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Mexican Crazy Quilt

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Mexican Crazy Quilt

Upon opening the subsidiary in Mexico, Linderman Industries was faced with several issues in getting the operations up and running to hand over to Mexican managers. The project manager, Carl Conway, encountered several challenges in his quest to complete the project successfully. Problems included, finding the correct employees for the various key positions, getting the cooperation and support of other divisional managers and having positions at the home location for returning employees who accepted the Mexican assignment.
According to Stevenson, there are several decisions that management must make in order for a project to be successful. These decisions include, “selecting a project team (Stevenson, 2012, p. 744).” Conway faced a few setbacks in building his team. He intended to hire Emil Banowetz and Bert Mill, but was unsuccessful. Strong measures were used to secure Bob Cates to join the team. As Kathleen Melymuka, a writer for Computerworld, pointed out, “it takes the right mix of "soft" skills, personalities and attitudes to gel and achieve results (Melymuka, 2014).”
Conway faced lots of resistance from several of the divisional managers. For example, the vice president of engineering refused to support his employees move to the project team. Another example is the vice president of manufacturing refusal to use a metric measurement scale in production. The personnel director had to intervene to resolve a situation between the project team and the corporate manager of industrial engineering. Stevenson noted that “top-down commitment (Stevenson, 2012, p. 743)” is one of the keys to the success of a project.
The final major challenge Conway faced was securing positions for the project team members upon completion of Project Mexicano. This was the reason Bill Mill refused a positon on the project team. His refusal was due

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