Scenario:
In 2010, a new director of SoBA arrived on campus. After spending the first 2 ½ to 3 years of getting the on-campus "house in order", she began to focus her attention on the academic component of the online graduate programs housed in the SoBA. The focus of that attention would be to ensure that the academic processes mirrored as a close as possible the best practices of the on-campus academic successes. These practices included tenured faculty observation of non-tenured faculty in the classroom, as a means to give feedback on how to improve performance or to recognize best practice. In some ways, it could be said that the on-campus programs had an informal project management system in place.
To her dismay and irony, none of the graduate programs had a project management program. There were some ad-hoc efforts by program coordinators but no systematic effort to ensure a consistent delivery of content, regardless of the instructor of the course. It was important to her that the programs had a reputation of high quality content and outstanding instruction.
Her review of several recently completed courses revealed that some academic instructional staff was not following the course author's content. Instructors were changing the assignments used to assess whether or not students had achieved the course objectives. The changes were done primarily to ease the workload on grading assignments. However, changing the assignments resulted in second and third order effects that the instructors were not aware of. The most damaging effect of these changes was that students were not prepared to successfully complete follow-on classes, which used earlier classes as the building blocks for their content. Additionally, the faculty or instructional staff who are responsible for teaching the follow-on classes were then saddled with the burden of teaching those students the content they were expected to learn in earlier courses.
The SoBA Director asked one faculty member for an example of the impacts faced in late program courses. Exhibit 1 is a project scope statement prepared by a student who earned an "A" in both foundational courses which were both taught by Instructor Spanish. Exhibit 2 is a project scope statement prepared by another student who earned a "B" in the same foundational courses taught by Instructor English. The assignment was to prepare a project scope statement in the Capstone Course (PM 7840) in accordance with the content guidelines outlined in Section 5.3.3.1, PMBOK 5e.
After reviewing the two documents and comparing with the assignment instructions, as well as the grades earned in the course pre-requisites, it became clear to the Director that a change was needed. Standards had to be implemented to ensure the consistent delivery of course content and assessment of students was meeting a higher standard. Approximately 10 additional student work examples were provided that illustrated the disparity.
The Director wanted a study completed in eight weeks and a report with findings, conclusions and recommendations. She, rather than the technical/admin management, would initiate the project because it was an academic issue. At a very high level, the Director wanted to ensure that students taking classes in the distance education program were receiving the same instruction and assessments and that variability in grading between instructors (i.e., subjectivity) was minimized. She knew this would require someone to take on a small project, manage it, research information, complete a root cause analysis and some other quality auditing to make conclusions, and prepare a final report with recommendations.
The budget for the project would be minimal. Most costs for internal projects were absorbed in the overhead of managing an organization at the University of Madrid; however, the university does require people account for their time. Codes are used for projects at the university to primarily account for a project team member's time. A typical work week for a project is about 8 to 12 hours for each person assigned to a project. She set milestones for completing the report and closing the project in eight weeks, after signing a project charter. The project would be completed during the summer when classes were not in session. Initiation would be completed before 1 June and the final report was due 1 August.
Hint: Each group should review each exhibit and take note of the quality of the assignments turned in by each student and the grades they received in foundational courses. Are they directly or inversely proportional? Is there a graphical way of illustrating this relationship?
Something for each group to consider: Kloppenborg (2014) discusses "sample versus population" in Exhibit 14.8 (CPM 3e). Based on that discussion, does it seem reasonable to consider a sample of documents, or should the entire population of documents be reviewed to illustrate the disparity?
Question:
Prepare a project charter that produces a report containing the findings, conclusions, and recommendations that addresses the concerns of the SoBA Director. You should write the charter as if you were the sponsor of the project.