Organizational Problem Example of an Organizational Problem

Organizational Problem Example of an Organizational Problem An Analysis of a Failed IT Project at the Los Angeles Unified School District Case Overview In January of 2007, the Los Angeles Unified School District began using a new ninety five million dollar IT enterprise system built by SAP with Deloitte Consulting managing the project (Bowers, 2009). The system was built because the entire existing infrastructure was outdated and consisted of a variety of different software systems that were put together piece by piece over the years.

As a result, the schools administration capacity was deemed to be very inefficient and many of the IT functions were redundant across departments. Therefore, the entire school system could reduce the amount of administrative work needed to maintain the schools if the system was modernized. However, the project was deemed to be a horrific failure in regards to the schedule and the budget. Furthermore, once the system was up and running, teachers and employees were under paid or over paid; in some circumstances, not even paid at all.

Many of the employees had no idea how to use the new software and as a result many of the names in the database were simply deleted by mistake. It is fairly common for these types of projects to be late or over budget, but this case failed in an exceptional manner.

It later took an extra thirty seven million dollars in repair costs as well as an extra year to fix the bugs; not to mention the chaos and embarrassment that the school had to deal with while the system was being fixed. This analysis will look at some of the organizational problems that were responsible for the project's failure. Discussion There are a multitude of organizational failures that are evident in this case.

For example, it is easy to speculate that effective change management was not instituted in this example in the slightest. However, given the space requirements, this analysis will focus on another example of an organizational behavior problem; the lack of effective training. Rapidly changing the technology that an organization is using also requires thorough training to make sure that the users are comfortable with the new system. Apparently in this case there was a lack of effective training that resulted in poor change management.

All training programs are definitely not created equally. There are a wide range of different methods available to teach people how to use new software. For example, training for these skills might include such activities as a workshop, an online course, some form of on-the-job training, traditional classroom education methods, as well as many others. In this case much of the training was left up to the employees to try to digest on their own.

Furthermore, since the employees were accustomed to their previous system, there was also a great deal of resistance in learning how to use the new system. Since training employees can be a very costly part to any organizational transformation, companies are often quick to try to minimize the expenses associated with training. They either provide inadequate training or in some cases provide no training at all.

Not only does this increase the amount of uncertainty that employees must deal with, but it also often results in the failure of the entire project. Since the users in this case were responsible for the systems success or failure in the end, it was rather unfortunate for the school system that they did not recognize a greater need for effective training. However, training programs represent a significant investment to organizations in terms of both time and money.

Yet there are other costs that must be should be considered as well. Training and development creates a workforce that has a broader skill set and this adds substantial value to the organization in terms of human resources. Therefore the value earned by any training program go far.