Business Interview

cuvyna
timer Asked: Apr 10th, 2017

Question Description

Interview an executive project steering committee member, sponsor or project manager of a significant project initiative at a company of your choice. Focus the interview on the use and value of project measures and metrics beyond the triple constraints. The interview should focus on what metrics are typically used by the company in their project monitoring, quality plan, customer satisfaction, and alignment to business goals and strategy. Also, explore the success – or lack of success – that has been experienced by the company in using these metrics, and any areas for potential improvement.

Because it can take a good deal of time to find a willing interviewee and schedule this interview, an early start to the assignment is advised. Students are also advised to plan for the interview in advance with some prepared questions to take full advantage of the time they provide. Suggestions of interview questions are provided by the instructor.

Students will write an APA-formatted 6 to 8 page paper, plus title page, abstract, and references page(s). In the paper, the student should examine how effectively the project measured success beyond the triple constraints such as quality measures, customer satisfaction, alignment with business goals. Based on analysis, document lessons learned and/or make recommendations for potential improvements for future projects. The interview questions and answers can be attached as part of the appendix of the paper.

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Sponsor Interview Planning Worksheet Date: Interviewer: Interview Candidate: Project Role: Section One— Rapport Questions (approximately 5% of questions and time) 1. (List 1-3 preselected questions here) Example Questions: Tell me about your role here at ABC Company? Are you familiar with CityU? How long have you been in your current position? 2. Record spontaneous, candidate-specific questions asked. 3. (Record key ideas, phrases of each response). Section Two-- Introduction Questions (5% of questions, time) 1. (List 2-3 preselected questions here) Example Questions: What was your specific role in this project? Can you please give me an overview of the project and its primary objective? What was the significance of this project, in your opinion, and how did it support the organization’s goas? 2. Record spontaneous, specific questions asked. 3. (Record key ideas, phrases of each response). Section Three--Core Project Sponsor Focus Areas Questions (75% of interview) 1. (List 5-10 preselected questions here) Example Questions: What were the key success factors for this project? What metrics did you measure to indicate progress? Were they effective, in your opinion? Why or why not? Were there any significant challenges to project success that you can describe? How was customer/stakeholder satisfaction monitored/measured in this project? What were the final results for the project? Were the original objectives met? Was there significant change to the project over its life? How were these managed? Was that effective, in your opinion? Ultimately, were the key stakeholders satisfied with project results? Why or why not? How did the project ultimately help support or contribute to organizational strategy? Can you explain? If you could do the project over again, what would you change? 2. Record spontaneous, specific questions asked. 3. (Record key ideas, phrases of each response). Section Four—Follow-up/Confirmation/Clarification Questions (10%) 1. Record spontaneous, candidate-specific questions asked. (These would be questions on topics that came up in the interview that were not anticipated and additional information could be useful. These follow-up questions would refocus the interview on earlier interview comments/topics and ask for clarity or additional information). 2. (Record key ideas, phrases of each response). Section Five--Closing, Candidate Questions (5%) 1. (List 2-4 preselected questions here). Example Questions: Is there anything about the project that you think might be relevant to my research and perhaps you’d like to add? Can you please give me some feedback on this interview process? Were you comfortable? Was it interesting to you? What could I have done better? Any questions that I should have asked you that I didn’t? Is there anything that I can tell you about how I will use this information? Do you have any questions? Would you be interested in receiving a copy of my final schoo report and project recommendations? 2. Interviewee Questions 3. (Record key ideas, phrases of each response). Post Interview Self-assessment Questions for Interviewer 1. Rate this interview, 1-5 (five is tops), on overall quality of information. 2 What focus areas were addressed? 3. What anticipated project problems/issues were discussed? 4. Did you detect new project issues, problems or gaps? 5. What ideas/suggestions of project improvement stood out? 6. What areas could be added for future investigation or followed-up by another interview? RUNNING HEAD: Project Sponsor 1 Project Sponsor Kylie Looper City University of Seattle Online Project Sponsor 2 Abstract During an interview with Project Manager, Kelsey Hilliard, she focused on measurements and metrics. More specifically, she focused on the importance of measurements and metrics to projects and measuring the success of projects. Project Sponsor 3 Measurements represent information used to create a common understanding of status, condition, and position of something. Measuring performance is a critical factor in optimizing performance. Optimal performance is the ability to accomplish multiple, and often times contradictory, goals under changing conditions. While project performance seems easy to measure; track the time, cost and scope and that’s it, when taking a more in depth look, in reality it is not that simple. First, it is necessary to find out what actually needs measuring. Is it the success of a single project, the success of project performance across many projects, or the success of project management and a project office (Pitagorsky, 2013)? Once it is determined what is really in need of measuring, a project manager can then identify the key performance indicators or KPIs. KPIs give managers the most important performance information that enables them to assess the performance of a project or process. The next step would be to define project objectives. These are to deliver goods and services, within time, cost, quality and other constraints in order to satisfy the stakeholder’s expectations. When measuring the success of a project, especially if the project is on-going (implementing a process for instance), it is crucial to focus on the project objectives and performance against schedule and budget estimates . It is also important to measure the success of a project in whether or not it achieved business objectives (reducing costs and risks, increasing revenues, increasing productivity, etc) since that is also a factor in whether a project was successful in the eyes of the stakeholder . Project Sponsor 4 Metrics provide measuring units to depict values, thresholds, constraints, scope, schedule, etc. Metrics are a precise description of what is measured and a target is the agreed upon metric value the project should achieve. They are numbers that tell a project manager important information about a process that may be under question . Metrics are defined as “standard of measurement by which efficiency, progress, performance, productivity, quality of a deliverable, process, project or product can be assessed” (Mishra, 2013). They can show accurate measurements about how a process is functioning and provide base for a suggested improvements. Metrics can help in building predictability, improving organization’s decision making ability as well as lay out what is working and not working within an organization. Metrics enable project managers to: • Assess status of ongoing project in terms of schedule, cost and profitability • Foresee potential risks • Keep a check on project profitability • Assess productivity of the project team • Assess quality of work products to be delivered Metrics come with many challenges. Some are (Subramaniam, 2009): • Lack of or minimal data for reviewing metrics, pre/post – live reporting • No timeline for refining and reporting metrics in line with implementation activities • Lack of continuous reinforcement, correlation of metrics to project outcomes Project Sponsor 5 • No management to support or participate in metric definition and management • No defined approach to measure return of investment One important thing to remember when creating and implementing metrics is making sure they make sense to the team. Showing metrics to someone who does not understand what they are looking at could cause unnecessary confusion to the project, the team and the final product. If a stakeholder or investor saw the metrics before there was a defined approach to measure return of investment, it could spook them into backing out if they felt the project wasn’t worth their time and/or money. If a customer saw the metrics being used on their project, but there was no timeline for refining or reporting metrics in line with the activities required for the project, or no obvious correlation to project outcomes, then the customer would be reasonably concerned with the abilities of the project manager and project team. The key to successful metrics are (Subramaniam, 2009): • Control process defined for metric management • Support and ownership from business • Metrics and measures are clear and concise • Define metrics from the beginning of the project It is important to understand that metrics are not the answer to everything and do not solve every problem. Metrics cannot identify, explain or predict everything that might happen throughout the project lifetime. The majority of issues require more than just one measurement in order to understand the issues. In addition, metrics should supplement, not Project Sponsor 6 substitute good management judgment. They should focus on areas of project planning like schedule, risk, cost/budget, scope, change management, status, risk, etc (Hilliard, 2015). Some examples of metrics for the schedule are schedule variance, which is the difference of cost between current progress and originally scheduled progress. For the cost, cost variance is an effective metric, which is the difference between a task’s estimated cost and its actual cost (Subramaniam, 2009). Background The person interviewed was a project manager for an online jewelry company, Blue Nile. Kelsey has her bachelor degree from Western Washington University in Supply Chain Management. She started her job with Blue Nile as an internship her junior year and was hired on as a full time employee after she graduated. After 2 years of working for Blue Nile, she moved to the Project Management Office (PMO) in order to help get processes in place throughout the company rather than just the receiving dock. Blue Nile is not only famous for their high quality diamond engagement rings, but also for efficiency in their supply chain for customer orders. After a customer places an order online, they have a 3-day SLA to get the finished product to the customer’s doorstep . In order to keep this promise, efficiency is key to their operation, and delays are critical . Their process to fulfill an order is as follows: Project Sponsor 7 Day 0: • Receive customer order o In the customer order is the exact diamond that the customer wants Day 1: • Schedule overnight delivery of the diamond to the manufacturing facility Day 2: • Receive diamond into facility • Go through QA process • Setting, sizing, and polishing of the setting • Go through second and final QA process • Sent to shipping team to overnight to customer Day 3: • Customer receives final product Kelsey was originally based in the receiving dock, where she was to focus on improving incoming shipments from vendors. There were daily issues with the vendors’ shipments for the receiving team which included but were not limited to some packages had partial labels, not all the correct labels, no labels at all, poor packaging, incorrect orders, etc. The problem with this was that when there were errors, it would take the employees out of their job to sort through the paperwork for expected incoming shipments, call the vendor and sort out the issues themselves. This would lead to a negative domino effect in that those workers would leave Project Sponsor 8 their team shorthanded, and the team would fall behind. Following that, those incoming shipments would be late getting to the team that would inspect the jewelry. The jewelry would then be late getting to the design team which would mean it would be late getting shipped out to the customer who ordered the piece. Since Blue Nile had an SLA of 3 days from receiving the order to delivery, all issues that slowed the above process were assessed. Due the fact that this issue was so extreme since it effected almost every department in the company as well as their customers, Blue Nile needed metrics that were specific; a metric that could help the vendor know exactly what the problem was so it was easy to fix rather than play a guessing game. The metrics Kelsey chose are known as operational metrics. These are metrics that are represented by performance. These metrics measure performance of people in operations function and can help identify where the discrepancy has its roots. The metrics Kelsey used were outside of the usual triple constraints. She tracked how many errors were outside of the 5% window aligned in their contract. By tracking each error by vendor in the Excel spreadsheet, Kelsey was able to match those shipments to the total number of shipments received from each particular vendor and be able to come up with a percentage of error shipments. Another metric Kelsey implemented was to compare the amount of issues one vendor had to the other vendors and give a total percentage. By using this metric, she would Project Sponsor 9 be able to see which vendor had the most issues. She would then use this data to show vendors where they stood and hope to use that as motivation to improve their processes when shipping to Blue Nile. The third and final metric Kelsey used was to track the most common issue in order to show vendors where they needed to focus their attention most in order to decrease their errors (Hilliard, K., personal interview, Jan. 25, 2015). By applying these metrics to the project, Kelsey was able see the improvements once things started in motion. Before starting this project, the amount of errors in the receiving dock was over 48%, meaning that out of every 100 packages received, 48 of them had some sort of error done by the vendor. The amount of time and effort this required of Blue Nile employees to find the error, contact the vendor, fix the error, etc was wasting time and money, and effecting the overall outcome for the Blue Nile customer. Kelsey brought this knowledge with her to the PMO and focused her attention to minimizing errors company wide. The PMO branched out from the three staple metrics (schedule, budget and scope) and instead started using things such as types of errors made, which department made the most errors, time of day errors were being made, etc. Due to the fact that Kelsey had a supply chain background, she wanted to focus on how to make processes more efficient and minimize the typical errors in order to improve the overall experience for the employee and ultimately the customer. Blue Nile’s business objective is to satisfy the customer with a high quality piece of jewelry, bottom line. By accomplishing this, they know Project Sponsor 10 they are confident they will turn a profit, gain a larger customer base through word of mouth marketing and the biggest part of the business - retain repeat customers. Without using metrics, there would be no way to measure just how successful Kelsey’s endeavor was other than having employees and managers attest to the fact that there were less errors they’ve had to deal with. A good metric changes behavior. What will be done differently based on changes in the number? If this question can’t be answered, it’s a bad metric (Shah, 2013). The metrics Kelsey chose affected the behavior of the vendor by showing them the errors and where they needed to focus their attention in order to minimize those errors in the future. Metrics are an amazing tool that, if used correctly, can aide in the management of a project, its team and to measure how successful the project truly was. It is important to remember the audience before presenting the metrics and to ensure they are thought out and planned first. Make sure the metrics align with business objectives and change the “bad” behavior. By implement smart metrics that accomplish the above, it is easy to know if a business is on track to accomplishing their business objectives, point out the organization’s weaknesses and their strengths. Project Sponsor 11 References Mishra, S. (2013, October 30). Five Project Management Performance Metrics key to Successful Project Execution – Operational Excellence. Retrieved from Suchitra Mishra: https://blogbysuchitra.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/five-project-management-performancemetrics-key-to-successful-project-execution-operational-excellence/ Pitagorsky, G. (2013, January 30). Measuring in-progress project performance. Retrieved from Project Times: http://www.projecttimes.com/george-pitagorsky/measuring-in-progress-projectperformance.html Shah, D. (2013, March 29). Measuring what matters: how to pick a good metric. Retrieved from OnStartups: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/96738/Measuring-What-Matters-How-ToPick-A-Good-Metric.aspx Subramaniam, A. (2009, July 28). Project Metrics & Measures. Retrieved from Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/anandsubramaniam/project-metrics-measures
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