PM 300 Week 5 Project and Product Management Example

After the Contractor Leaves: Project and Product Management for Ice Time at a Duluth Arena

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PM/300: Project Management Principles and Standards

Week 5 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Northshore Community Arena, its booking service, roles and figures are composites written for a model paper.

The earlier papers in this course followed a $5.4 million project, including the slab rebuild approved in Week 4, to replace the refrigeration plant at Northshore Community Arena, the invented public rink this course has used in Duluth, Minnesota. The new plant began making ice in September. The contractor has gone, the project team has disbanded and the arena's staff now run the equipment. This closing paper asks what the city should do now that the building work is over. It argues that the arena is a product the city sells, that the refrigeration project was one episode in that product's life and that the city needs product management, not only project management, to keep the value the project created.

Defining the Product

The current standard describes a product as an artifact that is produced, is quantifiable and can be an end item or a component, and it notes that products are often managed over a life cycle containing many projects (Project Management Institute [PMI], 2021). For Northshore the product is ice time in its several forms: hourly rentals to hockey associations and adult leagues, public skating sessions, figure skating lessons and a summer dry-floor season for lacrosse and events. Residents and clubs buy it, the city prices it, and its quality depends on equipment, schedules, staff and booking systems working together.

How the Two Disciplines Differ

The project and the product differ in several ways:

Duration: the project ran for about 17 months; the product has existed since 1994 and will continue for decades.

Success measures: the project was judged on scope, schedule, budget and the benefits described in Week 1; the product is judged on hours sold, revenue against operating cost, user satisfaction and ice quality each season.

Funding: the project drew on a one-time capital budget; the product runs on an annual operating budget and fees.

Decision makers: the project answered to a sponsor and steering group that dissolve at closure; the product answers to the arena manager and parks director every year.

Team: the project used a temporary team from three organizations; the product relies on permanent staff.

Lenfle and Loch (2010) argued that project management, as it developed after the large defense and space programs of the mid-twentieth century, came to stress control of planned execution over exploration of new possibilities. Product management carries some of the exploratory work the project discipline set aside: asking what users will want next and testing new offerings.

The Arena Across Its Life Cycle

Northshore's life cycle shows where projects fit. At introduction in 1994 a construction project built the arena. During growth in the late 1990s, a second sheet was added through another project, and ice hours sold doubled. Through maturity, from about 2005 to 2022, hours sold were stable at roughly 4,800 a season, and small projects replaced the roof and the boards. As the old plant aged, the product entered a period of decline marked by closures and rising refrigerant costs. The refrigeration project was a renewal decision: the city chose to reinvest rather than let the product decline further or close it.

Projects are the moments when a product changes; product management is everything that happens between those moments.

A Second Case: The Ice-Booking Service

The parks department now wants to replace phone and email booking with an online service where clubs and residents can see open ice and book it. The city could treat this as a project that ends at launch. That approach risks a familiar result: a tool delivered on time, then neglected, with growing complaints and no one responsible for improving it.

Ebert (2007) studied product releases inside a large software company and reported that where a product manager held real authority over the product across its life, delivery became more predictable than where that role was weak. Although the booking service is small, the lesson applies. The department will name a product owner, the arena's operations coordinator, who will own the service's backlog of improvements, meet monthly with representative users and decide which changes are funded each quarter. A one-year roadmap covers launch, a waiting list for prime-time hours, online payment and automatic billing for leagues. The initial build is a project with a scope and a date; every later release is a product decision.

Using Stage Gates for Product Decisions

Cooper (1990) described stage-gate systems for new products, in which a product idea moves through stages separated by gates where managers decide to continue, change or stop it based on evidence. The city can use the same discipline for new arena offerings. A proposed summer pickleball league on the dry floor, for example, would pass a first gate on demand evidence from a resident survey, a second gate on a three-week pilot and a final gate on revenue and staffing data before it becomes a regular offering. This approach brings the governance thinking of Week 3 into product decisions.

Measures the Product Owner Will Watch

The arena manager, as owner of the ice-time product, will track a short set of measures each season: hours sold against the 4,800-hour baseline, the share of prime-time hours filled, operating cost recovery from fees, unplanned closure days and a user satisfaction score from a brief survey sent to club schedulers in March. The booking service adds two of its own, the share of bookings made online and the number of double bookings. These measures differ from the project's: none of them has an end date, and each one feeds a pricing, staffing or investment decision in the next budget.

A Handover Model

The refrigeration project's closure exposed what a handover must include. The city will use a three-step model for future projects that change a product. First, the project and product owners agree before execution on which benefits the product owner will track and how. Second, at closure the project delivers equipment and also training records, operating manuals, warranty terms, open issues and the benefit measures with their baselines. Third, the product owner reports those measures at the annual budget review, so the value promised in the business case is checked in the operating cycle where it actually appears.

Conclusion

The arena's refrigeration project delivered a new plant, but the benefits it promised depend on how the city manages ice time as a product for the next 25 years. Projects are temporary episodes that change a product; product management gives that product an owner, a roadmap and continuing measures of value. The booking service shows the same pattern in a smaller form. By agreeing on benefits early, handing over records and measures at closure and reviewing them in the annual budget, the parks department can make sure that its projects keep paying off long after the teams that delivered them have moved on.

References

Cooper, R. G. (1990). Stage-gate systems: A new tool for managing new products. Business Horizons, 33(3), 44-54. https://doi.org/10.1016/0007-6813(90)90040-I

Ebert, C. (2007). The impacts of software product management. Journal of Systems and Software, 80(6), 850-861. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2006.09.017

Lenfle, S., & Loch, C. (2010). Lost roots: How project management came to emphasize control over flexibility and novelty. California Management Review, 53(1), 32-55. https://doi.org/10.1525/cmr.2010.53.1.32

Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.). Project Management Institute.