Project Management Assignment: Project Methodology For Maxima LT

Question

Task: A project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to provide an expected and beneficial outcome. A project life cycle is the series of phases that a project passes through from its initiation to its closure. Project goals should align with organisational goals such as improved operations or increased revenues, reducing costs or improving efficiencies.

Before resources can be committed to a project, the reason for its proposal and the benefits it is expected to deliver need to be understood by people in positions empowered to make decisions about the expenditure of an organisation's resources. The selection of organisational projects is typically performed through a method of classification and review of the project’s business case. That method of course should be applied consistently to all project proposals.

Answer

Introduction
The PMBok is the collection of the terminologies, best practices, guidelines and processes that are being acquired as a basic standard for managing a particular project. The project manager needs to follow these guidelines to s implement a requested project successfully. The topic that had been chosen for this assignment is called Maxima LT which is one of the largest retail trade operator located in the Baltic street. The assignment will be going to cover different project selection methods and will describe the initial process group and project documents that are created as inputs for the company Maxima.

Discussion
The organization Maxima LT had achieved a total turnover of 1.85 billion in the year 2006 but it showed 21 per cent growth in the total turnover. The company Maxima LT had forecasted total of 20 per cent growth in the total turnover in the year 2007. Presently the retail trade operator has total 370 outlets in Bulgaria, Latvia, Bulgaria and Estonia. Maxima LT had become one of the largest employees in the location Baltics whose strengths are mainly based on the employees whose skills had played an important role when the business is building a separate position as one of the leading retailer in Baltic States (van Eck et al., 2015). For making the retailing trade operation successful, the organization Maxima LT had set separate strategic objective to keep the best employees and retain all the skilled employees in their company. The Maxima LT organization had always trained their employees to make sure the employees are not at all making mistakes they do inside the working place (Lewis et al., 2015).

The organization Maxima LT seeks to increase the overall output for applying all the automated work processes to increase the total productivity of the work. According to the business plan created by the Maxima LT retail, shopping centres and stores are already being positioned to all the nearby shopping locations. The issues that are being faced by the organization Maxima LT is decision making which includes the local populace size, flow of shoppers and handling the overall traffic present in the bill counter (Flick, 2015) . Every shopper had to use either public or private transport to access the store. Nowadays the online shopping organization are acquiring shoppers who are willing to buy stuff from online.

The Maxima LT always provide the best quality products with the best affordable price for their customers, which is creating a competitive advantage against other competitors. The Maxima takes account all the different requirements of the shoppers, which includes opening community storing different local areas, separate stores that are being designed for the urban cities and shopping centres to attract all the consumers who are present in the hypermarkets (Joslin & Müller, 2015). The shopping centres of Maxima always offers an expensive assortment of goods to attract all the customers who have high economy.

The organization Maxima LT lacks the overall creativity in its service ad products due to undedicated R&D units. No new innovative ideas are being used by the organizations Maxima LT for further growth of the business by improving their existing project to gain customers that are more new. The organizations lack the survey novelties or trends in the areas, which will help Maxima LT to improve the projects. All the improvements of the organization Maxima LT need to assign a separate manager in the R&D unit to make sure employees are providing innovative solutions to increase the business units (Silvius et al., 2017). However, Maxima LT has a gap between the strategic objectives and existing situations, which needs to be filled up to, improve strategic initiatives. All the responsible managers need to be assigned for implementing the budgets and projects for further development of the project to improve the retail service (Pecherskaya et al., 2016).

From the analysis, It could be found out Maxima must develop new construction projects to build new attractive shops. The Maxima LT must improve all the competencies for the management of strategic projects. The Maxima LT faces different challenges in their business, which ensures critical mass for all the project team members who can able to communicate about the tasks. All the project team members must manage the progress of the project to manage all the tasks according to the given deadline (Patterson et al., 2018) . The Maxima LT had used all the suitable shopping formats where the customers receive service like insurance service, mobile communication service and ticket voucher service to attract more customers in their stores.

The organization Maxima always has a separate firm plan to add new services for the entire existing portfolio. For the service efficiency Maxima constantly examines all the customer self-service options and investing their time to improve all the supply chain service. The public funding European Union funds are being utilised for supporting the staff for the service organization. The project management is the set of standard guidelines and terminology for managing the retail project. The project team members need to define the initiation of the new project or creating a new phase (Vazquez et al., 2017). The planning stage is important which help the project team members to create the scope of objectives needs to achieved for gaining the right outcome for this particular project.

One of the most important parts of the PMBok methodology is the monitoring, controlling where the project team members need to regulate, review, and track all the performance and progress of the project they are implementing. Without proper monitoring system, the project team members will not be able to implement the project successfully because each member needs to know the changes or the tasks that are being provided by the project manager for the completion of the particular project work (Howes, 2017).

Another important project methodology that can be used by the retail Maxima to implement a separate firm with new service is the six sigma project methodology. The six sigma project methodology main aims to improve the overall quality by lowering the number of errors by identifying tasks that are not at all useful for the project (Mavrotas, Figueira, & Siskos, 2015). The project manager using this particular methodology can identify all the unnecessary tasks and can remove it. The six sigma project methodology is being used for managing the quality of the project which is highly statistical and empirical. With the help of the six sigma, the project manager can able to define the project goals and the problem that is present in the given project (El-Tawab et al., 2018). The process or tasks given to particular project team members can be improved by using the six sigma project methodology.

Another project methodology that can be used by the retail store Maxima is the lean methodology which promotes in increasing the total value of the customer and reduce the overall waste that had been generated during progress of the particular project work.

Recommendations
For creating a new firm the retail store Maxima needs to analyses what is the most demanding service among the consumers before creating a new firm THe Maxima store must utilise a survey process in the chosen location to find out which is the most demanded service that is needed by the customers. With the help of the data gathered from the survey process the project manager can easily able to identify, the best service required for the chosen location (Herrarte & Beloqui, 2015) . From the collected data, the project manager will be able to identify all the missing parts that are present in Maxima portfolio which needs to be improved to increase the overall growth of the business. One of the best project methodologies that can be used by the project manager is the lean methodology, which helps the project team to optimise overall energy, effort, resource, and people that are required for the completion of the given project work. The lean methodology promotes continuous improvements, which help the project manager to eliminate all the required wastes, and creates a value to the project. THE continuous improvement cycle helps the organizations Maxima to differentiate their services from other competitors. Using Lean methodology, the project manager can able to encourage the employees to develop a learning mindset. The project team members can able to test their own ideas with the given target market independently to find out the issuers or any missing services that are not being provided by the organization Maxima (Soni & Kohli, 2017).

Conclusion
From the overall analysis of the assignment it can be outlined that identifying the right project methodology is important to implement particular project work. The project methodology creates guidance to the project team members and the project manager to lead the project according to the given time and resources. Maxima needs to use Lean methodology project methodology to create a firm with new service to attract more new customers for buying products from Maxima store. The project manager is one of the crucial necessities for all organization.

Reference
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Flick, U. (2015). Introducing research methodology: A beginner's guide to doing a research project. Sage.

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Howes, L. M. (2017). Developing the methodology for an applied, interdisciplinary research project: Documenting the journey toward philosophical clarity. Journal of mixed methods research, 11(4), 450-468.

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Mavrotas, G., Figueira, J. R., & Siskos, E. (2015). Robustness analysis methodology for multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems and application to project selection. Omega, 52, 142-155.

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Pecherskaya, E. P., Averina, L. V., Kochetckova, N. V., Chupina, V. A., & Akimova, O. B. (2016). Methodology of contract managers’ project competency formation in CPE. International Electronic Journal of Mathematics Education, 11(8), 3066-3075.

Silvius, A. G., Kampinga, M., Paniagua, S., & Mooi, H. (2017). Considering sustainability in project management decision making; An investigation using Q-methodology. International Journal of Project Management, 35(6), 1133-1150.

Soni, D., & Kohli, P. J. (2017). Cost estimation model for web applications using agile software development methodology. Pertanika Journal Of Science & Technology, 25(3), 931-938.

van Eck, M. L., Lu, X., Leemans, S. J., & van der Aalst, W. M. (2015, June). PM $$^ 2$$: A Process Mining Project Methodology. In International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (pp. 297-313). Springer, Cham.

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