Sample Principles of Project Management

PROJ6000: Principles of Project Management

Task Summary

After reading the project case study, use it to develop a 2,000-word Project Charter, describing the entire project in a short, succinct, and professional document.

Context

Project leadership is about inspiring the project team to do their best from the outset. This requires a combination of verbal and written communication skills and a range of applied leadership skills. One of the foundational documents that helps “kick off” a project is the Project Charter. The Project Charter describes the entire project in a short, succinct, and presentable document that can be shared with project staff or other stakeholders and aims to commence the project in earnest. The Project Charter helps to clarify the project context, the project team roles, and the goals of the project.

Instructions

You will be given a project case study to use in order to develop your Project Charter. Though all students will receive the same case study, it is expected that each student will think about the project from their own perspective as an up-and-coming project manager in order to formulate a unique Project Charter. Use your own style based on your critical thinking of what it means for you to lead a project. You may use one of the templates provided in the learning resources or develop your own format.

Please follow the instructions below:

1. Read the case study provided by your lecturer. This will form the basis for your Project
Charter, because you will assume that you are the project manager for this project.

2. After reading the case study, begin to develop your project charter. This needs to be a 2,000- word report (+/- 10%) and must use a minimum of six (6) references (academic literature and industry publications—please consider the case study as a 7th reference). Please ensure all references are cited in-text.

3. The Project Charter must include the following headings and should be written as if you are presenting it to the project team that will build this project. You are the project manager.

The contents of your Charter should include:

a. Background of the project
b. Reasons for the project
c. Project objectives
d. Proposed project management approach or methodology/methodologies
e. Constraints, limitations, and risks
f. Leadership structure (project manager and his or her senior aides: list their roles and explain what each does in the project. You need to cite four (4) roles)
g. Project risks and their mitigation
h. Project stakeholders and how to interact with them
i. The vision of the project and the type of project team culture you wish to promote in your team
j. Reference list

Solution

Background of The Project

Multiple Listing Service is the kind of service that is controlled and run by real estate brokers. As stated by Halvitigala, D. (2018), real estate brokers of particular region unitedly make a database regarding real estate properties which are available for the customers and are ready to be sold. For Assignment Help This particular database is called multiple listing service (MLS). Thus, real estate brokers are able to see the available real estate properties that are listed for sale within their particular region or locality. Multiple listing service is created to provide compensation and cooperation to the real estate brokers by the other listing brokers.

My Florida Regional MLS is considered to be third largest MLS which is having over sixty thousand customers in Florida region. It is based in Orlando, Florida and operates mainly in Central Florida and the densely populated are of Florida’s West coast (councilofmls, 2021). My Florida Regional MLS is known for its ‘curated customer journey’. However, currently My Florida Regional MLS becomes Stellar MLS.

Feasibility analysis is important for any MLS. It decides pricing of the plots. In Florida, Washington County is the cheapest to buy a vacant plot over there. Besides that, Bay County, Citrus County and Marion County are preferred sites for new constructions. Permits for single family or duplex dwelling is not required in Florida. However, as stated by Shpak et al., (2020), dwelling for multifamily or business require relevant permit. Zoning law is another important factor in feasibility analysis. In Florida, zoning law is not about only physical property, it is applicable on pets or animals, whether they are allowed in a property or not. Zoning law is applied to preserve historic zones of Florida.

Prior starting a project, PSM or Process Safety Management is done by the project management team to prevent hazardous effects of chemicals. Project that serves My Florida Regional MLS, maintains regulations established by Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS). FDACS regulates professional mappers and surveyors of Florida.

Reasons for The Project

 In order to deliver required services such as strategic business plan, time frame, budget management, potential customers to the My Florida Regional MLS, a planned project is needed. The project is also initiated to bring a strong management team that can create charter, stakeholder assessment, high level plan, execute, monitor and control all the required steps that need to be taken for the betterment of the MLS. Large scale real estate projects are not only expensive but these are also risk oriented and have stakeholder challenges. For instance, eProperty Watch is a project plan that is developed by CoreLogic, with the aim to provide free services to the leading MLSs. Such projects are made to meet the following issues.

Budget Management- Project managers hire and manage various contractors, establish good relations with them and monitor the cost that changes due to vendors’ demand, managing protocols, change in orders and expenses for materials. Finally, they are able to keep the project under budget.
Time Management- It is important to keep track of time as delaying in activities such as failing to coordinate with stakeholders, not placing supply orders on time, delaying in paper works can slow a project and affects the whole project financially.

Risk Management- The main threat of a project comes from over budget and longer time. As stated by Starr, Saginor &Worzala, (2021), projects managers hire licensed management teams who are certified Project Management Professional (PMP) by Project Management Institute (PMI). Such professionals have four years degree and have experience of 4,500 hours of project management involvement.

Communication Challenges- Another reason of this project is to mitigate communication challenges that are unavoidable in any large-scale project. As, real estate brokers and MLSs need to build local support and goodwill through communicating with various stakeholders such as local leaders, customers, suppliers and political leaders.

Project Objectives

The project objective is to maintain the life cycle of a proposed project related to the real estates and to serve the real estate brokers of various MLSs. Proposed project management which is created to serve MLSs has almost same processes like other management models to organize, run and execute the proposed activities. This whole approach is SMART as it is considered to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time based. Life cycle of a project includes initiating, planning, implementation and closure. According to Doszyn Mariusz, (2020), acquisition, approval, new construction, sales and marketing, debt servicing, completion and finally handover are the pivotal steps or a complete life cycle of a proposed project management related to real estate business.

Land Acquisition- The first objective of a project is to identify a potential land or property and then research on required zoning or entitlements and finally assessing the budget.

Approval Stage- After acquiring a land, developers need to get approvals from different administrative and governmental organizations.

Development of New Construction- Once a property or site has got approval, constructor will develop plans to build new construction over the site.

Sales and Marketing- After getting approvals, a site is finally ready for sales. Sales and marketing are important to attract target customers.

Debt Serving Stage- This part is done by the developers where they serve debt including principal and interest at any point of time of the real estate project development process.

Completion and Handover of Property- After the completion of real estate project development, plots are finally ready to handover to the interested customers.

Proposed Project Management Approach/ Methodology

An effective project management approach relating to real estate is an art where certified professional project managers and a project management team work hard to set all the required constituents of a real estate project to run the process in sync. With the aim to manage costs and time, to control schedule and to establish goodwill through communication, a methodology is required in construction industry which is called project management methodology.

According to councilofmls. (2021), different MLSs adopt different types of project management methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, Lead, test-driven development and extreme programming. However, Scrum and Kanban are the most used methodologies in real estate business.

Scrum Methodology- As stated by Bibik, (2018), Scrum is considered to be an Agile project management methodology. This methodology is used by the leading real estate company CBRE which operates with its 480 offices over the world. In this methodology, the scrum master mitigates all obstacles to perform the work. This methodology helps project management to manage the threats coming from new entrants and automation technologies.

Kanban Methodology- According to Matt, Rauch & Riedl, (2018), in this methodology, management team can visualize the work and thus team can understand the workflow. This helps the team to set their strategic action plans to run the entire project.

Constraints, Limitations and Risks

Time, legal and Cost are the major limitations and risks for any project management.

Time- Mismanagement in time due to lengthy paper works, collecting permits, repaying old debts can affect the business directly. Especially in such cases where people are waiting to get a property and still if they have to pay rents due to late handover. For instance, a company had to extend their corporate lease as their headquarter was not ready in time. Even, fine is imposed on the MLS members if they fail to register full listing by the given time.

Legal- As there is no such institution, only to monitor the flow of money in real estate sector, therefore, this industry becomes an easy target for money launderers.

Cost- Currently, property prices are increasing in Florida due to high demand and low interest rates. Freddie Mac predicts that real estate property prices rise by 6.6% in Florida in the coming years. However, there is a risk for properties of not to be sold.

Leadership Structure

Leadership structure can be either hierarchical or non-hierarchical and this structure determines how authority, accountability and workflow work together. In hierarchical structure the power remains in a center and top position. Whereas, in non-hierarchical the power is in a structure with decentralized authority (French, Ooi & Mori, 2015). In case of providing services to real estate companies or MLSs, leadership structure must be non-hierarchical where every individual involved in the project has fixed job to perform on the basis of their expertise.

Role of Project Manager- A project manager supervises the project from initial step of land acquisition to the final stage of project completion and handover stage. It is the responsibility of the whole management team to manage the issues relating with vendors (Markoc, Cizmeci, 2021). For instance, such responsibilities belong to the developers of eProperty Watch, CoreLogic.

Role of Marketing Coordinator- In order to launch a real estate project, communication and creative materials are required and a marketing coordinator is responsible for doing these marketing jobs including promotion and digital campaign (Thaichon & Ratten, 2021).

Role of a Trainer- It is important to conduct a training program just before a product launch. Trainers are responsible for developing such training programs to upgrade the project management staffs to run the project smoothly. For instance, eProperty Watch conducted effective training programs to help the Florida based MLSs.

Role of Quality Assurance Technician- It is the responsibility of the quality assurance technicians to ensure the quality of products and to monitor the proper handling of products before the product launch. With the help of professional technicians My Florida Regional MLS is able to operates their business with 50,000 real estate agents and brokers across the Florida.

Project Risks and Their Mitigation

A common issue in real estate business is that often when a project is in its mid-way or at the stage of handover, customers find drawbacks in the project related to property’s actual size, location, gravitation and shape. According to Rajan Annamalai & Jain, (2013), project management should deal with the licensed surveyors and mappers while searching for a property to build new construction in order to avoid issues related to property’s contour, shape, location, dimension and gravitation.

Another issue is related to financing, finance management and debt management can deal with favorable financing institutions that reduces the cash outflow. As stated by McAlpine &Porter, (2018), value of a real estate not only depends on its design, location, durability, materials used, rather it also depends on political stability and socio-economic condition. However, unstable value of a property is a threat to the real estate MLSs. Project managers must stay up to date on market condition.

Luxury Real Estate Group and Redfin are the leading competitor of My Florida Regional MLS. In order to get sustainable competitive success, project management should provide best location at best prices, transparent contracts and should establish goodwill through great communication strategies.

Project Stakeholders and How to Interact with Them

People who impact on a property development project or who are impacted by the project are considered as stakeholders. Developers, customers, lenders, financial institutions, investors, utility companies, central and local government, landowners, architects, engineers, consultants, brokers, agents, valuers, mappers, construction companies, local residents and environmental groups.

Project management team needs to schedule meeting and conference call to provide project summary, approval papers and other important documents to the stakeholders (Hayibor, 2017). With the aim to build local support and goodwill to get zoning approval from local government, even in this current pandemic situation, it is advisable to conduct a ‘screen to screen’ meeting with the stakeholders. Sending newsletter to the stakeholders can attract even those stakeholders who are not directly involved in the project. In order to get honest feedbacks from stakeholders, informal communication such as lunch meeting can be a good idea.

Vision of the Project and Project Team Culture

In order to provide great services to the MLSs relating to real estate, the vision must to be the leading real estate service provider in the Florida region. Another vision is to make this project a preferred place where professionals want to get employment. Consistently developing collaborative partnership through mutual trust, must be another vision for the project management team.

Vision and strategy of a project team decides its team culture. Leadership, empowerment, innovation, task-oriented and customer service excellence are some of the common team cultures. However, in this particular sector, customer service excellence is the most important culture that needs to be maintained. With the aim to get sustainable success in providing services to the real estate MLSs, it is advisable to the project management team to build their customer service-based project culture by communicating priority, alignment of operational rules with officials.

Reference list