QUESTION
The Center for Project Management in San Ramon, California, examined 24 IT projects and compiled a list of ten dumb mistakes. The center then presented this list to 50 conference attendees and asked them to grade their organization on each mistake. The average grade was between a C+ and D. Here are the ten mistakes:
1. Mistaking every half-baked idea for a viable project.
2. Overlooking stakeholders, forgetting the champions, and ignoring the nemesis.
3. Not assessing the project’s complexity.
4. Not developing a comprehensive project charter.
5. Not developing a comprehensive project plan.
6. Not designing a functional project organization.
7. Accepting or developing unrealistic or unachievable estimates.
8. Accepting status reports that contain mostly noise and not enough signal.
9. Looking back and not ahead.
10. Not following a robust project process architecture.
Read the above list and find an example of a project for which this is the case. The project can be one that you have personal experience with or that you have read or heard about. Describe the example and state which of the mistakes was made with respect to the project. (Note that there may be more than one for a particular project.) If you choose a project in the news, provide a citation so that your classmates can read more about it. Minimum length of response is 100 words. Respond to at least two other student posts.
CLASSMATE RESPONSE 1: (STELLA)
Overlooking unlikely stakeholders during project development. In the school district when my oldest son of my neighbor was in kindergarten, she was on the committee to help increase parent involvement. They had the idea to start having Family Reading Night & Family Math Night at the K-2 level. It was a hit with everyone. They sold pizza, popcorn, juice, water, and drinks to raise funds for additionally needed classroom essentials. It was a great success that increased month after month. After about four years, the project began to decline, and the new school principal could not understand why. My neighbor told the principal that when the project was created the family dynamic focus was much different, and these things have drastically shifted from what they were in the prior years. They focused on the young families; the situation she was experiencing was children being left in the care of older people. The family dynamics including grandparents as the primary caregivers, the parents may register them in school and that is all the connection they have with the school district. Many grandparents are over 65, disabled, do not drive, or have no or limited transportation. So, my neighbor suggested the offering of transportation if they reserve in advance, although she knows that the cost would have to be approved by the superintendent before being presented to the school board. The school board approved it on a tentative basis at first, but it is still going strong. As I know that as times change, so must certain essential elements to keep the project focus align.
CLASSMATE RESPONSE 2: (SAMUEL)
Link to HHS Investigator’s General Review of the failed Project :
https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-14-00350.asp
Healthcare.gov is probably the easiest most obvious example of number 2 and 3. For those of you that might not remember, it was a project to bring universal healthcare to eligible persons in the United States. It included registering eligible citizens and linking them up with healthcare solutions. The problem with the website was that it was both hard to use, and it didn’t take into account the complexity of requirements for the site, least of all the average utilization on the webserver that would be required. When the site launched it was quickly overwhelmed. In addition, new customers looking to purchase a policy were turned away when trying to get insurance due to errors with instancing user account creation that were unrecoverable (HHS, 2016). So basically they failed to incorporate all requirements as well as positive risk of a larger take rate than planned.
Also overlooked in terms of stakeholders were the elderly. The site was notoriously hard to navigate with small icons that didn’t incorporate best practices of UI design. In addition there weren’t clear forward and back buttons at the top. What this achieved was disenfranchising older users and leaving them to try and subscribe to a health plan with the Helpance of another, creating another barrier to success.
References
HHS.gov. (2016, February 22). HealthCare.gov: Case study of CMS management of the federal marketplace. US Government Office of Health and Human Services. https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-14-00350.asp
