Question

Jim Watanabe was in his new car, driving down I-5
on his way to work. He dreaded the phone call he
knew he was going to have to make.
The original go-live date for a pilot implementation
of Petrie’s Electronics’s new customer relationship
management (CRM) system was July 31. That was only six weeks away, and Jim knew there was no way
they were going to be ready. The XRA CRM they were
licensing turned out to be a lot more complex than
they had thought. They were behind schedule in implementing it. Sanjay Agarwal, who was a member of
Jim’s team and who was in charge of systems integration for Petrie’s, wanted Jim to hire some consultants.with XRA experience to help with implementation.
So far, Jim had been able to stay under budget, but
missing his deadlines and hiring some consultants
would push him over his budget limit.
It didn’t help that John Smith, the head of marketing, kept submitting requests for changes to the original specifications for the customer loyalty program. As
specified in the project charter, the new system was supposed to track customer purchases, assign points for
cumulative purchases, and allow points to be redeemed
for “rewards” at local stores. The team had determined
that those rewards would take the form of dollars-off
coupons. Customers who enrolled in the program
would be given accounts that they could access from
Petrie’s website. When they signed on, they could check
their account activity to see how many points they had
accumulated. If they had earned enough points, they
were rewarded with a coupon. If they wanted to use the
coupon, they would have to print it out on their home
printers and bring it in to a store to use on a purchase.
The team had decided long ago that keeping everything
electronic saved Petrie’s the considerable costs of printing and mailing coupons to customers.
But now marketing had put in a change request that
would give customers a choice of having coupons
mailed to them automatically or printing them from
the website at home. This option, while nice for customers, added complexity to the XRA system implementation, and it added to the costs of operation. Jim
had also learned yesterday from the marketing representative on his team, Sally Fukuyama, that now Smith
wanted another change. Now he wanted customers to
be able to use the coupons for online purchases from
Petrie’s website. This change added a whole new layer
of complexity, affecting Petrie’s existing systems for
ordering online, in addition to altering yet again the
implementation of the XRA CRM.
As if that wasn’t enough, Carmen Sanchez was now
telling Jim that she would not be ready to let the team
pilot the system in her Irvine store. Carmen was saying her store would not be ready by the end of July.
Maybe that wouldn’t matter, since they were going to
miss the go-live date for the pilot. But Carmen was
hinting she would not be ready for months after that.
It seemed as if she didn’t want her store to be used for
the pilot at all. Jim didn’t understand it. But maybe he
should try to find another store to use as the pilot site.Jim was almost at his exit. Soon he would be at the
office, and he would have to call Ella Whinston and
tell her the status of the project. He would have to tell
her that they would miss the go-live date, but in a way
it didn’t matter since he didn’t have a pilot location to
go live at. In addition to going over schedule, he was
going to have to go over budget, too. He didn’t see any
way they would be ready for the pilot anytime close to
when they had scheduled, unless he hired the consultants Sanjay wanted. And he would have to stop the
latest change request filed by marketing. Even more
important, he would have to keep the rumored change
request, about using coupons for online purchases,
from being submitted in the first place.
Maybe, just maybe, if he could hire the consultants,
fight off the change requests, and get Carmen to cooperate, they might be ready to go live with a pilot in
Irvine on October 15. That gave him four months to
complete the project. He and the team were going to
have to work hard to make that happen.
Jim realized he had missed his exit. Great, he
thought, I hope it gets better from here.

Question:

Information systems development projects are said to fail if they are late, go over budget, or do not contain all of the functionality they were designed to have. Is the customer loyalty program a failure? Justify your answer. If not, how can failure be prevented? Is it important to avert failure? Why or why not?

Answer 1

is the customer loyalty program a failure?

NO, a customer loyalty program is not a failure, in above situation, it is mention pilot site which is mention in a contract could not accessible till July end, but it is not mentioned anywhere that customers suffer due to this issue. so loyalty program is not a failure.

failure can be prevented-

• by changing the pilot site.
• offer some additional bonus or reward after the company budget problem solved.
• customer convenience should be at topmost priority while deciding any change related to customer service. so working on this parameter helps to prevent failure.

it is important to avert failure because-

• after many failures anyone gets success, so by averting failure we reach one step near to success, and the ultimate aim of any project is to get success.
• before decided how to avert failure organization needs to know what is the cause of failure, in the above situation given cause of failure-
• not well researched and analyzed planning before implementing because of these unexpected changes occur in consumer awards and services also delay in the project and over budgeting leads to failure.

how to avert above a few causes-

• proper research of marketing with the help of a consultant, so that this situation could not arise in the future.
• proper explanation to a customer about a few changes in policy and future commitment to them that these changes never happen frequently in the future.