Question

Rocket Print Publishing – Case Analysis 20 points Rocket Print is a successful printing and publishing company in its third year. The University of Toledo has been outsourcing more and more of its printing needs. Rocket Print has managed to secure UT as a customer and has survived the challenges of new work that UT demanded in a very short time. Much of this work is to support the printing of customized eBooks. As the first term progressed with Rocket Print making customized eBooks for UT, there were a number of issues that affected the quality of the eBooks produced and caused a great deal of rework for the company. UT was unhappy as their eBook products sometimes reached campus late for use by professors and students. In some cases, the books were a week or two late. The management of Rocket Print was also challenged by these projects. The university expected them delivered on-time and at a low cost, and the company was not always doing that. Accounting was having difficult tracking the costs for each of the books, and the shift supervisor were often having problems knowing what tasks needed to be completed and assigning the right employees to each task. Some of the problems stemmed from the new part time employees. Since many of these workers had flexible schedules, it wasn’t always clear which tasks they were supposed to be working on when they came in to work. Each book being produced was indeed a book; but that was all they had in common. Each book had different production steps, different contents and reprint approvals required, and different layouts and cover designs. Some were just collections of articles to reprint once approvals were received, and others required extensive desktop publishing. Each eBook was a complex process, but was going to be made just once, as these eBooks were all customized for each professor and course each semester. Each eBook had to be produced on time and had to be made to match just exactly what the professors requested. Understanding what each eBook needed had to be clearly documented and understood before starting production. Rocket Print had been told by the university how many different printing jobs the university would need, but they weren’t all arriving at once, and orders were quite unpredictable in arriving from the professors at the university. Some professors needed rush orders for their classes. Some orders arrived as projected, but some came later than anticipated. When Rocket Print finally got all their orders, some of these jobs were much larger than they had thought they would be. Each eBook needed to have a separate job order prepared that listed all the steps that needed to be completed, so that tasks could be assigned to each worker. These job orders were also becoming a problem. Not all the steps needed were getting listed in each order. Often the estimates of time for each task were not completed until after the work was done, causing problems as workers were supposed to move on to new tasks but were still finishing their previous tasks. Some tasks required specialized equipment or skills, sometimes from other groups within Rocket Print. Not all of the new student hires were trained for all of the printing and binding equipment used to print and assemble to books. Most eBooks follow a similar set of phases from order to delivery, though the specific activities may vary. In the first phase, the request for an eBook is received by Rocket Print from the professor or the college. The request is checked and verified, and a job order initiated. In checking and verifying each order, the customer representative should make sure that they have the order date needed, including a "requested by date", and a full list of all of the contents to be included in the eBook. They should also verify that they have received all of the materials that were supposed to be included with the order and have fully identified all of the items that they need to request permissions for. Any problems found in checking and verifying should be resolved by contacting the professor. Once the job order is verified, the request moves to the next phase. In the second phase, all of the desktop publishing work is identified, planned, estimated and assigned to production staff. The job order is then updated (and presented to the customer) to include a "Statement of Work" that details out the work required to create/include the materials (contents) and to obtain necessary permissions for the inclusion of non-original items and a quoted price. The customer must sign the job order to advance the project to the next phase. In the third phase, permissions are acquired, desktop publishing tasks (if needed) are performed, content is digitized, and the proof of the eBook is produced. A quality assistant will check the eBook against the order and get approval from the customer before it is released to production. A second quality check (by a different quality assistant) makes sure that the eBook is ready to release to the university. In the fourth phase, a link to the eBook is emailed to the customer along with a request for a formal acceptance of the product. Upon a returned signature, the job order is closed and forwarded to accounting and the eBook is placed in the portal for self-serve delivery to the customer. Prepare a single MS Word document that addresses each of the following:

1. Printing books in a print shop, especially large quantities of a single book, is a process. A process is an ongoing day-to-day repetitive set of activities the print shop performs when producing its products. How are these customized eBooks different from a standard printing process? What characteristics make these customized eBooks a project?

2. Who are the stakeholders in these eBook projects? List them, in as much detail as you can

. 3. What project management processes, covered thus far in the course, would you recommend Rocket Print use to ensure better planning, execution and quality of work?

4. Create a Work Breakdown Structure for an eBook project as a hierarchical drawing that includes WBS numbering. (DO NOT INCLUDE ACTIVITIES)

5. Enter your WBS into MS Project. Deliverables (Submission Requirements) • Submit a single Word Document that includes well framed responses to questions 1, 2 and 3 and • either a screen shot of your WBS (created in a different tool), or your WBS, drawn directly in Word and • a screen shot of your MS Project worksheet that captures the WBS numbering and the WBS elements.

Answer 1

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1) Printing books in a print shop, especially large quantities of a single book, is a process. A process is an ongoing day-to-day repetitive set of activities the print shop performs when producing its products. How are these customized eBooks different from a standard printing process? What characteristics make these customized eBooks a project?

Customized ebooks are produced in a completely different way than traditional books are produced. As this case mentions, each of these eBooks are customized. The eBooks are customized for courses then for the professor teaching that course even though the subject/course may be the same. The professors may require content changes within their respective eBooks too. All the eBooks have the potential for completely different layouts as well. All of these unique features make each eBook a different entity which means they cannot be produced like a standard printed textbook.

Since every eBook is a customization by a professor, eBooks are characterized as unique. If eBooks were the same for every professor, the uniqueness of eBooks would not exist. Another characteristic of a project for these eBooks is that the content of the eBook can be changed by the professor. If the content was constant for a semester or two, then the eBook would need to be created only once. The last characteristic of an eBook that makes it a project is its limited duration. The eBooks only last a semester then are recreated so the life cycle is only a semester long.

2) Who are the stakeholders in these eBook projects? How are they involved in or affected by an eBook project?

The stakeholders in the eBook project are the students, professors and any colleges using these eBooks. Students would be characterized as the primary stakeholders in the eBooks because they are directly, positively or negatively, impacted by the project. The direct impact on the students is learning from the eBooks. Professors and their colleges would be categorized as key stakeholders because they are indirectly impacted by the eBooks. The professor determines the content while the college funds the purchase of the books but in the end, neither of the entities are directly impacted. The indirect impact can be noticed in the student’s grades at the end of the semester because they used the eBook to help achieve their grades.