Case Study: Background

A case study is perhaps the best way to demonstrate the patterns of action that successful project leaders exhibit on a project. The following case study does just that. Although it is about a project within a large global corporation, the insights apply to projects within institutions of all sizes and industries.

XYZ Corporation, of course, is a fictitious corporation. It consists of four business units and over two dozen subsidiaries in the automotive industry. As you might suspect, the supply chain is a quite complex and intricate web of foreign and domestic manufacturing units. Its workforce is over 200,000 and is very diverse, from gender to ethnicity .

Recently, the corporate staff recognized that its policies and procedures infrastructure needed significant overhaul . With over 400 policies and procedures, the infrastructure had many shortcomings, which made management of the global business quite difficult. The technology behind the supporting system was a myriad of software patches that reflected an antiquated architecture. The content of the policies and procedures themselves was dated and contradictory. The organization or structure of the policies and procedures was inconsistent, e.g., policies were written like procedures and vice versa. Everyone complained about it.

The executive council of the headquarters business unit, consisting of members from the different business units and headquarters executive staff, decided that the time for change was now, especially after a major reorganization. Consequently, they assigned a senior executive sponsor and project manager and provided some high-level direction on how to proceed. About the only guidance the council provided was a need to have a new infrastructure in place, two years hence, and be supported by all the major business units and subsidiaries.