MGT 645 Module 6 Project Work and Delivery Example

From Contracts to the First Certified Pizza: Executing and Delivering a Gluten-Free Line as a Temporary Organization

Student Name

Master of Business Administration, Aspen University

MGT 645: Project Management Essentials

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

From Contracts to the First Certified Pizza: Executing and Delivering a Gluten-Free Line as a Temporary Organization

With its plan approved, the gluten-free room at the Eau Claire pizza plant moves into execution. Over the next twelve months, a general contractor will build the walled room and air handling, an equipment vendor will supply and install the line, the plant's maintenance crew will connect utilities and the product team will finish recipes, packaging and procedures. Then the line must be started, certified and handed to operations. This paper plans the execution and delivery.

The Project as a Temporary Organization

Turner and Müller (2003) argued that a project is best understood as a temporary organization to which resources are assigned to deliver beneficial change. Like any organization, it needs structures, roles and decision rules; unlike the permanent organization, it ends when its work is done. The gluten-free project draws people and money from the plant for a limited time, coordinates outside firms and must hand its results back to the permanent organization at the end.

Governance

Ahola et al. (2014) reviewed the literature on project governance and found two main meanings. Governance can refer to the structures and processes within a project, such as decision rights and reporting, or to the parent organization's governance of its projects, such as portfolio decisions and oversight. Both matter. Within the project, decisions during installation must be fast. From the company's side, the board needs oversight without slowing work. The authors also noted that the two views often meet at the sponsor, who sits in both the temporary and the permanent organization. Here the chief operating officer chairs the steering group and reports to the board each quarter, which gives one channel for oversight instead of several competing ones.

Decision Rights in Execution

During installation and start-up, problems arise hourly. A daily start-up meeting of the project manager, process engineer, quality manager and vendor lead will decide issues under $25,000 on the spot. Larger issues go to a steering group of the sponsor, plant manager and sales vice president, which meets weekly and can convene within a day.

Procurement and Relationships

Contracts with the general contractor and equipment vendor are fixed-price with clear specifications. But fixed-price contracts can encourage vendors to resist changes, so the project manager will meet the vendor lead weekly and share the start-up schedule openly, treating the vendor as part of the temporary organization.

Building Quality In

Quality checks occur during work, not only at the end: air pressure is tested before walls are sealed, swabs are taken during trial runs and procedures are tested on the mock-up before the room opens. The certification body is invited to a preliminary walk-through in month ten, two months before the formal audit, so that any finding about room layout or cleaning procedures can be corrected while contractors are still on site. Defects found after the contractor leaves cost more and take longer.

Why Execution Fails

Pinto and Mantel (1990) studied how project failure is perceived and what causes it, and found that the causes differ by project type and by whether failure is judged on internal efficiency or on client satisfaction. Their results warn against a single checklist. For a construction and equipment project, technical tasks and troubleshooting weighed heavily; for client satisfaction, consultation with the client and acceptance mattered more. The gluten-free line has both sides: an engineering build and retail customers who must accept the product. The plan therefore pairs technical troubleshooting capacity during start-up with regular reviews of samples by the two retail buyers.

Handling Changes

Changes during execution are logged, sized and routed by the same thresholds that govern decisions. A request from a retailer to add a fourth crust size, for example, would go to the steering group because it touches equipment settings, packaging and the certified procedures. The project manager reports open changes, decisions made and their effect on the ship date in a one-page weekly note to the sponsor and plant manager.

Start-Up as the Hardest Stretch

The history check in Module 5 showed that the plant's past projects slipped mainly during start-up. Execution planning concentrates people there: the vendor's technician stays on site for six weeks instead of two, a second shift of trained operators is available for trial runs and the research baker is released from other launches until the recipes run cleanly at speed.

Success Beyond the Iron Triangle

Atkinson (1999) argued that project management had relied too heavily on cost, time and quality as success criteria and proposed including benefits to the organization and to stakeholder communities. The handover plan therefore includes a benefits tracker owned by the vice president of sales: retail listings, sales and repeat orders over three years.

The Handover

Handover is planned as a stage of its own, not a date. For four weeks after certification the project team and the plant's operations crew run the line together. Operators take over one shift at a time, the food safety coordinator observes each crew through a full cleaning cycle and maintenance receives the vendor's manuals, spare parts list and preventive schedule. The plant manager signs acceptance only after the line has run two weeks under operations alone with clean swabs. The project then closes, its people return to their departments and a short review records what the next plant project should copy or avoid.

Conclusion

Turner and Müller's temporary organization, Ahola and colleagues' governance and Atkinson's broader success criteria shape an execution plan with fast decisions, quality built in and a handover that ends with a certified line and someone accountable for the benefits.

References

Ahola, T., Ruuska, I., Artto, K., & Kujala, J. (2014). What is project governance and what are its origins? International Journal of Project Management, 32(8), 1321-1332. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2013.09.005

Atkinson, R. (1999). Project management: Cost, time and quality, two best guesses and a phenomenon, its time to accept other success criteria. International Journal of Project Management, 17(6), 337-342. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0263-7863(98)00069-6

Pinto, J. K., & Mantel, S. J., Jr. (1990). The causes of project failure. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 37(4), 269-276. https://doi.org/10.1109/17.62322

Turner, J. R., & Müller, R. (2003). On the nature of the project as a temporary organization. International Journal of Project Management, 21(1), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0263-7863(02)00020-0