Agile Construction

Maria is the owner and operator of a medium sized construction company named Agile Construction. The business has about 60 employees. Maria has engineers, accountants, human resource specialists, and purchasers on staff. Agile Construction normally specializes in building industrial workspaces for manufacturers. Recently, the work for new industrial workspaces has been slow and so Maria has been looking to get into constructing new things to keep Agile alive.

About a year ago, Maria bid on a new police station built with secure premises and holding cells for people who were arrested. Maria thought this was an excellent project for Maria’s company to take on.

Agile had three months to prepare a bid. Unfortunately, the entire bidding process was a disaster from day one.

Maria put the head of every department in the same room and told them, "this is your problem now. Figure it out". A shortlist of problems that then developed included:

  • No one took responsibility for the project, and so every part of the bidding project was delayed.
  • There was no clear organization or structure. People only talked via email and occasional run-ins with each other.
  • There were constant disagreements about how to build the police station, and how to meet the minimum specifications from the people with technical expertise.
  • Some employees were grumbling that there was no need to get into the business of constructing these strange buildings for the city – the industrial workspaces served the company well-enough for years.
  • The accountants did their best with the information they had. However, because of poor communication, they accidentally submitted a bid that was far too high.


Agile Construction’s bid was not accepted.

The company’s financial picture has gotten worse in the last year. Maria thought she would have to close the business down, but now the local arts college is building a new campus building. It’s a massive project with some unique technical challenges. Maria thought, "yes! This is the opportunity I’ve been waiting for".

Maria has six months to put in her bid. It will require coordination across all her business’s departments to submit a bid that will be accepted and make the company some desperately needed cash. It’s a big job. She comes to you and says, "I don’t want a repeat of the police station experience. Could you please help me turn my employees into a solid team so we have a chance of getting our bid accepted?"

Questions
  1. What issues did Maria have when bidding to build the police station?
  2. With your analysis in question 1 in mind, answer the following:
    1. Who should be on the team?
    2. How many people should be on the team?
    3. How will Maria get organizational buy-in for the goals of the team?
    4. Who should be the leader of the team?
    5. How and when should the team meet?
    6. How will the team make decisions?
    7. Any other activities that you think should be done to facilitate the team performing. You may wish to discuss team diversity here.

Source: Scott van Dyk, https://collection.bccampus.ca/course-packs/introduction-to-management/#module-13
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Last modified: Saturday, 19 April 2025, 9:51 PM
Callback before_footer in local_aigrade component should be migrated to new hook callback for core\hook\output\before_footer_html_generation
  • line 7225 of /lib/moodlelib.php: call to debugging()
  • line 7292 of /lib/moodlelib.php: call to {closure}()
  • line 71 of /lib/classes/hook/output/before_footer_html_generation.php: call to get_plugins_with_function()
  • line 987 of /lib/classes/output/core_renderer.php: call to core\hook\output\before_footer_html_generation->process_legacy_callbacks()
  • line 94 of /mod/page/view.php: call to core\output\core_renderer->footer()