Defining Standard Projects at Global Green Books Publishing
Global Green Books Publishing is a successful printing and
publishing company in its third year.
It has survived the bringing on a large new customer and all the challenges of
new work that this customer needed in a very short time.
Much of this work for the
college is customised eBooks. As the first term progressed with Global Green
Books making customised eBooks for this college, there were a number of issues
that affected the quality of the eBooks produced and caused a great deal of
rework for the company.
The local university was
unhappy as their eBook products sometimes reached campus late for use by
professors and students. In some cases, the books were a week or two late.
The management of Global
Green Books was also challenged by these projects. The college expected them
delivered on-time and at a low cost, and the company was not always doing that.
Accounting was having difficulty tracking the costs for each of the books, and
the shift supervisors were often having problems knowing what tasks needed to
be completed and assigning the right employees to each task.
Some of the problems
stemmed from the new part time employees. Since many of these workers had
flexible schedules, it wasn‘t always clear which tasks they were supposed to be
working on when they came in to work. Each book being produced was indeed a
book; but that was all they had in common. Each book had different production
steps, different content and reprint approvals required, and different layouts
and cover designs. Some were just collections of articles to reprint once
approvals were received, and others required extensive desktop publishing. Each
eBook was a complex process, but was going to be made just once, as these eBooks
were all customised for each professor and course each semester. Each eBook had
to be produced on time, and had to be made to match just exactly what the
professors requested.
Understanding what each
eBook needed had to be clearly documented and understood before starting
production. Global Green Books had been told by the college how many different
printing jobs the college would need, but they weren‘t all arriving at once,
and orders were quite unpredictable in arriving from the professors at the college.
Some professors needed rush orders for their classes. Some orders arrived as
projected, but some came later than anticipated. When Global Green Books
finally got all their orders, some of these jobs were much larger than they had
thought they would be.
Each eBook needed to have
a separate job order prepared that listed all the steps that needed to be
completed, so that tasks could be assigned to each worker. These job orders
were also becoming a problem. Not all the steps needed were getting listed in
each order. Often the estimates of time for each task were not completed until
after the work was done, causing problems as workers were supposed to move on
to new tasks but were still finishing their previous tasks. Some tasks required
specialised equipment or skills, sometimes from other groups within Global
Green Books. Not all of the new student hires were trained for all of the
printing and binding equipment used to print and assemble to books.
Global Green Books wanted
to start developing a template for job orders. This template should list all of
the possible tasks that should be performed in producing an eBook for the
college. These tasks could be broken down into the different phases of the
work.
In the Receive Order
phase, the order should be received by Global Green Books from the professor or
the college, it should be checked and verified, and a job order started. In
checking and verifying each order, the customer representative should make sure
that they have the requester‘s name, email and phone number; the date needed,
and a full list of all of the contents. They should also verify that they have
received all of the materials that were supposed to be included with that
order, and have fully identified all of the items that they need to request
permissions for. Any problems found in checking and verifying should be
resolved by contacting the professor.
In the Plan Order phase,
all of the desktop publishing work is planned, estimated and assigned to
production staff. Also all of the production effort to collate and produce the
eBook are identified, estimated
and scheduled, and assigned to production staff. Specific equipment resource
needs are identified and equipment is reserved on the schedule to support the
planned production effort. In the Production Phase, permissions are acquired,
desktop publishing tasks (if needed) are performed, content is converted, and
the proof of the eBook is produced. A quality assistant will check the eBook
against the job order and customer order to make sure it is ready for
production, and once approved by quality, each of the requested eBook formats
are created. A second quality check makes sure that each requested format is
ready to release to the college.
In the Manage Production
Phase, happening in parallel with the Production Phase, a supervisor will track
progress, work assignments, and costs for each eBook. Any problems will be
resolved quickly in an attempt to not have any rework or delays in releasing
the eBooks to the college.
Each eBook will be planned
using the standard job template as a basis for developing a unique plan for
that eBook project.
Comment
on the following aspects of the case study:
a) Printing books in a
print shop, especially large quantities of a single book, is a process. A
process is an ongoing day-to-day repetitive set of activities the print shop
performs when producing its products. How are these customised eBooks different
from a standard printing process? What characteristics make these customised
eBooks a project?
b) Who are the stakeholders
in these eBook projects? How are they involved in or affected by an eBook
project?
c) Why is it important to
have a defined project scope? Why is it important to make sure there is
agreement about the scope and what will be done in producing each eBook?
d) What kinds of
information would you want supervisors to have available to them in the Manage
Production phase? Why?
e) Do you think developing
a standard job template would be useful for Global Green Books? Why? What
advantages could it give them in planning work?
f) What other information,
if any, would you like to see included in the standard job template? Why?
Create a
Work Breakdown Structure for an eBook project.
a) What are the major
phases of work for making an eBook?
b) What are the steps in
each phase?
c) Can you identify any
sub-steps for any of the steps? What are they?
USA 
India