Global Green Books Publishing

Global Green Books Publishing was started two years ago by two friends, Jim King and Brad Mount, who met in college while studying in Philadelphia, USA. In the new business Jim focused on editing, sales and marketing while Brad Mount did the electronic assembly and publishing of books for Global Green Books. Their business was successful and profitable in the first two years, largely due to contracts from two big businesses. In their third year they got very busy thanks to their third major customer, a local college that needed customized eBooks. They hired several part time employees to help them with their publishing business. But by the end of third year of operation, Global Green Books started experiencing critical problems. They were: ♣ Unable to leverage all the new employees effectively ♣ Unable to deliver eBooks to their customers on schedule ♣ Unable to provide quality texts—time and money was being spent fixing defects in their products ♣ Unable to control costs—their business was not profitable in the third year. Global Green Books saw a significant rise in issues, a lot of unpleasant “surprises” were cropping up; business was down as new resources were hired, also some of the projects were poorly estimated. The local university was unhappy as their eBook products reached campus late for use by professors and student. In some cases, the books were a week or two late. Since the courses must start on schedule and students need their books at the beginning of their courses, the new lucrative college customer was unhappy. One of the new part-time employees hired by Jim and Brad, Samantha, had taken a project management course at college. Samantha was excited about the discipline of project management and had intentionally selected a job with Global Green Books Publishing as she saw an opportunity to polish her project management skills. One fine day, Jim invited Samantha, for a lunch meeting. He was aware that Samantha was familiar with project

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