Integrated Trade Shows Project in Germany - Case Study Example

INTERGRATED TRADE SHOWS PROJECT IN GERMANY Name Course + Code Professor University Date Contents Executive Summary 2 Figure 1. Queensland Government 2014 4 2.0 Literature Review 4 2.1 Kotter Model 4 2.1 Ackerman and Anderson Model 6 2.2.1 Upstream Change 6 2.2.2 Midstream Change 6 2.2.3 Downstream Change 7 3.0 Lewin’s Change Management Model 7 4.0 Recommendation 9 5.0 Conclusion 11 6.0 References 11 Executive Summary This paper presents an in-depth case study project namely integrated tradeshow in Germany. The purpose of the project is to showcase how the participation of the tradeshows can be invented and implemented purposefully for the companies to generate increasing sales and the brand awareness for its product and services. In this context, the project is purposefully conducted for the Passenger Port in Saint Petersburg. The research engages the literature review of the change management and how it impacts the integrated tradeshows project in passenger port in Saint Petersburg. Based on this type of project, change management is applied due to the increasing market demand in the contemporary market. As such, the change management is applied to ensure that the company survives in the market through diverse flexibility. The passenger port of Saint Petersburg operation process is greatly assessed. In this context, its operative processes are analyzed based on change management and how it might impact the intended integrated tradeshows project. As per the expected outcome, the report gives varied recommendation on how to improve on the identified shortcomings while fostering the organization success. Lastly, the author gives conclusive remarks based on the showcased findings from the integrated tradeshows project in Saint Petersburg. 1.0 Introduction The St. Petersburg port is located within the Northern sides of the Baybora Harbor. On the western part of the Tampa Bay across the Florida’s Gulf Coast is the Port of St. Petersburg. The company offers services such as berthing, storage, lights at night for all vessels, barges and watercrafts, insurance services, indemnity bond, and licensing among other services (Port of St. Petersburg 2014). In this context, the company encounters similar competitive services from the Baybora Harbor and Tempa Bay Harbor. As such, the integrated trade shows project is applied purposefully to improve the marketing performance for the port companies. The report provides an in depth analysis on how to prepare and conduct evaluation based on the attained results purposefully to design workable recommendation for future project processes. To attain the result, five process of change management is applied (Cameron 2015). These includes moving from current state, identification of change from the current state to future change, identification of the dialogue across the company for the need of change and the core areas for adoption and lastly implementing the agreed processes to attain the desired future state (Fatima 2013) To effectively attain the future results, the change management process is incorporated together with the project management to spearhead the project movement from the current stage to implementation through transition process as presented in the figure below. (International White Paper 2008). Transition process Implementation Figure 1. Queensland Government 2014 2.0 Literature Review 2.1 Kotter Model Kotter, a Harvard business school professor, came up with an 8 step process model known as Kotter Model for successful implementation of organization change (Kotter 1996). The design implies that change management is a process that undergoes through various steps of which each step depends on other steps for effective realization of the expected goal (Kotter 1995). Consequently, the Kotter model advocates that organizations managers are required to come up with plan, budget, staff, critical decision making, aligning employees, motivation of employees, and inspiring the employees purposefully to attain the organization objectives and goals (Kotter 2011). The below diagram is a presentation of Kotter 8 step model Kotter model is important for the trade shows organizers. Basically, trade shows are known for bringing prospects customers to sellers hence initiating cash flows, which is an important aspect for the trade shows organization. Due to increasing competitions and the urgency to produce new products into the market either qualitative or quantitative, the port of St. Petersburg needs to observe the Kotter 8 model process by introducing new product at a trade show. Contrarily, it is important to note that the Kotter 8 process model showcases strengths at the first four stages of the model. In this context, the port of St. Petersburg integrated tradeshows is most likely to weaken hence possibilities of not realizing the organization goal. 2.1 Ackerman and Anderson Model Ackerman and Anderson designed a roadmap process specifically for the organization leaders to implement different types of projects for the companies (Ackerman & Anderson 2010). The model targets the project managers, leaders, and professionals across the organizations. The founder implied that the model and its methodology is designed for the organization to effectively implement the change. As such, the model has three process, thus upstream change, midstream change, and downstream change. 2.2.1 Upstream Change Upstream change is the first phase of the model whereby the project managers and organization leaders foster for the change in organization. The model advocate that the first phase, upstream change, is critically important to the organization because 60% of the decision made will determine the success of the project (Ackerman & Anderson 2001). The core aspect entailed in upstream change phase is to identify the core reasons for change, designing approaches and steps for change, analyzing the organization preparedness for change, positioning collective readiness for change and assessing the strategies for change. 2.2.2 Midstream Change In this phase, the new project needs to be designed to fuse with the organization culture purposefully to achieve organization and project vision. Additionally, the model advocates for analyzing the impact of the project towards the organization, the employees, stakeholders, and the people within the project environment. Lastly, the mainstream change entails the planning and organizing for the project implementation 2.2.3 Downstream Change in this phase, the implementation of the change takes place and the success of the project is communicated across the organization while celebrations takes place. Importantly, the model advocates for evaluation and learning regarding the change process. In this context, the involved parties grasp important aspects for the future implementation of varied scopes of projects. Ackerman and Anderson model is important towards the integrated tradeshow project at St. Petersburg. It is important to note that the number of tradeshows participants are increasing every year hence newer competitive approaches are applied. Such approaches are implemented through project purposefully for the organization to attain the top leadership position. In comparison to the Kotter model, the Ackerman and Anderson model showcases much more strength through learning and course correcting in phase three that will be of importance to the future organization projects. 3.0 Lewin’s Change Management Model The model is one of the most recognized models that majority of the companies adopt to counter changes brought by various projects. One of the basic tenets of this model is the successful implementation of projects thorough processes of unfreezing, transition and refreezing. Stakeholders can be prepared to undergo project changes by devising ways to make them overcome resistance. Reassurance and leadership is necessary to ensure that transition is successful. A peer-reviewed article written by Stevens (2005), Trade Show and Event marketing, analyses how participation in trade shows enables a company to promote the sales of its products and services by engaging in a face-to-face communication with customers. In the article, Stevens argues that a company acquires itself a unique marketing opportunity in which it explains its products and services to the clients present in a more formal manner. The articles highpoints the need for proper communication when making product presentations in stage since trade shows normally comprise of a huge number of audience from various regions and with various interests. It is in this platform that the marketing team synchronizes its resources to create awareness on the existence of a certain product and/or service among the audience. There are various ways in which an effective trade show should be designed and conducted. Stevens explains that the effectiveness of a trade show is characterized by the achievement of the goals and the accomplishment of the primary purpose for which the trade show activity was designed to achieve. In every trade show activity, companies should ensure that exhibitions are properly themed so that the client’s attention is captured before the actual show is conducted. The brand image of the organization and the crucial benefits of offered services it offers in its destination should be clearly reflected in the communication made both before and during the show. Stevens contends that trade shows are extremely important in marketing services offered by companies in that the activity gives the company an opportunity to create a rich network of its customers, identify potentially new customers and reaffirm relationships that already exist thus scoping out competition. Stevens confirms this benefit by examining information from the “Trade Show Trends” EXHIBTOR MAGAZINE, of April 2011. The Magazine records that 80% of clients attend shows with a desire to evaluate services and products offered after which a decision is made on what to purchase (Sanders 2013). Contrarily, 50% of the clients will automatically make a plan to buy or use products and services exhibited (Sanders 2013) 4.0 Recommendation Based on the report analysis, the applied models showcases varied weaknesses that require vast scope of recommendations. Firstly, organizations need to ensure that the project managers are on the right directions. The approach can be attained by ensuring both the project managers, team members, and the involved stakeholders strive for accuracy, practice proactive planning, operate with situational rules, focus on the project outcomes, seek pragmatic solutions, operate with immutable laws, and focusing on individual processes. Having such directives, the integrated St. Petersburg tradeshows project is unlikely to encounter the project crisis management or unconsciously outing the project managers into trial-by-fire to fix problems under a limited time with very limited resources available. Secondly, it is important for projects to have common sense, the ability to communicate assumptions, and the associated risks. Contrarily to intelligence, hardworking and commitment, the project participants need to think correctly, thus having common sense. Having common sense builds the perception of reality across the project hence working on the right directions. The ability of having the common sense enables all the project parties to understand the project common terms, the expected procedures, and definition of qualities among other factors. Additionally, projects need to have assumptions before the commencing of work. The assumptions need to be aligned to the project scope of work purposefully to attain the expected project goals in organization. Lastly, all the project works need to create room for risks. Project operation process need to have room for risks that affects the project negatively and opportunities that affects project positively. Based on project managers experience, risks can be identified from past experiences hence they can be analyzed, timed, and measure its impact towards the current project. Once identified, the project manager can put mitigation measures, contingency plans, avoidance and fallback plans to ensure that the project flows effectively and doesn’t come to a stand-still. Project ignorance are highly affected by risks which contribute towards high use of resources such as time, financial and high number of participant to align the project to its correct path. Thirdly, change management and project work needs to follow all phases effectively to ensure smoothness of change implementation process. From the discussed models, all phase of project management showcases its importance hence the need to observe all the processes based on the type of model applied in a project work. In this concept, the change management framework will be observed hence attaining smooth implementation. The change management framework can be generalized as per the below figure 3 Lastly, organizations need to implement profitable projects by applying better processes. By generalizing on the discussed models, organizations can apply tools such as the lean six sigma, business process engineering, and the SIPOC that will engineer and yield more positive results for the project. Consequently, organizations need to implement project that are embedded to the contemporary market demand. In this context, organizations will have the capacity to implement projects that will be more important to the organization and contributes towards offering goods and services that are of demand to the customers. 5.0 Conclusion Based on the literature review, it can be argued that scholars come up with vast scope of models to spearhead change management through project work process. Models showcases similar basic processes of change management process during project work. Contrarily, it is the type and scope of project that determines which model to be applied because the models showcase strength and weaknesses over other models. A good example, the Kotter model is only applicable for short term projects while Ackerman and Anderson model is applicable for long term projects across the organization. Lastly, the current competitive business market spurs organization to highly engage into project management and change management process that can yield positive results towards the organizations. In this context, newer project management process and change management process are regularly invented based on project manager’s experiences from previous project success and failures. With increasing inventions, majority of project works and change management process are most likely to be successful across organizations. 6.0 References Ackerman, L. and Anderson, D., 2010. The Change Leader’s Roadmap. 2nd Ed. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer. Ackerman, L. and Anderson, D., 2001. Beyond Change Management. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer. Cameron, E., 2015. Making sense of change management: a complete guide to the models, tools and techniques of organizational change. Kogan Page Publishers. Fatima, M., 2013. Change Management and its Contribution to the Success of IT implementation. International journal of Information and Communication Technology Reserves, vol. 3, no. 4, p. 136. International White Paper., 2008. The Change Management Life Cycle: How to Involve Your People and Ensure Success at Every Stage. Kotter. J., 2011. Change Management vs. Change Leadership. What is the difference? Retrieved from www.forbes.com. (Viewed on 20th/march/2017) Kotter, J., 1996. Leading Change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Kotter, J., 1995. Leading Change-Why Transformation Efforts Fails, Harvard Business Review, p. 1-11 Port of St. Petersburg., 2014. Section one: General Information. Retrieved from http://www.stpete.org/stpete/Port_Tariff.pdf. (Viewed on 20th/March/2017). Queensland Government., 2014. Change Management Best Practices Guide. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/124895798/Change-Management-Best-Practice-Guide-Managing-Organisational-Change. (viewed on 20th/March/2017). Sanders, D., 2013. Trade shows, Fair or Exhibition? Trade Shows Public Relations. Retrieved from http://www.trade-show-pr.com/2013/02/22/trade-show-fair-or-exhibitionpart-1/. (Viewed on 20th/March/2017). Stevens, R.P., 2005. Trade show and event marketing: plan, promote & profit. South-Western Pub. Read More