CP70061E Principles of Project Management Assessment 2: Case Study 2026

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Category	Assignment	Subject	Management
University	University of West London	Module Title	CP70061E Principles of Project Management

Word Count	4000 Words
Assessment Title	Assignment 2

CP70061E Assignment 2

Title	Project Management Activities
Module	Principles of Project Management
Module Code	CP70061E
Module Leader:	Laden Husamaldin
Set by:	Laden Husamaldin
Moderated by:	Parisa Saadati
Assignment	Assignment 2
Hand in arrangements	Electronic submission via Blackboard and Turnitin
Structure of assignment	This is a single assignment which has a number of tasks. The tasks are described below. The learning outcomes of the module are assessed by a successful completion of all the tasks.
	Type	Weighting	Due Date
	Project managementactivities	100%	Week 13 to be submitted on Blackboardbefore midnight
	Extensions will only be granted in exceptional circumstances. Documentary evidence will be required. Extensions must be agreed upon before the deadline. A student who fails to submit coursework or a dissertation by the applicable deadline shall be deemed to have failed to submit it for assessment.
Learning outcomes	LO3. Determine the methodological factors that can be used for selecting, defining, planning, controlling, monitoring and delivering projects LO4. Critically evaluate the factors that contribute to project success, and identify the indicators that can be used to avoid project failure. LO5. Effectively apply the principles and methodological factors that can be used for selecting, defining, planning, controlling, monitoring and delivering projects

Background:

Refer to the case study on Blackboard and investigate further as appropriate. You are not required to have any special knowledge of the case study except that which is in the public domain. You may make any reasonable assumptions provided they are documented. You will need to use lecture/workshop materials and wider reading to answer the following questions. You must use the Harvard referencing system and include a bibliography at the end.

You have been appointed project manager for the project to roll out the business globally.

Tasks

Referring to the case study and the marking scheme, complete the following tasks: Individual Reports: 4000 words

Use the Project Approach Questionnaire to decide whether the agile approach using DSDM is viable. Research the Agile PM principles and explore the possibilities of applying these during the project?
Identify the main Roles and Responsibilities that this case study has introduced. If a role is not mentioned, then introduce this role to the case study. Include all roles in your answer.
Create the list of requirements (features) in a table format including MoSCoW prioritisation and estimates. Write as user stories with acceptance criteria included.
Describe how the project manager will develop a delivery plan including timeboxes and describe the first timebox in detail.

Marking Scheme

Task	Criteria	Issues		Max mark
Task 1: Project Approach Questionnaire and DSDM principles	Application	Have you produced an appropriate Project Approach Questionnaire? Have you shown reasonable justification and conclusion for the Questionnaire?		55
		Have you explored the possibilities of applying Agile DSDM principles during the project		10
	Relevant theory and frameworks	Have you provided a clear background on the Agile DSDM project management method		10
Task 2: Resource	Application	Identify the main Roles and Responsibilities that this case study has introduced?Have you selected added undefined roles to the case study?		5 5
	Relevant theory and frameworks	Have you provided appropriate discussion in the context of relevant literature to assign the roles and responsibilities in DSDM?		10
Task 3: Requirements, Prioritisation and User Stories	Application Relevant theory and frameworks	Have you created your list of high-level requirements (Features)? Have you demonstrated the reason for chosen these features?		82
	Application Relevant theory and frameworks	Have you driven the list of detailed requirements (features) in a table format including MoSCoW prioritisation? Have you provided appropriate discussion in the context of relevant literature? Have you demonstrated the reason for this prioritisation?		55
	Application	Have you produced a valid user story with acceptance criteria included?		10
Task 4: Delivery plan and Timeboxing	Relevant theory and frameworks	Have you systematically described how the project manager will develop a delivery plan including timeboxes?		10
	Application	Have you demonstrated the application of timebox and described in detail the main content?		5
Report language and structure			5
NB Marks may be reduced by 5% for poor quality presentation and writing			Total	100

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CASE STUDY:

How one auction website underwent a digital transformation to boost sales from $8 million to $70 million

Cincinnati-based EBTH added partners and focused on improving technology to help it grow from a locally-based auction site into a national platform with explosive sales growth and plans to go global.

Auction websites aren't new, but the way that Cincinnati-based Everything But The House manages their site is ground breaking.
The company underwent a digital transformation that helped it grow from $8 million in sales in 2012 to $70 million in 2016 and an anticipated $120 million this year, according to Jacquie Denny, co- founder of EBTH.

The company, which operates an online auction site with its acronym, EBTH, has a simple premise. If someone has an estate to sell, such as after a family member dies or moves to a retirement home, the items are listed online starting at $1 and buyers around the US can bid for 5-7 days until the item sells. Practically anything on the site can be shipped anywhere in the US and other parts of the world. There are deals to be had, but competition can be fierce since each item is one-of-a-kind.

EBTH currently offers auctions in 27 markets in 22 states with 3 million visitors to the site each month and 1 million registered bidders, and there are plans to expand globally. But it didn't start out that way.

Denny and Brian Graves co-founded the company in 2008 with a focus on estate sales in Cincinnati with an initial bidder base of 800 people. "We weren't sure we wanted to take this nationally, but within the first six months of growth and this becoming so explosive we started getting courted by groups in LA and Chicago. But we didn't want to franchise it," Denny said.

Denny said she liked the intimate feel of connecting with families and making it easier on them, in the case of a family death, than in a traditional estate sale where they didn't always know how much something sold for, or what happened to it. "They see how much people like the items, and it kind of tells the story of their family. They get closure," she said.

The company first expanded into nearby markets in Louisville and Lexington, KY and then Nashville, TN. But it still operated on its original premise, which was selling items online for local pickup only.

Eventually, Denny and Graves began talking to two brothers, Andy and Jon Nielsen, who were interested in buying a share of the business. Andy brought in Mike Reynolds as well, and the trio formed a new partnership with Denny and Graves in 2012, with Andy Nielsen as the CEO, Jon Nielsen as the chief business officer, Mike Reynolds as the COO, Denny as the chief development officer, and Graves as the chief learning officer.

Andy Nielsen said it was clear from the start that EBTH needed to make a more substantial investment in technology as well as develop a shipping strategy that was more automated, since every item sold is unique with only one SKU available. "We needed to build the technology to allow us to automate, and identify the constraints to growth, which were shipping, logistics, and fulfilment," he said.

"Our focus still remains on continued geographic expansion. We are in 27 different markets right now, and we'd love to be in the largest number of cities possible. There will be an international element of EBTH, but the exact timing is yet to be determined," he said.
One of the reasons EBTH is successful is the leaders' ability to learn from mistakes and quickly change what doesn't work.
The first expansion market for shipping merchandise from sales, instead of just offering local pickup, was in Fairfield County, CT in 2013. The shipping and logistical infrastructure hadn't yet been built out, and many of the items were purchased globally and had to be transported back to the Cincinnati warehouse and then shipped out to buyers around the world. "We were trucking full loads of inventory back to Cincinnati. It helped us to identify when we launched Connecticut that we had not fully fixed this logistical challenge," he said.
Currently, 50-60% of merchandise is shipped rather than picked up by buyers, and shipping demand continues to grow. While items can be sold to buyers around the world, it's not yet offering auctions based in other countries, so Nielsen does not consider the company to be global.

"To unleash global demand we needed to provide instantaneous shipping quotes for anywhere in the world. We changed our mentality from thinking this will be a local audience to pick up most of the merchandise and a minority of it [would be] shipped. That was one of our key learnings. We decided to double down and build the infrastructure of the shipping side of our business," Andy Nielsen said.
But they're not done yet. "We still have tremendous room for improvement," Andy Nielsen said. The current distribution center is a 200,000-square-foot facility in Blue Ash, OH.

"Solving shipping logistics is challenging. We believe that if you own this, then you can own this space," he said.
One of the reasons the CEO thinks EBTH has been successful is that it's an e-commerce company that acts like a technology company with regular feature releases and content deployment.

There are changes made to the site every day. Even during a single online session, a user might be prompted to refresh the page to see an updated version of the site. This is part of the EBTH strategy to test new ideas and see how buyers respond, said Bobby Uhlenbrock, the chief technology officer for EBTH.

Many concepts are tested in-house before buyers ever see them on the site. With more than 1,000 employees testing the beta version, "If it breaks or causes an error, we can hear about it before one customer ever sees it," Uhlenbrock said.

"We are always designing experiments to test something out on a small scale and learn from it, and if it's successful roll it out widely and double down. We're running 20 experiments on the site right now. We use this concept called a feature flag," he said.
Uhlenbrock explained, "We are agile and flexible. Nimble. We are able to de-risk a rollout by rolling it out to employees first. We're actually deploying new code 10-20 times a day. The site is changing 10- 20 times a day, but you as a customer might not see a thing. That's been transformational. That's a practice we've been doing for about a year now."

One thing that was tested but didn't work was offering customers the ability to browse by a particular item and see everything in that category for sale in any of the 27 markets served by EBTH, rather than shop by sifting through all of the items in one particular sale.

"We all thought that everybody would want to shop that way. If you're shopping for a sofa, or you're a collector of gold coins, why wouldn't you want to look at all the gold coins? So we rolled out this interface that sort of emphasized category shopping over sale shopping, and we noticed that it was grossly underperforming people shopping by individual sales. We took a step back and looked at the analysis and customers showed us by their traffic that customers preferred shopping by sales," Uhlenbrock said.
Data analysis is how EBTH determines what works and what doesn't and teaches the company how to build its business. But traditional e-commerce techniques do not work. Vendors try to sell Uhlenbrock off-the-shelf products such as recommendation engines and retargeting tools, but when there is only one of an item available, they don't work. "Building these neighborhoods of interest is basically impossible for us as an off-the-shelf algorithm," he said.

"How we do it is super proprietary and it works for us because we're designing it in an auction environment for an auction environment. We're building a bigger moat to keep competitors away."

Postgraduate Marking Scheme

%	Descriptor
86 - 100	The standard achieved is exceptional and the work provides clear evidence that the knowledge, understanding and skills are at a level appropriate to the level of study. There is evidence showing that all the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved with many at an exceptional standard.
76 - 85	The standard achieved is outstanding and the work provides clear evidence that the knowledge, understanding and skills are at a level appropriate to the level of study. There is evidence showing that all the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved with many at an outstanding standard.
70 - 75	The standard achieved is excellent and the work provides clear evidence that the knowledge, understanding and skills are at a level appropriate to the level of study. There is evidence showing that all the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved with many at an excellent standard.
65 - 69	The standard achieved is very good and the work provides clear evidence that the knowledge, understanding and skills are at a level appropriate to the level of study. There is evidence showing that all the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved with many at a very good standard
60 - 64	The standard achieved is good and the work provides evidence that the knowledge, understanding and skills are at a level appropriate to the level of study. There is evidence showing that all the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved with many at a good standard
55 - 59	The standard achieved is acceptable and the work provides evidence that the knowledge, understanding and skills are at a level appropriate to the level of study. There is evidence showing that all the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved with many at an acceptable standard
50 - 54 Marginal pass	The standard achieved is acceptable and the work provides evidence that the knowledge, understanding and skills are at a level appropriate to the level of study. There is evidence showing that all the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved though a few at only a very basic level
45 - 49 Marginal fail	The standard achieved is weak and the work provides evidence of insufficient knowledge, understanding and/or skills at a level appropriate to the level of study. There is evidence showing that a majority but not all of the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved
40 - 44	The standard achieved is weak and the work provides evidence of insufficient knowledge, understanding and/or skills are at a level appropriate to the level of study. There is evidence showing that several of the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved
35 - 39	The standard achieved is very weak and the work provides evidence of insufficient knowledge, understanding and/or skills appropriate to the level of study, although some of the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved
30 - 34	The standard achieved is very weak and the work provides evidence of insufficient knowledge, understanding and/or skills appropriate to the level of study. The evidence shows that some of the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved OR that none is achieved but there is evidence that many of the learning outcomes may be almost achieved.
25 - 29	The standard achieved is unacceptable and the work provides little evidence of the knowledge, understanding and/or skills appropriate to the level of study. The evidence shows that few, if any, of the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved.
15 - 24	The standard achieved is unacceptable and the work provides very little evidence of the knowledge, understanding and/or skills appropriate to the level of study. The evidence shows that very few, if any, of the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved.
0 - 14	The standard achieved is unacceptable and the work provides negligible or no evidence of the knowledge, understanding and/or skills appropriate to the level of study. The evidence fails to show that any of the learning outcomes appropriate to that level are achieved.

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