State email system transition: cost overruns and scheduling delays

Project Management

Project Success Criteria

Maintaining the morale and dedication of project staffers would have been a good project success criterion to include in the charter. A seamless transition of all systems at the same time through early and comprehensive upgrades to incompatible existing systems would also have been advantageous. Finally, a last project success criterion should have been the inclusion of stricter cost controls so as to limit budget overruns effectively, which clearly did not occur.

Overall Assessment

On the whole, this project was mostly a success, though there are certain significant problems that would require improvement in the next such project. Specifically, the major cost overrun (of more than three-hundred thousand dollars, or almost twenty percent of the total project cost, and twenty-four percent more than the initial projected cost) and the massive delay in project implementation that extended he project by a month (ten percent of total actual time, and eleven percent of projected time) could be marked as failures in terms of the expected process deliverables. These elemnets are not enough to call the entire project a failure, however; the fact that users are overwhelmingly positive in regards to the new system and that the Ohio Department of Corrections is now deploying the same system for their own organization clearly demonstrate that an effective choice was made in switching systems and in the specific system/product selected, and that the implementation of this switch was not unduly burdensome on the state as a whole or on the employees that use the system on a daily basis. The ultimate goal of the project was to transition to a new email system, and this was accomplished in what was ultimately an affordable and timely manner, despite attaining significantly longer and costing significantly more than initially projected.

Few if any projects or carried out exactly as planned. While deviations should be minimized, they should also be expected. Focusing on the bigger picture, this project was a significant success.