Project Team Pitfalls: Lessons from the SR-520 Bridge
This paper examines common project team pitfalls through the lens of the SR-520 Floating Bridge project, which suffered from cost overruns, missed deadlines, inadequate oversight, and failures in engineering standards. Drawing on project management principles, the paper argues that effective risk assessment, contingency planning, and flexible scheduling are essential to project success. It also addresses the role of groupthink in suppressing dissent and impairing decision-making, offering strategies to foster open communication and diverse perspectives. The paper concludes that proactive risk management, trust-building, and accountability are key to helping project teams avoid systemic failures.
- Introduction to Project Team Pitfalls: Overview of project pitfalls and SR-520 context
- Risk Management and Cost Overruns on SR-520: How poor risk planning caused SR-520 cost overruns
- Deadline Management and Schedule Risk: Consequences of unrealistic schedules and missing buffers
- Groupthink and Its Impact on the SR-520 Project: How groupthink suppressed dissent on the project team
- Preventing Groupthink on Project Teams: Strategies to encourage open communication and debate
- Building Successful Teams by Avoiding Common Pitfalls: Synthesis of risk, trust, and communication best practices
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds abstract project management concepts in a concrete real-world example — the SR-520 Floating Bridge — giving each pitfall discussed a tangible illustration.
- It balances problem identification with practical prevention strategies, giving readers both diagnostic and prescriptive value.
- The transitions between risk management, schedule management, and groupthink sections are logically sequenced, building from external project factors to internal team dynamics.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper effectively uses a case study as an anchor to apply theoretical frameworks. By repeatedly returning to the SR-520 project, the author demonstrates how to connect academic concepts — such as groupthink (Reaves, 2018; Hart, 1998) and risk management — to documented real-world project failures. This technique strengthens argumentation by showing theory in action rather than presenting it in the abstract.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a broad definition of project management and risk assessment before narrowing to the SR-520 case. It then addresses cost overruns, deadline failures, and groupthink in separate, focused sections. Each section follows a consistent pattern: define the risk, show how SR-520 failed, then recommend corrective practices. The conclusion synthesizes all three pitfall categories into a unified set of best practices for project teams.
Introduction to Project Team Pitfalls
A project manager's job is to ensure that a project is completed on time, within budget, and to the required quality standards. To accomplish this, they must identify and avoid potential pitfalls that could cause the project to fail. One way to find potential pitfalls is to carry out a risk assessment. This involves identifying all possible risks that could affect the project and then evaluating their likelihood and impact. The risk assessment helps the project manager determine which potential pitfalls are most serious and need to be addressed first. Another way to identify potential pitfalls is to consult previous project team members, who can share their experiences of what went wrong on prior projects and how those problems could have been avoided. By being aware of potential pitfalls before they occur, the project manager can greatly increase the chances of success.
This paper addresses the project pitfalls related to the SR-520 Floating Bridge and explains what corrective actions should have been taken from a sponsor's perspective. Some of the pitfalls of the SR-520 Floating Bridge project included a lack of oversight, a lack of adherence to standards, and insufficient engineering testing. In short, these pitfalls could have been avoided if the project had been managed more effectively from a risk standpoint. Because there are so many stakeholders in the SR-520 project, it is absolutely important that waste not become a concern. No one wants to see billions more spent on a project that has already run over budget and past its deadline.
References
Bonjukian, S. (2013). Problems on SR-520 floating bridge causing delays, cost overruns.
Hart, P. T. (1998). Preventing groupthink revisited: Evaluating and reforming groups in government. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73(2–3), 306–326.
Larson, E., & Gray, C. (2017). Project Management: The Managerial Process (7th ed.). McGraw Hill.
Reaves, J. A. (2018). A study of groupthink in project teams (Doctoral dissertation, Walden University).
Shirey, M. R. (2012). Group think, organizational strategy, and change. JONA: The Journal of Nursing Administration, 42(2), 67–71.
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