Product Management Question
Yankee Chair Company
The Yankee Chair Company was anxious to get a new model rocking chair onto the market. Past efforts to introduce new models had resulted in frustrating failures. Bret Ricks, president of Yankee Chair, was determined that it would not happen again with the newest model. He had no confidence in his current management team, so he hired Jan Dymore, a local consultant, to organize and manage this project. He assigned a Yankee Chair manager, Tom Gort, to work with Dymore to start developing some talent for project management within the company. Dymore decided to set up a PERT network and guided Gort through the process of listing activities, assigning precedence, and estimating completion times. She also explained the critical path concept to Gort, who by this time had a reasonable grasp of the project direction. At the first review session with Mr. Ricks, the PERT approach was accepted enthusiastically, but toward the end of the review Dymore made some critical remarks about the product design and was subsequently released from the project.
Ricks then asked Gort if he could carry on the PERT approach by himself. Gort jumped at the chance, but later in his office he began to question whether or not he really could use the PERT network effectively. Dymore had made a guess at what the critical path would be and how long the project would take, but she had also told Gort that several other calculations had to be made in order to calculate the exact time estimates for each activity and the variances of those activity times. Gort really did not understand the mathematics involved and certainly did not want to look bad in Ricks’ eyes, so he decided to take Dymore’s guess at the critical path and get the best possible estimates of those activity times. By concentrating his attention on the critical path activities and ignoring the variance issues, he figured he could bring the project in on time.
Questions: Will Gort’s approach work? How much more of a gamble is Gort taking than any project manager normally takes? What should Gort watch out for?
Solution Preview
Gort’s decision to work with estimations when it comes to the timing of activities in a project might get messy as it is necessary to lay down careful calculations and get the exact results. The initial strategy by Dymore was to effectively approach PERT in a way that showed order and in a position to give better predictions of the outcomes. Most projects fail because of poor planning and at this stage, Gort might be gambling with whether all the activities will be conducted in the available time or the inclusion of fast-tracking. The activities might seem easy and achievable in a certain time limit only to get complicated in the middle and bring confusion to the project management team.
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