A Look on Real-life Practices of Project Management
A summarized Look on real-life practices of project management such as the project of Nintendo for the Wii product.
Today, organizations are increasingly using project management within their operations. These projects play a vital role in the contribution to the success of the organizations. At the same level as the vision, mission, and strategies contribute (Maylor, 2010). Real-life examples of the role of a project are from the engineering group Siemens. The group stated that 50 percent of their revenues came from projects. And also for HP enterprise, the project brought 60 percent of the revenues (Maylor, 2010).
According to the Project Management Institute, ‘A project is a temporary endeavour, undertaken to create a unique product, service or result”. The definition of a project can be different based on the organization. But the common thing of all definitions is that a project has a beginning and an end. According to H. Kerzner (2009), ‘project management is the planning, organizing, directing, and controlling of company resources. Which is for a relatively short-term objective that has been established to complete specific goals and objectives”. Generally, a project has some stages which are as follows: initiation, planning, execution, controlling, and closure. Each of these stages plays a critical role in the success of the project. The future is unpredictable and uncertain, and so is the project.
Uncertainty is a common characteristic of a project, which is fundamental to the success of the project. According to Maylor (2010), uncertainty includes all the environmental conditions that can affect the project, nor to fail or succeed. For instance, a project may occur uncertainty about the costs of materials or not knowing the amount of time for the completion of a task.
Nintendo
A project can fail at any stage of its life cycle. There is a real-life example of the Nintendo Company, which fails in launching a new product. Because of managers who failed to plan correctly (Maylor, 2010). Nintendo made a significant change in the company’s history by launching Wii. The launching of the Wii was undertaken by a project of stakeholders and project managers of this company.
The expectation of the project managers for the success of the new gaming product was higher than the reality. The difficulty of launching the Wii product was so complex. Because of the product characteristic, which was the first product that involved the whole family in a gaming product. Wii Nintendo had great sales when it was first released in Europe. So, the demand for Wii exceeded the supply. Later, using Wii turned out to be dangerous, because many people got injured. These injuries came because of different games like boxing, which lead to people having damage (Maylor, 2010).
The project Nintendo for the Wii product failed at the planning stage. Because customers’ buying patterns and usage of the device were not planned by the stakeholders and project managers of the Nintendo Company.
Projects can fail at any stage of their life cycle. Therefore, controlling is an essential activity for any project.
Reference for further reading: Maylor, H. (2010) Project Management (source)
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