Project Management Context Elements the Case Study

Project Management

Context Elements

The case study that is to be reviewed in the response below centers on John Parker and how he had to revolutionize the project management framework and ensuing performance at AG Edwards starting in Fall 2001. Parker was given the dire nature of the situation up front and it was noted that there was a mission-critical upgrade that was about to commence that could not go south as it would deliver a potential death-blow to AG Edwards. As the case study subject states, failure was not an option for Mr. Parker. Parker discovered that while the project management frameworks were already present, there was an absence of coherent, cohesive and effective leadership and Parker had to go about changing that.

Initial Situation

As is noted in the prior section, leadership was a big problem with the projects at AG Edwards. Projects were ran using the PMI and ITIL frameworks, but nearly half of all of the projects were late and the average overage in time and money for those projects was 54% each and some projects were bungled so badly they had to be scrapped and taken as a straight loss to the business. In 2002, IT costs were nearly $300 million and net profit was $71 million. New systems were being developed in isolation and it showed when they were deployed to the larger business.

Final Situation

Project failure rates were massively reduced and the same numbers mentioned at the end of the last section evolved in 2006 to be a net IT cost of $241 million (despite continued investments) and net profit more than doubled up to $186 million. The IT management team took their basic project management skills and incorporated the strong leadership foundation that was missing before. The amount of projects that were late or over-budget plummeted from the half of all projects that it was before to about 12%, with the other 88% being on time.

Technical Considerations

There were a few technical considerations mentioned in the case study. One major one is that IT, at least as of 2001, did not have the backbone to push back on the "customer" (i.e. The rest of the business) as to what was feasible, what was not feasible and hammering out which one applied to a given situation. Another technical consideration that changed with great benefit to the business was a strong alignment of IT priorities with the larger priorities of the business. Prior, there was disunity between these two paths and it was crippling to the bottom line of the business.

Social Considerations

There were a number of social considerations that had to be taken into account as well. Parker specifically avoided a rigid and inflexible revised framework and he did that for two reasons. First, a rigid framework is not really required. Second, using such a framework greatly increases the probability and the severity of employee resistance that can and will occur if senior management is too heavy-handed. Instead, a more flexible framework was use and there as a decentralization of the reporting to the functional areas so as to improve the flow of information and eliminate the lack of parity that can occur when people that report to each other are not sufficiently enmeshed.