MGMT 625 Week 1 DB Forum 1 Thread Example

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MGMT 625 Project Planning & Scheduling, Discussion Board Forum 1: Thread

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The prompt and the food bank's warehouse project are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Wilson's text, the scholarly sources and Scripture are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 625.

Two years ago, the regional food bank where I volunteer on the facilities committee decided to replace its leased warehouse with a 90,000-square-foot building of its own. The board approved a schedule of fourteen months from design to move-in, timed so that the new building would be operating before the November and December surge, when donations and distributions both triple. The building opened twenty-two months after the board's vote, and the food bank had to run its holiday season from the old warehouse with rented trailers in the parking lot.

Looking back, no single event explains the delay. The city's permit review took five months rather than the two the schedule assumed. The refrigeration system for the cold storage rooms had a seven-month lead time that the planners learned about only after design was complete. And when the building was ready in October, the staff could not move during the holiday surge, so move-in slipped to January. Each delay was reasonable on its own. Together they added eight months, about $410,000 in extra lease payments and trailer rentals, and a holiday season run from two locations, which the operations director described as the hardest of her career.

Flyvbjerg (2006) argues that inaccurate forecasts in projects come from two sources: optimism bias, in which planners honestly judge their own project more favorably than experience warrants, and strategic misrepresentation, in which forecasts are shaded to make a project look feasible. I think both were at work. The committee genuinely believed fourteen months was possible, and it also knew the board wanted the building before the holidays, so no one argued for a longer schedule. Lovallo and Kahneman (2003) describe the remedy as taking the outside view: instead of building the estimate from the details of one's own plan, ask how long similar projects actually took. Had we asked three other food banks how long their warehouse projects ran, we would have heard eighteen to twenty-four months.

Wilson (2014) presents the schedule as the plan against which a project is controlled, which means a wrong schedule makes every later report misleading. Our monthly updates showed the project "on track" against a baseline that had never been realistic, so the board learned of the slip only when the October date was already lost. If I could change one thing, I would require any schedule above a certain cost to be compared with the actual durations of at least three similar projects before approval, and I would ask suppliers for lead times on long-lead equipment during design rather than after it.

James rebukes merchants who announce a year of trading in some city as if the future were theirs to command, and tells them to frame their plans with the words "if the Lord wills" (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, James 4:13-15). Humility in planning is not the absence of a schedule; it is a schedule built honestly on what experience shows. For a ministry like a food bank, an honest schedule also protects the families who depend on it, because the board can plan its fundraising, staffing and holiday operations around a date that is likely to hold.

Classmates: have you ever compared one of your schedules with how long similar projects actually took, and what did you find?

References

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). From Nobel Prize to project management: Getting risks right. Project Management Journal, 37(3), 5-15. https://doi.org/10.1177/875697280603700302

Lovallo, D., & Kahneman, D. (2003). Delusions of success: How optimism undermines executives' decisions. Harvard Business Review, 81(7), 56-63.

Wilson, R. (2014). A comprehensive guide to project management schedule and cost control. Pearson FT Press.