Instructions  

1.       Refer to the case entitled “The Accounting Software Installation Project”  

a.       Answer Questions 1, 2, and 3  

2.       The entire assignment should be a maximum of 5 pages double-spaced (excluding title page and reference page) and should follow APA referencing style.

3.       Prepare your report as an essay, summarizing the responses to the various questions. Make sure to include a comprehensive introduction and conclusion to your report.

Questions

1- Why is the Project Delayed?

2- How to Make the Project Proceed?

3- How to Keep the Project on Schedule?  

Answer:

Abstract

This paper discusses the case study of a software installation project which originally started out on a positive note, but in the short period of six months was in danger of failure. The project manager, Ms. Karin Chung, was responsible for installing accounting software throughout the company, and decided to use a partnering approach between six contractors and the different company divisions to complete the project. As a consultant hired to evaluate the project, several areas will be discussed in this paper, such as:

· Current project status, constraints, associated costs, and project time-frame.

· Associated project costs, return on investment, and risk assessment.

· Steps that must be done for the project to be successful.

· Methodology used for tracking progress.

Case Study: The Accounting Software Installation Project

Karin Chung, project manager for a large software installation project, has been overseeing the progress for the last six months. She decided that the best approach would be to implement a partnering agreement with six contracting agencies and several company divisions (represented by respective task force teams). During the formative period, the contractors and task force members provided their views on the installation project, to include potential problems and a detailed work breakdown structure. Training sessions were performed at all divisions that taught everyone about the accounting software, and each division was briefed on their respective involvement with the required software interfaces. At the end of the formative period, specific representatives from all six contractors, task force members, and key accounting executives participated in a one-day team-building workshop that emphasized collaboration and effective communication, which ended with a signed partnering agreement.

Two months into the project there were indications that the partnership was starting to weaken. However, Karin didn't act upon these signs, which contributed to the lack of trust between the partnership members and the project manager. For example, there was a situation where a contractor ignored the concerns a task force member had presented, and after the task force member informed Karin of the encounter, she did not get involved and asked the individual to settle the issue with the contractor on their own. Criticism between certain contractors began to emerge, and the introduction of a critical compatibility issue with one of the divisions added even more bad news to the list of growing problems for the project.

Four months later, the collaboration between all participants was non-existent and the project was now two months behind schedule. Karin's unwillingness to properly conduct the project during the duration of this project influenced negative attitudes that some of the partnership members began to experience. On one occasion, a contractor filed a formal letter complaining about the decisions being made by another contractor that caused schedule delays, which adversely affected their own timeline. The strongly worded letter tried to limit the contractor's liability to the project, which went against the signed partnering agreement that they produced after the team-building workshop.

In an attempt to reign in the quarreling parties, Karin called for a meeting to discuss the problems with the project. Once the meeting started, there were accusations and flared tempers as some groups were blaming others for the disconnect. The main complaint produced during the meeting was that “it is impossible to tell who's in charge of what.” (Larson, 2011). This is a direct indication that Karin never asserted her position as the project manager, and didn't clarify the roles and responsibilities of the different groups during the formation period, and now the overall commitment to the partnership is being threatened. As the meeting began to degenerate, she decided to stop the meeting and later contacted the stakeholders to discuss the current situation. She requested that all the stakeholders meet at an upcoming meeting with “concrete suggestions” to get the project back on track.

Current project status, constraints, associated costs, and project time-frame

The project is now on hold, awaiting the results of the upcoming meeting with the stakeholders. There are three types of resource constraints: People, Materials, and Equipment. With the current case information, it is clear that the constraints to the project are the individuals involved (people), specifically, their availability and commitment. There are no indications of materials or equipment constraints, since most of the case study text discusses the events that have influenced the project time-frame so far. Equally, the associated costs (value of money used on the project) are not mentioned anywhere in the text, so calculating the Return of Investment (ROI) is impossible to obtain.

As the hired consultant, the project's overall status can be considered to be in a stage of re-evaluation, as we need to step back to assess the standing issues, generate possible solutions, and formulate a plan of attack to resume the project. The remainder of this document will be dedicated to the discussion of the project's future.

Why does project partnerships sometimes fail?

One of the primary reasons project partnerships appeared to fail is the auto-pilot mentality of project manager who set the course of the stakeholders, but then stop monitoring the various stakeholder gauges to determine if the personnel were still working within the guidelines that were originally agreed upon. The challenge with people teams and tasks is that touch points along the project schedule are required in order for the project task to be completed without delay.

A lack of reading and reacting to the signs along the way by the project manager also attributed to the build-up of the team inefficiencies. Frequent reviews and status updates are part of the best practices that are helpful in every outsourced project partnership (Gray & Larson, 2008, p. 392). It is the project manager’s responsibility to do something when communication or sequential tasks are not being completed on time. This partnership failed because Karin failed to fulfill the role of mediator for the stakeholders with conflicting issues throughout the time observed. This role is critical like a coach who needs to get a team through a close game with lots of emotions.

The response given to the team by the time things had reached a critical stage should have been given much earlier in the time line (Gray & Larson, 2008, p. 411). The failure of the project manager to manage effectively the early signs of conflict between the stakeholders was the primary reason for this project partnership breakdown.

Steps that must be done for the project to be successful

Even though Karin Chung decided to take the partnering approach, there were several mistakes that caused the current problems to arise. The primary problem was the lack of communication between the contractors, task force members, and the key division representatives. The first thing that must be established is a system of communicating the current project status, outstanding and completed tasks, and issues that need resolution (such as dependencies and compatibility problems). Due to the geographically diverse group of the stakeholders, the recommended communication method would be Real-time Status Reports, which provides information that is more flexible, trimmed to the needs of the recipient, isn't geographically limited, and is instantly available and actionable (instead of waiting for a physical meeting to take place before an issue can be discussed and resolved).

Modern technology allows team members to collaborate online and communicate instantly with video chats and/or instant messaging, giving Karin immediate access to productivity data. Real-time Status Reports requires a “Communications Plan”, so when preparing the plan, Karin must consider the location and time zones of all participants and communication preferences, describing every aspect of the real-time approach, to include:

· Format and timing of status reporting.

· Raising and escalation of issues.

· Response times for decisions / updates.

· Locations of key documents – issue logs, change requests, action logs, etc.

How the information is provided by the Real-Time Status Report can vary widely and depends on how data must be shared amongst the team, the project manager, and stakeholders. For example, there can be an intranet-based web page that team members use to update their task status in real-time, or a shared folder used to collaborate on documents … both can be used at any time by the entire team and stakeholders to examine the project's current status.

Once Karin adopts and implements the Real-Time Status Report, she will take care of the second major problem that the project is facing: determining who is in charge. All parties assumed that Karin's approach to project management was effective, and as a result, nothing was changed in the way the different “spheres of responsibility” were managed. Unfortunately, most of the parties shared a belief that trust could be built by aligning objectives and improving communications, but that wasn't the case. Karin needs to assert her role as the project manager and take a more active part in the overall progress of the contractors and the task force members.

In spite of having signed a partnering charter that assured they would work together, they soon forgot the spirit of the collaboration and worked in separate “spheres of responsibility”. This brings us to the third major issue: re-establish the partnering agreements. All participants must be re-acquainted on what the true purpose of this partnership agreement means to all sides, and it is Karin's responsibility to remind everyone throughout the project's entire life-cycle in order to ensure compliance. According to the Partnering Initiative Website, the following definition explains what it means to be in a partnership:

“A partnership is a cross-sector collaboration in which organizations work together in a transparent, equitable and mutually beneficial way towards a sustainable development goal and where those defined as partners agree to commit resources and share the risks as well as the benefits associated with the partnership.” (What is Partnering, 2008).

Table 1. The Steps to Partnering (Eriksen, 2007)

Re-acquainting all parties on the purpose and significance of the partnering agreement, will help resolve the next major issue: trust in all the participant roles and responsibilities.   According to the Reforming Project Management Website:

“Trust develops when people make and keep commitments. But promising to "communicate" isn't as effective as promising and delivering the submittal documents on a date certain. But people on projects, even with partnering sessions, are reluctant to make specific promises for performance when they lack confidence in their ability to deliver when they know other people are unlikely to deliver the needed prerequisites. So people promise to "try" and they say delivery will be "hopefully" on time. Project performance spirals down as delays compound.” (Reforming Project Management, 2002).

There is also a need for an Independent Review of the project. This is a common tool to provide impartial assessments of the overall status of the project, and to appraise the adequacy of the plans, procedures and schedules:

“To mitigate the incidence and impact of runaway projects, organizations conduct independent reviews of their IT projects (Hettigei, 2005). [Information System] auditors spend an average of 15.6% of their time monitoring IS projects (Keil & Mann, 1997). Audit deliverables include identification of project risks and project continuance recommendations to management along with overall assessments of the project (Hettigei, 2005). Managers use the information provided by IS auditors to make important resource allocation decisions, and IS auditors are viewed as important sources of information to managers about troubled software projects because of their perceived objectivity (Keil et al., 2000). Thus organizations can benefit by understanding the decision processes and factors that affect the quality of IT project review selection decisions.” (Pennington, 2007).

According to Alan Patching, former CEO and project director of the Sydney Olympic Stadium, there is a difference between project management and management by projects. “The projects approach takes effectively trained managers (and training is a definite requirement for any project management system to work effectively within an organization) allocates a restricted number of clearly defined responsibilities together with the resources and authority to meet those responsibilities, and gives complete control over the method by which the results are delivered to the project management team. This differs from the 'business as usual' approach where people have a comparatively larger number of tasks to deal with and usually some degree of uncertainty concerning resourcing. This latter approach can quite often lead to a management by crisis situation.” (Patching, 2005).

Methodology to be used for tracking progress

Some project managers prefer to make the project's current status available using custom software that displays a simplified Tracking Gantt Chart, which only shows planned/actual dates and delays. (Campbell, 1996). However, due to the complexity of this project, there must be additional information included in the Gantt Chart, such as dependencies, outstanding tasks, and resources assigned.

Figure 1. Sample Gantt Chart (b4ubuild.com, 2011)

What actions are necessary to keep a project on the right track?

A collective agreement is necessary around an escalation process that will address future conflicts without derailing the project timeline. A straightforward plan of communication and accountability to a task deadline will help keep a project on track.

Re-allocating flexible tasks to future milestones in the project may help alleviate the requirements on the stakeholders and allow the teams to concentrate on larger tasks that need all the resources allocated to finish by the next project milestone (Brooks, 2010).

Co-locating project stakeholders to facilitate easier handoffs of similar task requirements will help eleviate the conflict around priority task requirements. If not previously agreed upon, having completion incentives for the stakeholders to complete their tasks on-time would help create a sense of urgency (Gray & Larson, 2008, p. 397).

The conflicts noted in this case study are common with projects that are not closely monitored. Quicker response to the indicators noted would have allowed the project manager to address the disharmony among the stakeholders earlier without the more severe consequences that followed. Steps like the re-evaluation of the tasks required, tracking progress daily on a Gantt chart and scheduling overtime will help to restore the project timeline. A clearly defined escalation process, re-allocating tasks to future milestones and co-locating stakeholders with adjoining or similar tasks when possible will help the project stay on task to completion (Gray & Larson, 2008, pp. 410-411).

Conclusion

The Accounting Installation Project is in the critical stage: the partnering agreement is about to collapse due to the lack of communication, failure to collaborate, and lack of overall control of tasks. The current project status was presented, constraints, associated costs, and project time-frame, the steps that must be done for the project to be successful, and the methodology used for tracking progress. The recommendations presented in this document will help Ms. Chung to take back control as the project manager and reinforce the partnering agreement.

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