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...

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%,…