The Columbia Gas of Massachusetts case – Your assignment is to identify 2 to 4 issues and provide a draft of solutions and the pros and cons of each. This draft is ungraded. Your facilitator/instructor/grader will let you know if you are on the right track for a good Case Study Report based on this draft, which can be in basic bulleted form. In fact, here is a template you should use to facilitate getting your ideas together and we would like you to use this spreadsheet to submit your draft:
Columbia Gas of Massachusetts Case – Project Issue Analysis Report (Total 12 Points)
How this will be graded:
Structure, Organization, Ease of reading, Grammar: 3 Points
This Assignment had a very, very specific structure. Identify 2-4 issues. Come up with solutions for those issues and summarize them briefly. Provide a table with Pros and Cons for each, and wrap it all up with an overall (but brief) recommendation – what could have been done to help prevent this disaster from a PM perspective. DID YOU FOLLOW THIS STRUCTURE?
Did you follow the advice given in the lectures and From Your Instructor about the format?
Did you follow rules of English grammar, spelling, and syntax? Did you fix errors pointed out via Word’s editing capabilities (e.g. squiggly blue or red underlined text)?
Content: 10 Points
Is it clear from reading your assignment that you read the case and understood what happened that led up to the mistakes that were made and that yielded the fires and explosions?
Did you ‘dig deeper’? Some people identify very technical issues – did you find the underlying reasoning – the project-level thinking that may have driven decisions to go a certain way technically?
Did you keep your writing concise and to the point? Part of the intent of this assignment is an exercise in expressing important ideas in as efficient a way as possible.
Was there a logical flow from your Issue Identification to your Proposed Solutions, to your Pros and Cons and to your conclusion?
If you did have ‘extra’ information to exhibit, did you put it in an Appendix rather than in the body of the text? Again, the focus is on a concise, crisp presentation of your arguments.
References and resources: 2 Points
Did you provide several relevant references that helped make your points? Of course you can use the main Case as a reference, but did you reach out and find out more about the Columbia Gas incident from other sources? You really should at least investigate the references pointed to at the bottom of this Case at a minimum.
Other things to consider:
Did you add value from your own professional and/or personal experience?
Did you make appropriate use of figures and tables in an appendix? Don’t substitute quantity for quality here – one good, relevant, and meaningful small table is worth 100 randomly inserted graphs and charts.
Did you really take on the viewpoint of a project leader here, and consider the way the team was motivated, the way the different stakeholders communicated (or didn’t), the culture of the different companies?
Did you consider the different stakeholder interests?
