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Case Study: The Accounting Software Installation Project

Cesar A. Marrero

MGMT505 – Project Management Fundamentals

September 21, 2011

Prof. Tony L. Sines

Southwestern College Professional Studies

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.

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).

|FACILITATION |A partnering facilitator will support project managers in planning and conducting partnering |

| |activities. Being neutral, they are able to help all members of the team move from an |

| |“individual’s interest first” to a “project interest first” basis. A cottage industry of |

| |facilitators is now available nationwide; a “partnering facilitator” Internet search will |

| |provide a list of candidates. |

|INVITATION |The invitation to partner can be made by any of the principals to the other stakeholders on a |

| |project. It may be a formal invitation in the contract documents. In many cases the invitation|

| |has been as simple as a telephone call. |

|DECISION |The decision to apply formal partnering should be based on two criteria: A commitment by the |

| |organizations’ leaders to support partnering methods, and a business decision that the project |

| |benefits will exceed their costs. |

|TIMING |The benefits of partnering begin to accrue at the initial partnering workshop – These should be |

| |timed when major new organizations come onto the project. Troubled projects often reverse course|

| |and succeed because of turnaround partnering workshops. Follow-up workshops are used to assess |

| |and reinforce the team relationships. |

|STARTING |The initial partnering workshop provides the venue for the team to begin the partnering process.|

| |These workshops last from one to three days and are conducted at a neutral location away from |

| |the organizations’ offices. The workshops bring the executives, managers and contributors |

| |together, as a team, to review and develop actions to address the project’s issues, |

| |opportunities and risks. They set the project direction and goals and develop the partnering |

| |management processes. |

|APPLICATION |Once back on the job, the project team applies the partnering processes that they have designed |

| |in the workshop. They work as a team to complete a successful project by striving to meet the |

| |charter goals, by maintaining open honest communications, by resolving issues quickly, and also |

| |importantly by pausing from time-to-time to measure and renew their partnering relationships, to|

| |bring new members into the team, and to celebrate their successes. |

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 (, 2011)

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.

References

Campbell, J., Gillis, R., Sacks, C.,Timko, J. (1996). Communicating Project Status To Management—Simply. Research Technology Management Journal, 39(2), 12-13. Retrieved September 11, 2011 from

Eriksen, D. (2007). A Project Manager's Team Building Tool: Project Partnering Pamphlet. ATI

Hettigei, N. T. (2005). The auditor’s role in IT development projects. Information Systems Control Journal, 4, 44.

Keil, M.,&Mann, J. (1997). The nature and extent of IT project escalation: Results from a survey of IS audit and control professionals. IS Audit and Control Journal, 2, 66–69.

Keil, M., Mann, J., & Rai, A. (2000). Why software projects escalate: An empirical analysis and test of four theoretical models. MIS Quarterly, 24, 631–664.

Larson, E., & Gray, C. (2011). Project Management: The Managerial Process (5th ed). New York, McGraw-Hill

Patching, A. (2005). Management by Projects: the Futureproof Approach. Alan Patching & Associates Website. Retrieved September 22, 2011 from

Pennington, R., & Tuttle, B. (2007). The Effects of Information Overload on Software Project Risk Assessment. Decision Sciences, 38(3), 489-526. Retrieved September 22, 2011 from

Reforming Project Management Website (2002). Partnering, Promising and Project Management (Commentary). Retrieved September 20, 2011 from

What is Partnering. (2008). The Partnering Initiative Website. Retrieved September 20, 2011 from

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