Project Management at IPS: A New Chocolate Production Lines Project

This case study describes how IPS, a project management company, helped Tom Hendrickx, the manager of a Catalan chocolate factory, to prepare a project to install two new dark compound chocolate lines to replace an old white chocolate line, to cope with a higher demand of their products. IPS had a project manager, Winnie Vanrespaille, working full time for the manufacturing company, in charge of managing all the ongoing projects of the factory. In the case text, Hendrickx makes a first basic estimate of the planning and budget, as to ask Vanrespaille to prepare a detailed project management plan, including the planning, a stakeholder analysis and a risk analysis. With this, he wanted to get the green light for the project from the steering committee in their next meeting of March 2017. The class discussion, described in the teaching note, follows the waterfall project management methodology. Although it is one of the oldest methodologies, it is still one of the most useful for projects of the predictive type, such as many industrial projects, including the one of the chocolate lines treated here.