FROM PROJECT MANAGEMET Marlena is a project manager for a publishing company who
ID: 399218 • Letter: F
Question
FROM PROJECT MANAGEMET
Marlena is a project manager for a publishing company who has been overseeing the development and production for a line of "How-To" books for children. The team is nearing the end of Phase 1, which is manuscript development. Phase 2 is slated to involve minimal effort for Marlena's team. The art and images to be used in the book are to be selected by another team working for the client, and Marlena's team will review only the selected images to make sure that they fit the physical parameters that are needed for the book (size, resolution, and so forth).
When the client's image team sends the first round of selections to Marlena's team for review, Tim (an editor on the team) notices that several of the images are iconic images that he has seen in other publications. He researches these images to check copyright information and finds that four of the five images cannot be used in the book without paying significant costs that are out of budget. Marlena tells the client's image team that the images have been rejected for copyright issues and must be replaced with new selections. The second round of images sent for review is also found to be problematic. Again, Marlena informs the client's team that several images must be changed.
At this point, Marlena's team has spent a lot of time reviewing and researching copyrights for images, and she fears that many more rounds may cause the team to expend all of their budgeted hours before this phase of the project has been complete. She recognizes that although the client's team is slated to select images for all the books, it has been a struggle to select images for the first book. Her concerns are compounded when a representative for the client mentions that Marlena's team would be better off selecting the images internally and suggests that they just go ahead and do that.
Assume the role of Marlena's manager in this scenario. She comes to you and presents this situation, asking your advice with regard to handling the issue both internally and with the stakeholders involved. Explain what Marlena should do by addressing the following topics in your response: (POINT FORM PLS)
The need for issue escalation documentation and steps to address that
Scope management plan
Explain why a scope management plan is in place
Explain why this extra work request from the client is considered out of scope.
Describe the documentation that must be supplied when addressing the need for scope change.
An explanation as to why these steps are necessary and what tools, processes, or documentation should be used throughout a project to address scope change if it should occur during a project life cycle
Explanation / Answer
- As a manager, would ask Marlena to document the cases where in the client’s image Selection Vendor has breached copyright issues by selecting iconic images already used in the past by other publications. Since this is a major 4 out of 5 instance when such images have been received, the client should be thoroughly briefed on the same.
- The implications of such Copyright infringement should be clearly highlighted to the client and in case the client wants to stick to the same images, the clear cost implications should be shared with the client.
- Marlena, should present how the Scope of the work initially taken up by them has changed drastically to ensure no legal hassles befall on the client once they go ahead with the launch. To ensure proper and legally viable images are shared with Marlena is the other vendor’s responsibility.
- They should highlight the fact how they have been going out of their way and ensuring no major issues are faced by the client in the future.
- In the process, they are losing their own man-hours assigned to the jobs at hand and their costs are over-shooting since they have been continuing with this additional check.
- This additional work is clearly out of scope for Marlena’s team and if the client wanted them to continue doing the same, the scope of the work would require a revision with some alterations in the Jobs as well as the Project value.
- The scope management plan is in place to ensure the work-heads are clearly defined to both the client and the vendor. The project value is specifically arrived at after checking the various work-heads and the man-hours assigned to the same. This additional task is a separate work-head and requires specific allocation at the vendor’s end
- A revised Scope of Work Document would have to be created, with additional tasks of the image checks for copyright infringement and specific man-hours would be assigned to the same. The revised scope would have added costs and also altered the delivery timeline.
- All process and time charts would undergo an addition of a line item and specific resource allocation would be done for the same.
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