Project Management Case File #168

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From the course by University of Virginia

Fundamentals of Project Planning and Management

1691 ratings

University of Virginia

Fundamentals of Project Planning and Management

1691 ratings

Projects are all around us. Virtually every organization runs projects, either formally or informally. We are engaged in projects at home and at work. Across settings, planning principles and execution methodologies can offer ways in which projects can be run more effectively and efficiently. Project management provides organizations (and individuals) with the language and the frameworks for scoping projects, sequencing activities, utilizing resources, and minimizing risks. This is an introductory course on the key concepts of planning and executing projects. We will identify factors that lead to project success, and learn how to plan, analyze, and manage projects. Learners will be exposed to state-of-the-art methodologies and to considering the challenges of various types of projects. As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 12 professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122)

From the lesson

Ready, Set, Go: Project Execution

In our final week, we'll move from plan to action and consider the execution phase of a project. We'll learn about the earned value approach for monitoring and controlling progress. We'll consider the individuals who are executing the project and how their habits impact project progress. We'll discuss some alternative methods for project execution such as Agile, Scrum, and Kanban. Finally, we'll review and summarize the course, and our journey from project definition through execution and completion.

Project Management in the Wild1:00

Project Management Case File #1432:11

Project Management Case File #1686:24

Meet the Instructors

Yael Grushka-Cockayne (@grushkay)
Associate Professor of Business Administration
Darden School of Business

If you can imagine, here we are,

10 years into building

a $30-$60 million science center and we're finally getting geared up.

We've got the partner that we need,

and the developer says, guess what?

Here's another big museum and we're going to put it right beside here.

The Children's Science Center is

a local nonprofit organization based here in Northern Virginia.

We get started over a decade ago,

and our mission is to instill a love of learning and science,

technology, engineering, mathematics among all children and our large community.

We had a vision for a world-class,

science center here in Northern Virginia.

It was all about filling a gap.

In 2015, we opened our first end-term operating site at Fair Oaks Mall,

in Fairfax, Virginia, and here are the children science in our lab.

We serve about 50 thousand people a year,

and we continue to serve our community outside our walls,

and other 20 thousand a year.

We have very significant capacity challenges.

We always knew that we needed a bigger science center for our population here.

We serve about 2.5 times the industry average and capacity of visitors in our state.

So, our great project going forward is building

a full-scale science center that will serve children and adults to like ages 1-101.

We have a tremendous opportunity.

We have been given a donation of land that is north of Dulles Airport,

on a major highway, on Route 28,

and here we can build a science center that is both inside and out,

because the development that we're building the science center within has

a 150 acres of natural park land along a major stream valley.

That requires a significant amount of capital and funding from all sources.

One of our great challenges had been attracting that strategic partner that we need,

and we have found that partner.

They are very large science museum that wants a large presence in Northern Virginia.

It's a great relationship.

However, it's one that we have to take care of very carefully.

They're still in the process of deciding how much,

and if they will make a huge investment in this effort,

and this is an eight figure investment.

So, this is not a small undertaking.

We are just beginning to enter

our conceptual design phase and building

our master plan for what this building would look like.

What are all the galleries that are going to be within it?

As we're starting that process,

we did bump into a bit of a challenge.

We sat down with the developer for one of our meetings,

and the developer share that there will be another very large museum.

That will be right beside us in the development,

and the architecture for the renderings

that we've seen for this museum are very distracting.

Very large. It's hard to sell your museum

when you have one that looks like a national monument right beside you,

and so immediately, we were worried.

We didn't feel any better after talking to our partner.

They were not happy.

They felt like this was a big enough issue that we

should consider walking away from this developer.

Why would this developer put a big museum like that right beside us?

So, it was a very tenuous moment,

because by the way,

it took us over a decade to get this land.

We turned over every rock,

we looked in every nook and cranny of Northern Virginia.

We talked to every government entity,

every developer, and this is it.

This is the place,

and so walking the way is not an easy thing for us to do.

Actually, the solution started before we reach the challenge.

We made a really critical decision during this process to bring in

a museum design team that would be very favorable to our major partner.

We use the design firm that they had used for many years,

and so there was a lot of trust with that particular design group.

It felt like there was no way that we could have any problem or

any backlash from our partner with the design that this firm

would come up with because the partner's health is such high esteem.

Everything that they had done for them.

The other part of the solution was the problem itself,

and being able to go back to the developer and say, yes, that's exciting.

There's another museum here.

There could be a lot of interesting synergies that

happen within museums once they're opened one day, that's wonderful.

But we actually have a problem here,

and we need your help to solve it.

We are not going to be able to get the buy-in from

our partner or not going to be able to get the buy-in from our funders in

the community to build our museum if we look

like the ugly stepchild of this big fancy museum.

So, we need to change something here.

So, when we approached the developer,

the developer was very sympathetic to our situation.

They got a great job of listening,

and between the designer and the developer,

we went through a series of iterations at looking at what

are other sites in that large development,

it's a 500 acre development.

So, there's a few choices,

and we were advertising a museum that would be science in her inside and out.

So, we needed to be closer to the nature trails.

We needed a prominent position in that development.

Our final solution is really a wonderful solution.

We have found a way to optimize our site in the development.

We have a large museum on one end,

and we have ourselves and we bookend the retail village of the community.

If you can imagine them all,

we're Macys on one end and they're Bloomingdales on the other,

and we each are anchoring the community at our future home.

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