Tech must reply two students
Student #1: Jones
Project Management Final Project Approval
The organization and department I'll be using in this assignment is the customer service department of Forever 21. I chose this organization and department because Forever 21 has been at the forefront of teen fashion for the past 28 years, but unfortunately last year this organization announced it was filing for bankruptcy. Due to the bankruptcy Forever 21 will be going through many structural changes and I believe structural change will be needed in customer service. I believe that the global customer service department at Forever 21 should start changing the customer culture. If no change is done for Forever 21 it will suffer the same fate as Wet Seal, American Apparel and Delia's, who according to CNN, have had to file bankruptcy and closed all their stores ( Meyersohn & Isidore, 2019). Change in Forever 21’s customer service model will include changing how the organization interacts with customers in person and online. Customer-focus culture is imperative to the success of an organization like Forever 21 and my goal is to build a proposal that focuses on the needs of the customers and shareholders.
My project is relevant to the company and division because of the recent closings of 178 locations that have closed due to shifts in consumer tastes. And if you research the Forever 21 customer service reviews and complaints received from customers, you will see that this organization averages a 1.8 out 5 in quality. Poor customer service quality plus wavering support of “fast fashion” has led to a drop in revenue and lack of brand loyalty. The buying taste of generation Z is changing, and mall culture is not the same as when it first explored in the 1980s. Forever 21 saw a drop in revenue from $4.4 billion in 2016 to $3.3 billion last year and went from 43,000 to 32,800 employees, this is not ideal considering that Forever 21 is close to $500 million in debt. While Forever 21 halts production it is a good time to simplify things and change the quality of customer service that its employees provide.
One of the possible hurdles I would face is rallying support behind my project or team. I can mitigate having trouble finding support by having clear objectives and relating them to company objectives and layout the value of my project. I must avoid misalignment between my project and Forever 21’s business objectives in order to prevent gaps. The second hurdle I would face in my project is managing to keep teams on the same page. I believe I will encounter this obstacle because my team that would be part of this project would be widely spread out due to how large the customer service department of Forever 21 is. However, I can mitigate this problem by keeping communication on a single platform or page to avoid confusion and keep a schedule that accommodates the differing time zones around the world. The third and last hurdle I would face is fragmentation because of how large of an organization Forever 21 is and the size of the customer service department. Fragmentation can be mitigated by prepping for potential problems and slippages.
The references I plan to use below are relevant to my project because the article details the rise and fall of Forever 21. And these articles have helped me understand what structural changes needed to be made while the organization is going through bankruptcy.
Reference
Meyersohn, N., & Isidore, C. (2019, September 30). Forever 21 files for bankruptcy and will close up to 178 US stores. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/29/business/forever-21-bankruptcy/index.html (Links to an external site.)
Maheshwari, S. (2019, September 30). Forever 21 Bankruptcy Signals a Shift in Consumer Tastes. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/29/business/forever-21-bankruptcy.html (Links to an external site.)
Student 2: Matt
I work with an organization who is partners with Ford Motor Company called Jacobs Engineering. The department I will be talking about is the Vehicle Evaluation and Verification (VEV) department. The VEV department handles different emissions projects that come into Jacobs every day. There are multiple sites and many different technicians that run testing allowing other companies to complete their projects they have been assigned. When a technician sets a production vehicle onto a dynamometer and runs the emission and fuel economy testing there are different engineers that record the data allowing them to move onto the next project. For example, I have been running testing on the new hybrid vehicles allowing them to go into a certification phase. After this certification phase the company is allowed to put them onto a dealership lot. There are many different projects being run throughout the building and each project has to be done on a certain time. This is how the VEV department decides whether or not it is high-priority testing or not for the technicians running these test projects.
Growing up as a kid I was always told that Ford is the best brand car company there is and my whole family owns Ford vehicles. Jacobs Engineering is part of the Ford community and lets me grasp a little bit further into detail what powers these cars and how they are testing to maintain certain emissions. The VEV department within Jacobs Engineering interests me because it is something I deal with every day. I am able to see all of the new updated and new project cars that will be released into the public in a later moment of time. It is hard to explain a lot of my job because I am unable to speak of it in detail. When I was younger I was always intrigued with cars and how they worked, it became a passion of mine then and still is to this day. The progress technology has made with many more advancements that anyone could ever imagine is unbelievable when you see it all connected and working within a running vehicle. Since this department specifically lets me look at all of these technologies and upgrades it keeps me interested to see how they will look when they start selling on the dealership lots.
These projects are relevant to my division and company because if it weren't for these projects many of these newer car emissions would be crazy. My division brings in these new projects every day to allow newer model vehicles to improve on the fuel economy to help the environment and save on gas money. The better the fuel emissions the better Ford looks compared to their competitors. Projects that are loaded up onto my site are from engineers trying to figure out what needs to be done in order to be better than previous year model cars and better than the competition like GM, Toyota, etc. There are a couple different problems or issues that relate to these projects that I receive every day. What I have noticed while working with this organization is that a lot of these test vehicles should not be approved to run on a dynamometer. Also, there should be regular maintenance on the driving sites themselves. It is unsafe and could cause danger to whoever is driving the vehicle or around the site at the time. I have had different project cars get thrown into park while driving 50 mph, ceiling tiles fall onto a windshield, and many more. These vehicles can shake aggressively and throw you off of the dyno rolls and can cause major harm. These are some of the issues that need to be addressed by Ford Motor Company.
One major obstacle that I will encounter while working on this assignment is that I do not believe that I will be able to share everything to my knowledge because of the nondisclosure contract that I signed when I first got hired into the company. The company does not want anything major to get leaked out for our competitors. Something I will be able to do to get around this is to ask my supervisor in the workplace what I am allowed to post about the work projects. I have done this in the past and gotten the approval on what I can post into our discussions. Another hurdle I will have to work around is trying to find all of the detailed information about the company and its projects. It will be difficult trying to locate these references allowing me to provide information that isn't from my supervisor and I can work around this hurdle by looking at references on my work website allowing me to get an approval with detailed information about the company. If there is information already out to the public it is allowed to be shared from myself. Lastly, a hurdle I will have to try and work around is getting information on the specific projects that engineers bring to VEV technicians on a daily basis. These engineers from Ford, and myself, will have to become more in contact that will better allow me to find out more information on what the projects have located inside of them.
These references do not have the exact projects that I will be talking about. What these references have is the outcome of the aftermath from Jacobs Engineering and what these projects have accomplished. Ford. (2020). Ford Media Center. Retrieved from https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en.html Jacobs. (2020). Newsroom. Retrieved from https://www.jacobs.com/newsroom