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MANAGING PROJECTS

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Projects represent nonroutine business activities that often have long-term strategic ramifications for a firm. In this chapter, we examined how projects differ from routine business activities and discussed the major phases of projects. We noted how environmental changes have resulted in increased attention being paid to projects and project management over the past decade. In the second half of the chapter, we introduced some basic tools that businesses can use when planning for and controlling projects. Both Gantt charts and network diagrams give managers a visual picture of how a project is going. Network diagrams have the added advantage of showing the precedence between activities, as well as the critical path(s). We wrapped up the chapter by showing how these concepts are embedded in inexpensive yet powerful software packages such as Microsoft Project. If you want to learn more about project management, we encourage you to take a look at the Web site for the Proj...
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Developing Marketing Strategies and Plans

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The value delivery process includes choosing (or identifying), providing (or delivering), and communicating superior value. The value chain is a tool for identifying key activities that create value and costs in a specific business.
Strong companies develop superior capabilities in managing core business processes such as new product realization, inventory management, and customer acquisition and retention. Managing these core processes effectively means creating a marketing network in which the company works closely with all parties in the production and distribution chain, from suppliers of raw materials to retail distributors. Companies no longer compete—marketing networks do.
According to one view, holistic marketing maximizes value exploration by understanding the relationships between the customer’s cognitive space, the company’s competence space, and the collaborator’s resource space; maximizes value creation by identifying new customer benefits from the customer’s cognitive space, utilizing core competencies from its business domain, and selecting and managing business partners from its collaborative networks; and maximizes value delivery by becoming proficient at customer relationship management, internal resource management, and business partnership management.
Market-oriented strategic planning is the managerial process of developing and maintaining a viable fit between the organization’s objectives, skills, and resources and its changing market opportunities. The aim of strategic planning is to shape the company’s businesses and products so they yield target profits and growth. Strategic planning takes place at four levels: corporate, division, business unit, and product.
The corporate strategy establishes the framework within which the divisions and business units prepare their strategic plans. Setting a corporate strategy means defining the corporate mission, establishing strategic business units (SBUs), assigning resources to each, and assessing growth opportunities.
Strategic planning for individual businesses includes defining the business mission, analyzing external opportunities and threats, analyzing internal strengths and weaknesses, formulating goals, formulating strategy, formulating supporting programs, implementing the programs, and gathering feedback and exercising control.
Each product level within a business unit must develop a marketing plan for achieving its goals. The marketing plan is one of the most important outputs of the marketing process.

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