Manchester United Soccer Club Case Study Nicolette Larson was loading the dishwasher with her husband, Kevin, and telling him about the first meeting of the Manchester United Tournament Organizing...

Manchester United Soccer Club Case Study
Nicolette Larson was loading the dishwasher with her husband, Kevin, and telling him about the first meeting of the Manchester United Tournament Organizing Committee. Nicolette, a self-confessed “soccer mom,” had been elected tournament director and was responsible for organizing the club's first summer tournament.
Manchester United Soccer Club (MUSC) located in Manchester, New Hampshire, was formed in 1992 as a way of bringing recreational players to a higher level of competition and preparing them for the State Olympic Development Program and/or high school teams. The club currently has 24 boys and girls (ranging in age from under 9 to 16) on teams affiliated with the Hampshire Soccer Association and the Granite State Girls Soccer League. The club's board of directors decided in the fall to sponsor a summer invitational soccer tournament to generate revenue. Given the boom in youth soccer, hosting summer tournaments has become a popular method for raising funds. MUSC teams regularly compete in three to four tournaments each summer at different locales in New England. These tournaments have been reported to generate between $50,000 and $70,000 for the host club.
MUSC needs additional revenue to refurbish and expand the number of soccer fields at the Rock Rimmon soccer complex. Funds would also be used to augment the club's scholarship program, which provides financial aid to players who cannot afford the $450 annual club dues.
Nicolette gave her husband a blow-by-blow account of what transpired during the first tournament committee meeting that night. She started the meeting by having everyone introduce themselves and by proclaiming how excited she was that the club was going to sponsor its own tournament. She then suggested that the committee brainstorm what needed to be done to pull off the event; she would record their ideas on a flipchart.
What emerged was a free-for-all of ideas and suggestions. One member immediately stressed the importance of having qualified referees and spent several minutes describing in detail how his son's team was robbed in a poorly officiated championship game. This was followed by other stories of injustice on the soccer field. Another member suggested that they needed to quickly contact the local colleges to see if they could use their fields. The committee spent more than 30 minutes talking about how they should screen teams and how much they should charge as an entry fee. An argument broke out over whether they should reward the winning teams in each age bracket with medals or trophies. Many members felt that medals were too cheap, while others thought the trophies would be too expensive. Someone suggested that they seek local corporate sponsors to help fund the tournament. The proposed sale of tournament T-shirts and sweatshirts was followed by a general critique of the different shirts parents had acquired at different tournaments. One member advocated that they recruit an artist he knew to develop a unique silk-screen design for the tournament. The meeting adjourned 30 minutes late with only half of the members remaining until the end. Nicolette drove home with seven sheets of ideas and a headache.
As Kevin poured a glass of water for the two aspirin Nicolette was about to take, he tried to comfort her by saying that organizing this tournament would be a big project not unlike the projects he works on at his engineering and design firm. He offered to sit down with her the next night and help her plan the project. He suggested that the first thing they needed to do was to develop a WBS for the project.
Section 1:
40 marks – 50% of the Case Study Marks
After reading the case study, Manchester United Soccer Club, answer the following questions.
1. What are five characteristics which help differentiate projects from other functions carried out in the daily operations of the organization?
(5 marks)
2. Why is the implementation of projects important to strategic planning and the project manager?
(5 marks)
3. The technical and sociocultural dimensions of project management are two sides to the same coin. Explain.
(4 marks)
4. What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of the functional, matrix, and dedicated team approaches to managing projects?
(4 marks)
5. How are projects linked to the strategic plan?
(4 marks)
6. What are the six elements of a typical scope statement?
(6 marks)
7. What questions does a project objective answer? What would be an example of a good project objective?
(4 marks)
8. What does it mean if the priorities of a project include: Time–constrain, Scope-accept, and Cost–enhance?
(3 marks)
9. List three kinds of information that are included in a work package?
(3 marks)
10. When would it be appropriate to create a responsibility matrix rather than a full-blown WBS?
(2 marks)