Voice of the Customer
Projects are nothing but a method of production system. When such systems are efficiently structured in order to deliver product while also maximizing on value and reducing the waste, then these systems are known to be as ‘Lean’ projects. Lean project management typically differs a lot from its traditional management not because of the goals but because how the phases has been structured, the connection between those phases and the overall participants in each of the phase. The project in question is about managing a sporting event that is among the most popular events in the world. This event is known as FIFA World Cup 2018. This World Cup takes place every 4 years with the latest one being held in Russia. The event saw a total of 32 teams participating and a total of 64 matches that were planned. The event started on 14th of June in the year 2018 and ended on 15th of July. Overall 11 cities were used for the matches in over 12 venues in Russia. The overall budget allocated were around 14.2 Billion USD.
The customer’s voice means nothing but when an organization collect customer feedback in order to take an informed decision. These voices of the customer is typically an on-going program that any business or entit would use to collect valuable feedback from the customers. These feedbacks can be from a wide-range of topics or even a singular topic. It can be a valuable feedback that could help shape up important decisions in order to make changes which will enhance customer’s experience. This is a valuable tool from the the point of view of an organization and can help to gain valuable insights from customers.
In the case of FIFA World Cup, customer’s needs and requirements needs to be focused on primarily by the project manager. This is because, customers would demand nothing but exemplary service in terms of cleanliness, order, management and other amenities in and around the stadium (Correa, 2016). For this very reason, the project manager would need to study similar events and other public venues where people come in large gatherings in order to understand the services and amenities expected.
Critical to Customer Requirements is among a specific type of requirement or interest for a customer that needs to be fulfilled while the project is being fulfilled. For instance, players expect the environment to be hygienic, healthy, with good accommodation, appropriate nutrition among others. Simultaneously, an audience would desire comfortable and well-arranged seating systems. Additionally, the PM can research well in advance and learn about the audience and their choice of football-personality and then can have that personality available to that audience in advance. Apart from this, the project maanger can choose a more appropriate cost for the ticket thereby helping in increasing the ticket sales. This can be done by surveying a sample potential audience.
Critical to Customer Requirements (CCR)
CQP refers to factors and state towards the overall quality that needs to be maintained for customers. The parameters of quality for the customers will vary a lot from one another. For instance, an audience within the stadium may demand a unique kind of arrangements to enjoy the match without much interruption. The audience outside the stadium would desire to have the match telecasted. Furthermore, the project manager can boost the audience’s motivations by inviting ex-football celebrities. This method would ensure that the Audience is engaged with the vent even more. This should be done while also gathering further information from the Audience. This allows the project manager to shape up the matches further. These feedbacks will also enhance the knowledge of the project manager for the matches which he or she can use to enhance the matches.
To conduct a successful FUFA 2018 World cup event, it is important to follow the six principles of lean project management. First is the principle of specific value. It revolves around understanding the perspective of customer and includes how much the customer is willing to pay. Using this principle, the project manager should know the needs of the customer with respect to place to watch the matches. Both local and foreigners shall be looking for low-cost entry fees for inauguration and closing ceremonies along with matches. Second principle of lean is defining the value stream which shall depict all the required activities which should be executed to deliver the product and mark the areas from where waste can be eliminated. In lean project management, waste is defined as an activity which does not add any value to the project and hence can be eliminated. Audience, locals and foreigners, shall be looking for a neat and tidy stadium to watch games. In order to attain this, project manager should set up a team to serve two purposes: cleaning the stadium after match and also making audience aware about cleanliness. This will result in attracting more customers. The third principle of lean is to ensure continuous flow of work by means of streamlined and planned processes. In other words, it ensures continuous improvement which shall result in minimizing waiting and downtime between the steps. The project manager can come up with ideas of offering low-cost services to audiences such as audience of the day for maintain cleanliness in stadium or providing free tickets on some of the days or even advertise about long-awaited moment of the FIFA world cup 2018. The fourth principle of the lean project management is the executive commitment. This ensures that profits should be made even before the customer is willing to pay for a service. The fifth principle of the lean project management is to focus on the leadership aspect and ensure that performance of the project is on right track. Using this principle, the project manager can enhance the glory of the world cup by starting social media marketing and use social channels to allow audience at home to connect with the live matches. The last principle is to maintain value stream which is defined as the linear sequence of activities carried out in a way to conduct the FIFA world cup 2018. Since the customer is always the focus of the project, the manager should provide all relevant information to the audiences regarding the rules and regulations of the matches along with legal policies about waste.
Critical to Quality Parameters (CQP)
Beginning: The project manager needs to do a lot of research before starting to manage the match. This would ensure that he or she is prepared to begin with the FIFA World Cup project. Previous session records, match and event details can be sourced from sports association. The project manager would also need to understand the need of the business as well as the prime stakeholders (Elias, 2016).
Planning: Again, for planning needs the project manager must gather as much details as possible from the previous years. A proper plan can be developed by going through previous matches. A lot of the details can be extracted from those matches and can be extrapolated and adjusted for the current year and then the planning can happen accordingly. The project manager must also consider lean project management principles in the planning.
Execution: The project manager needs to make the time schedule for the entire match. He or she to be extra careful while making the time schedule for the match. This is because, there are a lot of different people coming from various countries across the world and they are coming from different time-zones and far-off places and thus the timings should be convenient so as to not make their stay difficult in Russia.
Project Manager needs to have a team setup to monitor the entire event. PM also needs to be committed to the core objective while also monitoring the entire process. PM needs to track the ticket sales, cost, the entire schedule, the matches and sub-events among others. The entire monitoring should be done from the control room by the team members of the project management team.
The project manager must prepare well in advance for the closure of the event. All the core activities planned for the closure must happen as they were planned. Extra precaution and safety measures needs to be taken as there could be some resistance and commotion among the audience and therefore the original closure activities should not be hindered in any fashion.
This is the very first phase of the project that will be executed using the PRINCE2 methodology for the World Cup. Main requirements of the project as well as the demands needs to be studied carefully and the project results should be determined accordingly. The entire preparation of schedule for 64 matches, the selection of these matches, budget estimates are also activities that needs to be done. Also, complete information needs to be provided to the team members as well.
Implementation of lean project management
Initiation of the project is the 2nd stage wherein the evaluation of the feasibility as well as justification of the project will be determined. Lean Management principles require some specific requirements that needs to be defined for an event like the FIFA World Cup. As such, this process would allow the human resources to make better decisions and also a baseline would have been setup too. It will result in continuous and rapid improvement because of lean project management principles
This stage continues straight beginning with initiation till the end or the closure. The main project board will be the primary responsible party here. Furthermore, these directions include the sub-processes during initiation, boundary setups, monitoring and controls ending up with the closure. It will ensure that the quality was improved in a continuous fashion.
The main goal for lean project management implementation is to get improvised satisfaction and enhanced experience, reduction of waste as well as business process improvement (Gabriel, 2004). The main process group that remains under the PRINCE2 methodology will ensure that the targets are achieved by organizing managerial audits and reviews for any gaps that were left and filling of those gaps.
A lot of deliverables need to be completed for the FIFA World Cup 2018 project. Such deliverables are needed to provided on the basis of budget and schedule. While at the same time, their implementation would require PRINCE2 methodology to ensure deliverables are executed on time. Any restrictions or limitations will be managed within this stage.
Products delivery in terms of organization and conduction of all the matches as well as agreements of audience present at that time in stadiums will be typically handled in this phase of the project. This will result in improvisation of trust of customer as well as his or her expectations.
The World Cup will be in its conclusion during this stage of the process group and as a result, the final part of the project allied activities needs to be carried within this group. The event closure, quality assessment, feedback of the customer, tasks for documentation and evaluation of performance are the key tasks that needs to be carried out before the project is closed (Jamali & Overisi, 2016).
This methodology supports the lean project implementation of FIFA World Cup 2018 as mentioned below:
Process 1: Strategy integration – The project manager will need to find out the ways to convert the end products of FIFA world cup in Russia to match with the needs of the customer.
Selection of Processes for Lean Project Implementation
Process 2: Strategy alignment – The world cup needs various types of preparation before it can begin. For instance: The project manager needs to ensure that all opening ceremony and closing ceremony planning has been done well-before they start.
Process 3: Delivery implementation – Implementation of opening ceremony process to customers. The manager should implement that along with matches, ceremonies are also delivered to them with regular updates.
Process 4: Delivery management – The project manager should ensure that results of matches and the ceremonies information should be delivered to within expected time period.
Process 5: Analysis of outcomes – The project manager can analyse the results of ceremonies events and matches.
This methodology supports the lean project implementation of FIFA World Cup 2018 as mentioned below:
Agile process 1: Create testable product – In this process, project manager is able to divide all the teams into a different set and then creating matches among these sets. The sets shall have equal number of weak and strong teams.
Agile process 2: Current planning – The planning for FIFA world cup should be done with in-depth research and should be given ample time before starting the entire event. This will help project manager to understand the interests of the customers.
Agile process 3: Execution – When the matches are played, there are various ways in which audiences can be taken care of such as project manager can form teams for distributing food-items or for cleaning the stadiums or for monitoring that audiences are well-seated and informed about any new updates.
Agile process 4: Testing – Though the project manager shall gather all information before starting the event, it is necessary that all the collected information is tested and verified before putting them into implementation.
Agile process 5: Future planning – the project manager will gather lessons learnt in this FIFA project so that same can be used for future events.
This methodology is a combination of two methodologies: Lean and Six sigma. Lean focuses on the waste removal and six sigma ensures there are not many variations and issues by concentrating on root causes (Bridge C, 2016). The Lean Six Sigma methodology is implemented by using DMAIC methodology (Kornfield & Kara, 2013). The phases of DMAIC are as follows:
Define – In this phase, all the issues and requirements of the customers are identified. Once the requirements are identified, they can be communicated to the other departments so that authority knows how and when to keep the audiences informed about the match results.
Measure – The project manager should measure the processes carried out in previous world cup event with the steps taken in this FIFA 2018.
Analysis – The project manager can check whether the matches are being held exactly in the same way as that of last years or there are any areas of improvements. Also, the manager should find out root causes of any issue or challenges such as reduction on social media engagement or reduction in number of attendees.
Improve – In order to attract more customers, manager can approach authorities to lower the taxes on food items or reduce ticket prices. Also, teams can be employed to guide audiences during the match about the exits and entries.
Control – Coaches will be able to find out the weaknesses of their respective players and then work upon them to improvise for next world cup.
There are multiple methodologies within project management that were defined and listed that could have been used for management of the World Cup. Agile methodology was recommended for the management of the project. Furthermore, agile methodology would have further accelerated the lean project management of the World Cup. Apart from these, the core recommendation involves with customer feedback. Customer feedback is extremely important for events-based project as it is for them that the event is being conducted. As a result, their feedback will allow the project manager to learn what they desire and then help shape the event according to the taste and preferences of the Audience. Agile methodology and customer feedback would have gone hand-in-hand as at the end of each sprint, the customer’s feedback will have been considered to improvise quality of the project (Juricek, 2014). This would have made it possible to increase the satisfaction of all the different type of people associated with the World Cup including managers, the teams, the players, the audience, the doctors, the assistants, media entities, physiotherapists, referees, advertisers, technical personnel among others. Apart from this, the management must have included an effective management and reduction of waste which would have been made possible with the help of Audits and Reviews. Unneeded activities could’ve been avoided and thereby wastage of resources minimized.
Conclusion
The overall report above presented the lean project management principles as the foundation of project management of the FIFA World Cup of 2018. As a result, the study focused on discussing various such terms such as Voice of Customer and Critical to Customer Requirements. The report also presented couple of different methods where the project management of the event could have been improved resulting in a better experience for the audience and the people involved with the event, not mentioning that it would have been better for the environment. These included focus on customer feedback within agile method of project management and waste reduction.
References
Bridge, C. (2016). Overview of Lean Six Sigma [Ebook] (4th ed., pp. 11-12). USA: PricewaterhouseCoopers Public Sector (PS) LLP. Retrieved from https://ipmamc.memberclicks.net/assets/2016conference/chelseabridge_2016ipmatrainingforum.pdf
Elias, A. (2016). Stakeholder analysis for Lean Six Sigma project management. International Journal Of Lean Six Sigma, 7(4), 394-405. doi: 10.1108/ijlss-11-2015-0046
Gabriel, E. (2004). Building a Project-Driven Enterprise: How to Slash Waste and Boost Profits Through Lean Project Management. International Journal Of Project Management, 22(3), 268-269. doi: 10.1016/s0263-7863(02)00075-3
Juricek, J. (2014). Agile Project Management Principles. Lecture Notes On Software Engineering, 2(1), 172-175. doi: 10.7763/lnse.2014.v2.117
Jamali, G., & Oveisi, M. (2016). A Study on Project Management Based on PMBOK and PRINCE2. Modern Applied Science, 10(6), 142. doi: 10.5539/mas.v10n6p142
Juricek, J. (2014). Agile Project Management Principles. Lecture Notes On Software Engineering, 172-175. doi: 10.7763/lnse.2014.v2.117
Kornfeld, B., & Kara, S. (2013). Selection of Lean and Six Sigma projects in industry. International Journal Of Lean Six Sigma, 4(1), 4-16. doi: 10.1108/2040146131131047
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