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Strategic Business Units

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The Case Study for PROJ587 will place the student in the role of a senior manager in charge of one of your company’s Strategic Business Units (SBU). Your first task in this new position is to develop a project portfolio management process and then use this process to select projects for your SBUs portfolio. The Case Study will involve the application of the tools and techniques of multi-project/program management and will deal with the analysis and establishment of project management systems based on the structure of the project.

The expected outputs from this Case Study will be in the form of a two part written report due week five.

Background

The senior management of your company has already made the strategic decisions to allocate annual funding to each of the Strategic Business Units (SBU) within the company. You have been hired to manage one of the companies SBUs.

Your new company is a mid cap company with revenues of approximately $350 million dollars a year. This company, like many others, is struggling in today’s economy. It realizes in order to survive it needs to both expand and control costs at the same time. You are new to this industry. This company’s vision is to become the “go to” support or the “provider of choice” for the cruise ship industry throughout the world.

This company currently is in the travel and hotel support industry. As such, you supply support services to the travel and hotel industry such as linen services to cruise ships and major hotel chains in the Southeastern United States. Most of your new company’s revenues are derived for the cruise ship industry versus the hotel industry. This company is home based in Tampa, Florida, as most of your business is in that geographic area.

You are in charge of the Operations SBU and responsible for the management of a product portfolio in this strategic

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