Study reference materials and analysis

Information Technology Management Case Study

Why is it important to have several status review and decision points throughout the project's life cycle?

It is important to have several review and decision points throughout the project's life cycle because that is the only effective way of identifying potential delays and other obstacles at the earliest possible point. That enables the team to mitigate the potential damage or delay to the project as much as possible under the factual circumstances, whatever they may be. It also allows the team leader or client liaison to communicate with the client and explain the reasons for doing anything that requires a departure from the original project plan, anticipated expenses, and timeline.

As the case study illustrates, the consequences of not pre-establishing several status review and decision points throughout the project's life cycle did the exact opposite. Instead of identifying potential problems and reasons for delay as early as possible, the consultants used previously by Husky Air apparently waited until the scheduled date of delivery to inform the client of problems and delays. This maximized client disappointment instead of minimizing it and it also (probably) greatly increased the cost of completion and eliminated some of the other possible alternative decisions that would have been available after timely communication of any possible delay.

2. Is there any advantage to having regularly scheduled (e.g., weekly) status meetings?

Ideally, working groups and business units should have both regularly scheduled status meetings as well as ad-hoc meetings dictated by circumstance. Without regularly scheduled meetings, there is a much greater risk that two working groups or business units could be operating under mutually incompatible assumptions or work product. It allows for the possibility of catastrophic failures, such as a relatively recent (1999) incident that ruined the entire Mars Orbiter mission and resulted in a total loss of the $125 million device because a Lockheed-Martin engineering team computed navigation data using the English units of measurement whereas the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory had already been using the Metric System for approximately a decade (CNN, 1999). Obviously, regular meetings at various levels could have identified this major problem at some point long before the failure of the Orbiter by crashing into its destination planet. Regular meetings are especially important involving joint projects with various components of the project being completed by entirely different units. The same principle holds true even in situations involving only two members of the same team performing work that is interdependent to any degree.

3. Why is it important to celebrate the small but important successes?