the gap between the project team and the
parent organization. Moreover, people not assigned to the project might become jealous especially when
they believe that this is their hard work that is directly related with the finish products. In addition, as the
design teams were paid on higher rates than the manufacturing engineers, they might think themselves
superior to the others and therefore, there might be a tendency for them to do scope creeping which
eventually leads to project delay. One way to overcome these problems is to treat all engineers equally and
it could be done by implementing equality in the salary structure. However, it might not be possible over
night as it needs activity from the HR. Therefore, the PM should take the initiative to diminish this
discrepancy by offering extra bonus for the rest of the team mates who are involved in the Jaguar project by
carefully doing the budgeting.

5. The design team should work hand in hand with the manufacturing team and should always have customer
requirements at the highest regard (other than obvious design changes caused by the science of it all).
Designers should not get too excited and start making decisions on their own. Regular conferences should
be established to make sure that all engineers knew and updated the exactly scopes of the projects.

Reported by: Mohammad Majid 3

Question 2: How would you change the organizational chart and master plan to reflect these changes?

Answer:

Organization Chart: Based on our discussion and the feedback from the participants, we tried to figure out the
probable organization chart as follows:

Figure 1: Propose Organization Chart for Jaguar Project

1. Deputy Planning and control Manager will be responsible for building an overall project network,
scheduling, managing the budget, controlling and evaluating the design and development program and
preparing the status reports. Besides, he/she would act as a design manager and will monitor/supervise the
activities of those staffs of the design teams who would work in full time basis for that particular Jaguar
project. He/she also need to sit with team leaders of the design teams to take regular update of each and
every subsystem.

2. Like the Deputy planning and control Manager, we might need the Production Manager who would
supervise the production team as well as be responsible for building and managing the production line.
He/she also need to deal with production issues throughout the project life cycle (design phase,
manufacturing phase etc) and multiple production teams would work under his supervision.

3. It seems that the ORION hasn’t any specialized market research team, which is bad for organization to
handle the current market trends. In the worst cases, the organization will waste lots of money and time to
develop some out of date products. Therefore, we need a Marketing manager who would be responsible to

Reported by: Mohammad Majid 4

 run a team to collect all the necessary pre and post production enquires and requirements from the
customers and do the feasibility analysis with help of the design teams.

4. Electronics System Engineer and Mechanics System Engineer would provide support to both production
team and design teams on the issues related to electronic systems and mechanical systems respectively.

5. Quality Assurance (QA) manager would run a team to assure the quality in each and every phases starting
from the design and development phases till to the end of the production and delivery phases.

6. ILS manager would be responsible to address the customer’s concerns, arranging training programs as well
as will be in charge of preparing technical documentations. His/her team will also be responsible for
providing any post production delivery support to the customers.

7. Like the design team, each of the production team might have their own team leaders. Team leaders from
production teams and design teams might be involved in multiple projects. However, each team (both
production and design team) should have some full time engineers dedicated to the Jaguar project only.

Master Plan: Based on our discussion and the feedback from the participants, we tried to figure out the probable
organization chart as follows :

Figure 2: Propose Master Plan for Jaguar Project

1. Our understanding is that if somehow we could manage to start the activity of building the production line
a bit earlier, it will automatically shift the start time of PRR to the left. Consequently, it would be much
quicker for us to go for Production and delivery. Consequently, the project life span would be reduced
significantly. Therefore, our suggestions would be the manufacturing team should start working to design
the necessary production line as soon as PDR has completed. Later on, CDR will not only reveal the design
issues but also provide the guidelines to manufacturing team to build the final prototype.

Reported by: Mohammad Majid 5

 2. ILS team can start preparing their documentation as soon as SDR has completed under the supervision of
the ILS manager. They need to be in touch with both the design team and manufacturing team so that they
can perfectly highlight the technical details in their technical documents.

2. GRADING OF TEAM MEMBERS

The teammates’ performance evaluation just is a kind of advice to our supervisor, given by the “PM” in each web-
based tutorial. IT DOESN’TMEAN THE MARKS YOU WILL GET. The real mark still is given by the supervisor.

Teammates Grading Remarks

Reasonable, each answer with specialized reason and specific
examples from the case.
Aaron Simwanza 8/10
Insightful viewpoints

Lack of participation in the discussion forum.

Compared to others, participated in regular basis throughout
the discussions.

Shasha Cheng 9/10 Reasonable, each answer with specialized reason and specific
examples from the case.

Actively response PM’s query.

Compared to others, participated in regular basis throughout
the discussions.

Taner Uzum 9/10 Reasonable, each answer with specialized reason and specific
examples from the case.

Actively response PM’s query.

Reasonable, each answer with specialized reason and specific
examples from the case.
Zixun Wu 8/10
Insightful viewpoints

Lack of participation in the discussion forum.

Reasonable, each answer with specialized reason and specific
examples from the case.
Ruixin Huang 8/10
Insightful viewpoints

Lack of participation in the discussion forum.

Reported by: Mohammad Majid 6

3. GRADING OF PM

The PM’s performance evaluation just is a kind of advice to our supervisor, given by the “PM” itself in each web-
based tutorial. IT DOESN’TMEAN THE MARKS HE/SHE WILL GET. The real mark still is given by the
supervisor.

PM Grading Remarks
Regular PM
Mohammad Majid
9/10 Actively response others’ posts
(Taslim)
Good summarizing the final report

4. PROJECT OUTCOME (PM’s POINT OF VIEW)

As a PM, one of my findings is that we can in fact work concurrently instead of doing sequential jobs if we can
include all the stakeholders in the project team. This eventually reduces project life span. People working in the
different teams should respect others duties and should co-ordinate with each other in order to fulfill the company’s
vision. We cannot compromise with the quality. Therefore, we need adapt policy for qualify checking in every phase
of production designing and manufacturing. Also we have to take good of our customers by fulfilling their pre and
post productions enquiries and requirements.

Reported by: Mohammad Majid 7