Project Management: Principles and Strategies

The main objective of this assignment is to reinforce the importance of project definition and needs identification in the initial phase of the project life cycle. Success of a project is affected by the way a project’s objective(s) is defined, planned and managed. Unfortunately, successful project managers do fail; the key difference in strategic project management is that they learn from their mistakes. Project managers also learn from their success and are constantly searching for new strategies to further improve. In highly successful projects you are likely to find an excellent and valuable project team, a motivated project manager and a very efficient project structure.

This assignment is designed to lead you through a systematic evaluation of a project. Your role is to critically analyses on the successful project of Macarthur Wind Farm in south western Victoria and how was this project planned, managed and performed. Macarthur Wind Farm is the biggest wind farm and cost approximately 1 billion in southern hemisphere. This project was undertaken by a joint venture, which are AGL Energy and Meridian Energy.I want to see that you have thought about the project and offered critical comments and insights based on your understanding of project management.
Instructions:
You are encouraged to search the Web for this project and to collect any type of information about the situation, making sure to cover different viewpoints. This could include newspapers, project management magazines and journals. As this project is a real case you can expand the information presented in the references (i.e. source).

Write a report that critically analyses how the project was planned and performed. The report should include:

1. A project stakeholder analysis.

2. A brief description of how the project was managed (e.g. strategy, key events, tools used etc.).
•    Describe the implementation phase of the project. In particular, explain whether the project ran to plan – in which case explain the benefits of careful planning to the project manager.
•    Alternatively, if the project deviated from plan, why did this occur and what was the impact of these deviations for the project?
3. A critical analysis of the project outcome (i.e. the critical factors that made this project a success or a failure).
•    Conclude reflecting on the project, what did you learn? What good practices will you, as a manager, take from this to future projects, and what activities would you not do in the future and why?
4. Appendix.
The report should not exceed 1000 words and should be formatted using 1.5 line spacing and a font size of 12pt. The word limit does not include the appendix, or the executive summary.
Guidelines on writing a report can be accessed at: http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/learningconnection/student/learningAdvisors/reports.asp.