This is a true story. The company name
has been changed.
Background
A government agency decided to
implement a new set of systems that would provide services to all communities
in the state. The project required significant participation from staff of the
state government, a telephone company, several systems vendors, and a systems
integration vendor.
The government engaged Acme Consulting to
manage this large complex project.
Acme’s project manager met with the
project sponsor from the government agency several times and established the
project scope, responsibilities, schedule, and resources needed.
Acme’s project manager brought on a
junior project manager and a coordinator to work with him. These three were to spend eighteen months
implementing the new systems and processes, then at go-live, two Acme
consultants were to take over and support the new systems for ten years.
The situation
Within two weeks, the junior project
manager began to realize that the scope of the project was too vague. There
were several sizeable elements of the project where the government agency and
Acme Consulting each thought the other was responsible for the task.
The junior project manager discussed
this issue with the project manager, who replied that it was too late to be
wondering who should be doing what, and told the junior project manager to
focus on getting the work done, instead of questioning the work.
With every week that went by, the junior
project manager became more worried about the vagueness and confusion related
to who was responsible for what. It was clear that Acme Consulting did not have
enough staff assigned to the job to do everything the government was expecting.
Further comments to the project manager were futile.
About eight weeks into the project, the
junior project manager attended a conference to learn how others had
implemented similar services. He realized that the gaps in project scope and
responsibility were much worse than he had feared. Many of the vaguely
described project elements were significant jobs, requiring weeks or months of
effort.
Escalation
The junior project manager documented
his concerns in writing to the project manager. When the project manager
continued to ignore this information and push the junior project manager to
‘just do it’, the junior project manager talked to an Acme VP about his
concerns.
By now, the project was nearly three
months along. The VP was very worried when she heard about the junior project
manager’s concerns, and began to investigate. At the same time, the project
manager finally began to realize that the project had been poorly defined and
understaffed.
Recommendation to client
The project manager began to speak more
openly to the government sponsor about the problems of project scope and
responsibility. The sponsor was quick to grasp the problems and to realize that
he too had misunderstood the effort involved in developing and implementing the
new services.
With the consent of the sponsor, Acme
Consulting began to re-define the project scope and work plan in more detail.
This process took the entire fourth month of the project.
At the end of the month of scoping and
planning, it was clear that more detailed planning would be required to ensure
completeness and clarity. However, there was enough information to determine
that the project would take at least three years to complete, and would require
eight more staff.
Epilogue
The government wanted Acme Consulting
to provide the eight additional staff, but did not have a way to adjust the
total project budget. It was decided to reduce the amount of support time for
the ten post-implementation years, and apply that money to the implementation
phase instead.
The government sponsor and the Acme
Consulting VP were unhappy with the project manager who had originally made the
deal, and who was slow to recognize the shortcomings in the scoping and
responsibility assignments for the project. The project manager was replaced.
Conclusion
There are two things the project
manager should have done differently on this project.
First, on a project this large and
complex, the amount of effort put into planning and scoping was completely
inadequate. Instead of several meetings to determine the project scope and
resources, the project manager should have recommended to the government that
the planning and scoping be a separate, predecessor project. Resource planning
and therefore pricing could not reasonably be done without two or three months
of effort.
Second, when the project started, and
the extent of the gaps between the government’s and Acme’s understanding
started to show, the project manager should have discussed the problem with the
VP and the client immediately. Since the project manager had made the agreement
that was so inadequate, he was probably reluctant to own up to the error.
The junior project manager, although
less experienced, was quick to realize that the project was bigger than they
thought. The advice given to him, to ‘just do it’, was not the right advice.
The junior project manager was correct to escalate his concerns to the VP.
Copyright
2015 Debbie Gallagher
