In this paper, the author will introduce a failure case of K-Mart 's IT modernization system project. In 2001, K-mart took $1.4 billion dollars into this project with the purpose of competing with its rival Walmart. The dream is beautiful, but the real work is cruel. After 18 months, the project was failed because of lacking of cash. What happened in the detailed for this project? $1.4 billion dollar is huge numbers, why it was still not enough to pay and distribute for this project? How did its project manager do in this project? What are the project problems? How can we learn from the failure of this case? The paper includes the case background introduction, the project development process, the problems in the project, analysis and …show more content…
The scope of the K-Mart IT project includes its sales, marketing analysis, supply chain management, and logistics management system. RISKS AND CONSTRAINTS OF THE PROJECT The risks of the IT project are in many factors, such as poor estimation, poor scheduling, ineffective stakeholder management, insufficient risk management, poor quality assurance, insufficient project sponsorship, lacks of user involvements and other risks. In K-Mart IT project, the most risky parts and constraints are lacks of top executives support and highly customization modules. Lacking of top executives support is essential to the K-Mart IT project development. The new IT project system design very well but does not use in full potential. Some import features and functions such as forecasting demanding and planning, cannot be used correctly. The top managers always think and trust their own experiences, not the data generated from the computer system. This incoordination made the project implementation even difficult and the results are inaccurate based on the inaccurate judgement for the planning from the top managers. Highly customization modules are another high risk for K-Mart IT project development. The system is spread out all work flow in the K-Mart system from the demanding planning, supply chain
In today’s competitive economic climate, most project managers and organizational leadership has concluded the importance of the positive impact that project management leadership has contributed to the organization and on their projects and programs. This positive impact has caused most organizations to implement Project Support Offices (PSO). Within the Project Support Offices (PSO) there will be an understanding of the importance of the as-is and the to-be process is to managing projects and programs. The Project Support Office (PSO) uses this very effective technique in transforming vision into results. This technique is used to develop and populate an As-Is and To-Be diagrams. The As-Is diagram depicts the present state of the organizations, project or program process, culture, and capabilities. The To-Be diagram depicts the desired future state of how the organizations process, culture, and capabilities will look in the future. This case study reviews the goals confronted by the Pizza Delivered Quickly (PDQ) business while further developing the multiple related sub-systems to achieve the Pizza Delivery Quick (PDQ) requirements and be able to manage the project (Wysocki, 2012).
For the IT Management area, I put a low level of risk assessment. For the information technology management, the company has a specific IT strategic plan, which is consistent with the Company’s strategic plan. In addition, based on the company’s organization cart, I found out the company have a clear reporting and response system. The responsibility for chief information officer clearly classified to four parts, application, operation, information security and database administration. Above all the key aspects we take a review about IT management, the company have a good internal controls for it. There is unlikely happen a risk in this area.
At first, identifying the potential problems. Though I will pay more attention to the top three classical problems, it is necessary to analyze other potential problems in specific project by investigating similar IT projects that is “Failure” or “Success” before kicking off project. The “similar” can be explained in many aspects, such as same goals, cost, scope, same industry, background and so on. I need to investigate how such similar project fails. For example, we assume that a company want to launch an ERP projects recently. In this area, there are many companies did it before. Failure of high-profile ERP projects is common. In order to avoid mistakes that usually occurs in such IT project, it can investigate many failure projects, such as Airforce, Saudi Telecom and so on. The project failure of Airforce due to the following reasons: weak teamwork & composition and lack of top management support. The Saudi Telecom’s failure attributes to lack of top management support, inadequate of company culture, and huge system customization (Aldammas & Al-Mudimigh, 2011). As you
3) Learning from past experience: The companies must maintain a record of lessons of their success and failures to help themselves to be at a better position. George Santayana, one of the famous philosopher coined a phrase “Santayana Review” speaks about those who overlooks the past and do not pay attention tends to repeat the mistakes. IBM’s 360 computer was result of “technology of failed stretch computer”. Here the learning happened to be by chance rather than by careful planning. Another example is of Boeing launches, based on the principle of “Project Homework” to eliminate some serious problems. They worked on the comparison between the development process of 737 & 747 with those of 707 & 727. And came out with an inch-thick booklet of lessons learned and recommendations. Today 757 and 767 are the most successful error free launches in its history. Similarly, Xerox also used the retrospective approach to find out the cause of failure of the company’s restructured business initiatives. Furthermore, Arthur D. Little, the consulting company showcased the companies utmost successful practices, publications & techniques featuring booths and presentations documenting the same around the world. Also, British Petroleum at its project level established the post project appraisal unit to review the earlier major investment projects. In this approach, two concepts have been recognized the value of productive failure as contrasted unproductive success. Productive failure is the
AtekPC is a mid-sized U.S PC maker with sales of $ 1.9 billion and employed 2100 full time employees and additional 200 part time workers. This case discusses most of the obstacles to establishing a PMO (Project management Office) are beyond the CIO and PMO Manager's control. We see a lot of problems faced by the CIO in implementing a PMO in the enterprise. Regardless of the technical challenges during the implementation, the core of the problems seems to be that the PMO is lacking organization support, from the top to the bottom. There is not enough executive stakeholder support, there is no visibility of the program, there is a conflict of interests within departments
The risk factors for the hardware replacement project are miscalculating scope, time, costs, quality, and the risks. Other risk factors to consider in correlation with the five variables to project management is not having a solution where the costs become far more than the benefits, and is still risky if the benefits outweigh the costs. Another risk factor is compatibility in collaborating and
Project management practices are establish to ensure the smooth running of the project. In our case study we will identify the individual practices that Corwin Corporation failed to adopt during its project with Peters Company and eventually led to project failure.
When considering project management and the project life cycle, the process of identifying risks that could have a positive or negative effect on the outcome of a particular project should be considered. All project managers and project teams need to have a good understanding and knowledge of these possible risks in order to plan ahead and increase the chance of project success. This paper discusses the process of risk identification, evaluation, and management in a project and demonstrates why this process is needed to help ensure project success measures such as budget limits, deadlines, and stakeholder satisfaction are achieved.
In this proposal the research is focus on the aims to reduce failure of I.T. intensive projects. This research aims to accumulate and categorize
According to the project management Solution (2011) survey shows that “$74 million in projects are at risk each year in the average firm surveyed (37% of the total value of projects closed)”. And 22% software
The IT unit in the Organization was analyzed for its working. The Organizational communication strategy was observed closely, right after the new project requirements were handed over to the unit head by the Business unit. The new project required Oracle as the technology. Apparently, the IT head had no clue about the financials involved in acquiring the project from client. He did not look keen on knowing anything apart from the technology that they would be working on, and the final deadline that the client had asked for.
What is one of the biggest challenges for IT industry companies is implementing project management practice within a constantly changing environment and not flexible inner culture of the company. This paper is based on the case by Harvard Business School that is describing challenges and failure of AtekPC during the implementation of Project Management Office. AtekPC is a PC maker founded 1984 with the headquarters in Metropolis. In 2006, it was a middle-sized company with sales of $1.9 billion. The company had 2100 full-time and 200 part-time employees 1.
One of the necessary functions in information technology (IT) projects is risk management. The main aims behind that are to provide a safe environment for E-business because most of the IT projects are outline high degrees of risk. The speedy conversion in information technologies changes in business growth to create surprising fluctuate in cost benefit relationship and feasibility of doing different things in appropriate ways. The bases of IT organizations usually concerned with standards have advertised different methods of risk management. These advertised methods have fully adopted by organizations while dealing with IT projects for identifying, analyzing, and minimizing the risks in their projects /IT work. The risks oppose by IT projects are not core financial risks. IT project managers have to move towards project issues more quickly for resolving, before they become serious problems for the project as well as threaten for goals of the project. Most IT specialists understand that there are some extra risks other than financial risk in origination projects. IT project risk consists of technology, security, people, business process, information, management, financial, external, and even the risk of success.
When an organization tries to create a competitive advantage by applying advance Information technology, it generally finds that attaining system development objectives is more difficult because personnel are not as familiar with the technology. © The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India System Development Life Cycle Methodology 2.3 • Lack of standard project management and systems development methodologies. Some organizations do not formalize
In July 2013, one of the major clients initiated a multi-year business modernization project, with the purpose of replacing the current business operations software with highly efficient software. METASYTEMS, an independent IT firm (in 2013), got the project contract with the delivery constraints of five years (till July 2018). The project development contract called for METASYTEMS to validate client’s business and technical requirements and to design, develop and implement the project in five phases, one phase per year. METASYTEMS worked on phase-1 until November 2014 and failed to deliver phase-1 on time due to lack of processes for software development, leadership and technical issues.