The Project Management Life Cycle and Organizational Culture - Essay Example

The scope of the project is defined and assigned to the project manager responsible for project success. Planning involves determining the number of resources needed, determining task order, scheduling of education, and analysis of risk where knowledge areas on risks are required, and the development of communication systems. Proper planning increases the chances of project success and is followed by execution and control where the project is implemented and necessary changes made to the plan to fit reality on the ground with tracking of the progress mandatory for efficiency measures. Evaluation entails reporting on the issues, progress, lessons, and challenges during the project for use in the completion of future projects and checking if the needs of the projects were met (Westland, 5).

Question Two
Organizational culture is the environmental factors, values, goals, work ethics, and norms in a given company. Projects have to be aligned with the culture of the organization has higher rates of working than projects that do not fit in the culture of an organization. Organizational culture affects project management in different ways including the lack of project management training in an organization results in the failure of projects, bureaucracy results in red tape in project completion, autonomous decision-making results in high success rates while management styles that the project makes all the decisions fail projects. The other impact is that traditional time-setting cultures reduce project success rates while innovative and organizational cultures result in more innovation and augmented project success. Autocratic cultures result in tight resource and competency control affecting the ability and free flow of ideas affecting project management and success negatively as opposed to democratic cultures that encourage team members to be innovative and generate solutions.

Strong project management is generated by a democratic culture where team members have the freedom to provide solutions and innovation to ensure project success.
SWOT analysis aids in addressing project the effectiveness and execution of a plan and its implementation. Strengths of a project entail the internal advantage in terms of finances, motivation, technology, and expertise, among others that aid in ensuring the achievement of the objectives of a given project. In analyzing the strengths, the project managers need to consider the resources at his/her disposal, the motivation of the employees, the time available for the project, the skills and knowledge available, and other positives that would lead to the success of the project.

The threats are the external factors that derail project implementation and success including strong competition, taxes on the product or service aimed at the project, and distribution challenges affected by regulations. Implementing a project for success has to be on the basis that these factors are not very influential to derail the overall success of the project. Weaknesses are internal insufficiency including lack of transport, the limited reputation of the firm, nonsufficient motivation, distribution problems, etc hindering a business meet its demands. The need to consider the factors that are done or are part of the firm but negatively influence the project implementation and have to be overcome in ensuring the project is successful. Opportunities entail external trends favoring project implementation and success including advancing technology and new product market development. The success of a project is possible when project strengths exceed project threats and match operating requirements in the market.

SWOT analysis is complimentary to project selection success as it aids in realizing the abilities of the firm to overcome challenges that derail project implementation as well as gain insight into the opportunities that can be harnessed to better the chances of project success whilst overcoming external forces impeding project implementation and meeting set objectives.

Question Four
Impressing customers, augmenting customer experience, and gaining competitive advantage are some of the objectives that conventional marketing can no longer deliver. This necessitated the need for the development of Voice of the Consumer (VOC) where understanding of the knowledge for collection, reasons for its collection, and its use, and information gathering measures are paramount for its success. An ideal VOC does not replace but rather augments the benefits of conventional marketing by opening further insight into consumer behavior through structured, relaxed, and qualitative techniques to understand indirect business information from consumers. VOC is revolutionary, as it allows the business person to understand the context and what customer challenges in their lives to enable a business to respond to the consumer needs creating a lasting bond between the consumer and the business.

VOC allows for better knowledge of customer comfort and knowledge of a customer’s thinking allows tailoring a product to these needs will create a lasting relationship between customers and the firm. Read More