Managing Lean Project Assignment Sample

Managing Lean Project

Introduction

The modern world is so competing that organisations are always under pressure for giving their best and uplifting themselves. They have limited resources and it is always required from them to maintain quality with quantity. However, not all organisations achieve this exceptional performance. While working on the project, organisations are bringing up some innovative approaches though. However, the best way to deal with the organisational performance and project pace is to implement lean project management tactics. This would be very much effective in bringing efficiency in the work. The basic principle of lean management is to discard the redundant process that is unnecessarily increasing the time consuming by a particular event. This ensures the timely completion of the project objectives and an organisation can easily deliver the completed project well on time. In this project, the lean project management will be discussed in the context of the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar. In the course of this assessment, the stakeholder management using PMBOK approach will be talked about along with the ways of implementing lean project management. In addition to this, processes, such as PMBOK, PRINCE2, OPM, Agile Practices, and Lean Six Sigma will also be elaborated.

Overview of the Event

The FIFA World Cup 2022 is the 22nd edition of the football world cup that will be held in Qatar. Being the first FIFA World Cup that will take place in any Arab country, it is going to be the sporting event to go for. In total 32 teams will participate in this edition of FIFA world cup commencing from 21 November 2022 to 18 December 2022. The overall budget is between $8 billion and $10 billion. The country is being criticised for organising such a huge world level event as it has a very high operational risk. The event will also have Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system.

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Project Stakeholder Management as per PMBOK

The whole process of stakeholder management is cumbersome and might not be everyone's cup of tea. For the world sporting event like FIFA World Cup 2022, it is the sole responsibility of the Qatar government to satisfy each and every stakeholder as this should be their primary goal. It is important to understand that the needs of stakeholders vary as per their type. For instance, the investors might be looking for high returns for his money, whereas the organiser might be looking for timely completion of the project and give high returns. Hence, it is the duty of the project manager working on FIFA World Cup 2022 to understand stakeholders. It has been seen that stakeholders that are ignored may result in project issues. The “Project Stakeholder Management” has four processes as per PMBOK. These are shown in fig. 2.

Identification of Stakeholder

The knowledge of stakeholders is important for any event as they are solely responsible for the success of the event. From project initiation to the project delivery, every stage involves some types of stakeholders. Attending to their needs by the organisers marks the success of the event. Stakeholder engagement is characterised by determining and communicating in an effective way with the group, community, or people who put their interest in the project. It is believed that the external parties have an immense impact on the project (Koskela& Howell, 2013). There are two types of stakeholders, namely internal and external. The former comprises workers, managers, and organisers. The latter consists of suppliers, government, creditors, shareholders, sponsors, spectators, local community living in Qatar, media, unions, etc.  

According to PMBOK, the identification of stakeholder is one of the two fundamentals to the existence of a project. The other fundamental of a project is ‘Project Charter.' The project stakeholders must be identified prior to the initiation of the project. According to PMBOK guidelines, for every process, there are some inputs that are feed in with some tools and techniques to get the desired output (Meng, 2012).The same is provided for ‘Identify Stakeholder’ process in figure 3.

Plan Stakeholder Engagement

PMBOK promotes the development of the stakeholder engagement plan that emphasises on making each stakeholder linked to the project and project organisers should ensure that project should interact with every aforementioned stakeholder. FIFA World Cup 2022 will become a successful grand event if it reflects the interest of each stakeholder and they connect themselves to the event. It is desired that the stakeholders should be able to control their interest in the project. PMBOK emphasises that the stakeholder engagement plan should be made after analysing the concerns and interest of the stakeholders for the success of the project. PMBOK suggest the best technique for stakeholder is to understand the voice of stakeholders (MPMM, 2018). This can be done by surveys and questionnaires. This might help in understanding their demands and other expectations from the FIFA 2022. This is a proactive approach. In addition to this, complying with international standards and setting up benchmarks for providing high-value services can help in enhanced engagement.

The input, tools & techniques, and output diagram of this process is provided below:-

Manage Stakeholder Engagement

Looking into the popularity of the FIFA World Cup 2022 across the world, there is no doubt that the fans are very much excited about the event. The project manager is required to consult each and every stakeholder on regular basis for understanding their expectations and needs. This may be done through various ways like recording feedbacks on a monthly or quarterly basis. The overall aim of the FIFA 2022 is to provide the best sporting experience to the global as well as a national sports fanatic and make the event the best part of their memoir (Meng, 2012). A majority of the customers might be seeking safe and secure, cost-effective, and high-quality services. These may be called "critical to customer requirement." If these are not fulfilled, then this may result in poor stakeholder satisfaction. Hence it is very important to focus on managing stakeholder engagement. PMBOK emphasises on various techniques, such as conflict management, negotiation, cultural awareness, communication plan, and some ground rules.

The input, tools & techniques, and output diagram of this process is provided below:-

Monitor Stakeholder Engagement

PMBOK guidelines promote the monitoring and controlling process to be carried out on regular basis. This would ensure that whether or not a Stakeholder Management Plan is effectively implemented and how effective it is. In addition, this, organisers of FIFA World Cup 2022 can review the stakeholders' interest and communication by gathering information through surveys and questionnaires. Once the data collected is analysed, organisers can make decisions (MPMM, 2018). The tools that can be used are stakeholder engagement assessment matrix that can further result in providing work performance information.

The input, tools & techniques, and output diagram of this process is provided below:-

Implementing Lean Project Management for FIFA World Cup 2022

It is important to understand that the lean approach is one of the important management philosophies that is employed by the organisation to develop its capabilities and competencies so as to improve value creation and discard waste. For the management of a grand project like FIFA 2022, it is important to implement lean thinking in the project management. For that purpose, it is important to understand and determine the processes that are generating a greater amount of waste and increasing the time and resource consumption. According to Špundak (2014), there are seven types of waste associated with a project. These have been explained below:-

Overproduction:It is irrelevant to producesomething more than the demands. This would result in increasing the obsolescence risk. It would take maintenance and storage place. This might happen due to poor communication between the teams working on a project.

Waiting Time:If the idle time between two processes is increasing due to any bottlenecking or discrepancies, then this would be considered waste. It increases the cost of machine and labour that ultimately increases the budget of the project (Poppendieck&Cusumano, 2012).

Transportation:Unnecessary movement of stocks or material that does not any monetary benefits or value to the product. Such movement will be considered a waste as it might cause deterioration and physical damage to the product.

Stocks:Ordering a large number of raw material or finished products or work-in-progress. It would increase the storage cost, increase the number of defects in the products, and financing cost as well.

Defects:Errors might cost a fortune to the company working on FIFA World cup. It might affect the processing, delivery, and even specifications provided for a particular task.

Over-procedure:Putting more efforts to a task than the required will increase the waste of time. It will not anything to the product quality but it will cost something to the organisation. It increases the delay in the successive work delivery.

Movement:The time of traveling between home and work or vice versa and it comprises the time consuming from one working site to another. These are considered as waste as it is not adding value to the project.

Processes Supporting Lean Project Management

PMBOK: As per the understanding of the PMBOK, nothing can be better than using two processes, namely Project Procurement Management and Project Scope management. Since building up the facilities and sporting infrastructure requires external procurement, attending to this procurement should be a subdomain of Project Procurement management. There are many contractors working on this giant global event who are putting experience and knowledge in order to deliver quality service. However, while working on the project, they might get demotivated. Hence, the project manager should actively involve with them in order to get their part of work to deliver on time and within budget. It is required from the manager to determine the procurement needs of the project. These may be vendor requirements associated with the project task. Once the procurements requirements are determined, the execution of procurement started.

Talking about the scope management, there are many sub-processes that together lead to scope management. These comprise planning scope management, collecting requirement, defining scope, creating WBS, validating scope, and controlling scope. Here, the create WBS and Validate Scope will be discussed from the planning process group and monitoring and controlling process, respectively. WBS can help in discarding the chances of inaccurate plans. Since there are many teams working on a building the venue of FIFA World Cup 2022, there are high chances of conflicts. WBS can help in reducing them by assigning different roles to each team and save a lot of time. Talking about the validation of scope, it mainly focuses on stakeholders’ acceptance. This process initiates at the end of every phase, wherein the stakeholders give their feedback during the process.

PRINCE 2: I have chosen two themes of PRINCE 2, namely Risk and Progress. FIFA World Cup 2022 venues need to be completed well on time. Therefore, the progress theme assists in analysing the actual progress in comparison to the planned progress. This will help in articulating expected inputs that include cost, resources, time, and efforts. In addition to this, the project manager would be able to reduce the deviation of actual progress and anticipated progress. One thing is sure that progress theme is very much focused on project control.

The reason for choosing risk theme is that FIFA World Cup 2022 is associated with high risk and even a small mistake can cause big damage. Therefore, for the effective management of the project, it is important for the project manager to document the risk associated with the project and integrate the risk management with other project management tasks. PRINCE 2 provides certain risk management strategy that the project managers develop during the initial stage of the project.The risk management strategy detailed out two roles responsible for risk management, namely risk actionee and risk owner.

Agile Practices

Agile can be understood as acting lightly and sleekly. Talking in accordance with FIFA World Cup 2022, it can be related to the speed of getting the work accomplished and the pace of completing the project well on time. Agile practices make use of software for iterating the aspects and output of a process in order to reduce the chances of error. For hosting the grand world event like FIFA 2022, there is a strong need for mature project management practices. Since most of the work is documented and reported in the computers and tasks are operated on some kind of computer-operated tasks, it saves a lot of time and resources (Alleman, 2015). The Agile practices promote the use of innovative tools and techniques that reduce the consumption of resources and time as well. There are various agile practices, such as code refactoring, backlog grooming, etc. The refactoring of codes can facilitate the project manager to address and eliminate the technical debts. Moreover, the implementation of various agile practices can help in reducing the chances of making mistakes or defects, thereby promoting the lean approach in managing FIFA World Cup 2022. There are many advantage and disadvantage of agile practices. They make the team flexible and efficient but on the other hand, they require top-notch technical skills and high collaboration (Dingsøyr, et.al 2012).

Organisational Project Management (OPM)

These practices aim at improving the project performance by improving the utilisation of the resources, minimising wastage, and delivering good results. In addition to this, it aims at promoting sustainable practices to complete the project as big as the FIFA World Cup. OPM makes use of various techniques and tools along with the expertise of people working on the project. It promotes the use of standards formulated by the Project Management Institute (Howell&Koskela,2012).In other words, OPM promotes the use of tools, techniques, processes, and knowledge to develop a platform from which the project manager can make use of these capabilities to make strategies. OPM ensures the engagement and integration of all the stakeholders with the project. In short, OPM is the distinct approach that is adaptive and fits the abilities of a program, project, and portfolio management as per the need of the project.

Lean Six Sigma

Lean six sigma approach emphasises on reducing the deviation in the project scope and minimising the process variations. This will be very helpful in resolving issues related to the process. It promotes the use of the various statistical tools to reduce the fluctuation and error in the process. This also speeds up the process delivery. Utilizing an organized and powerful examination strategy, one can totally comprehend the procedure components. The main suspicion is that the result of the entire procedure enhances by letting down or controlling the vacillations of various components. Six Sigma is based on DMAIC methodology (Hilton &Sohal, 2012) that stands for “Design, Measure, Analyse, Improve, and Control.”

Six Sigma is built upon two noteworthy suppositions. Initially, of which is, individuals working in the FIFA 2022's organising committee obviously comprehend the way that numeric figures can likewise speak to the qualities and highlights of a procedure and project task. They should mull over that a solid understanding of over-interpreting information can be utilized to propose updates (Hilton and Sohal, 2012). Likewise, to give another point of view on the procedure, graphical portrayals of information can turn out be very valuable. Another supposition is that by lessening the varieties or fluctuating components of the considerable number of tasks, the association's general execution enhances (Nave, 2012).

Conclusion

In this whole assessment, the basics of lean management to organise a world level sporting event has been talked about. It was understood that the basic principle of lean management is to discard the redundant process that is unnecessarily increasing the time consuming by a particular event. This ensures the timely completion of the project objectives and an organisation can easily deliver the completed project well on time. In this project, the lean project management was discussed in the context of the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar. In the course of this assessment, the stakeholder management using PMBOK approach was talked about along with the ways of implementing lean project management. In addition to this, processes, such as PMBOK, PRINCE2, OPM, Agile Practices, and Lean Six Sigma were all elaborated.

References

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