PROJECTS IN AN UPROAR

A RANA Case Study – A Large Metallurgical Organization

The Story

Larry James is the Director of Engineering for Hobson Metallurgical Incorporated, a large multi-national mining concern. He is complaining to his spouse that he is burned out. As a matter of fact, he has worked late hours for at least the last six months on a variety of issues relating to projects at Hobson.

The difficulty seems to be that the Company is doing so well. With consistent profits in the precious metals market and a high demand for its technical expertise, Hobson is so much in the black that a large number of development projects have been initiated, both from Senior Management as well as from the line foundries and processing units. The result is that the limited number of engineers is stretched very thin, there is virtually no cost control, some projects overlap others and people working on projects have no idea what priority their projects have in the organization.

So Larry is under pressure. As he describes it, “It’s like juggling six balls in the air at the same time, except that they aren’t balls: they’re more like knives.”

Larry would like to bring the management of projects at Hobson under control; he feels that he can’t, since he doesn’t even have time to help his project managers and leaders with basic engineering advice as it is.

The Intervention

Larry Hobson called RANA in. The RANA Process Leaders:

Facilitated a meeting of Larry Hobson and his top supervisory engineering staff to set up a change process;
Facilitated an Issue Management meeting of all 147 Project Managers in the company, mostly mining engineers, to help bring definition to the components of the situation;
Researched what steps were common to the Project Management process of all of the engineers involved;
Created a Made at Hobson Project Management Manual and had all of the engineers assess it for gaps and improvements;
Held training sessions of all those involved in Hobson’s projects, including administrative and coordination staff;
Assessed the results of the training in terms of its impact on how projects were being conducted;
Worked with Larry James to ensure that the list of projects being conducted at Hobson aligned perfectly with the overall organization’s Business Plan;
Facilitated the next iteration of the Business Plan to ensure alignment between Strategy and Operations.