Question

Murphy's Law: What Can Go Wrong, Will

You come into the office in the morning to find a message from the executive sponsor of your project asking you to come see him urgently. The meeting begins with the usual pleasantries; "How's your family? How's the weather? How's the team doing? How's the project going? etc" but you can sense that something is amiss.

The bomb drops.....

Due to new urgent priorities, your project budget has been cut by 25% and 33% of your resources are being reassigned. You have 48 hours to redo your project plan and present it to the steering committee.

After you go back to your office, compose and delete 3 emails resigning and then take a walkabout to clear your head, what do you do?

Describe the changes you will make to your project in time, scope or cost and the impact that will have on the objectives that were agreed in the charter.

Also, include a table detailing the changes with monetary or percentage values and totals.

For this assignment, DO NOT redo your project plan. Simply write a short paper (2 - 3 pages or so) that describes the changes that you will have to make and the impact.

Answer 1

Changes in project :-

Since project budget has been cut by 25%, it means we will be having less amount of money eft with us then we have planned for . As a result we have to again renegotiate with the vendors to whom we have subcontracted various parts of the project . Such renegotiations will take time. Further , since earlier we were paying more price to the suppliers and it may be possible that they may have undertaken to perform our work on priority basis but now since the amount to be paid to them will be drastically reduces and thus those tasks may not be performed by them on a priority basis. Thus, both these causes apart from other causes will play their part in increasing the project duration.

Further cost to paid to the the subcontractors and vendors have to be reduced by way of renegotiation since we cannot pay more than the budget allocated to us.

One way to reduce payment is to curtail the scope of work subcontracted . As and when scope of work is reduced this will lead to reduction in the cost of making work done . Thus scope of work will also be reduced as a result of reduction in project cost allocated.

Last but not the least objectives agreed in the charter will be compromised a bit because of curtailment of scope of work but we should make sure that only little bit of objectives are compromised retaining the basic nature of project otherwise the whole purpose of the project may be defeated. It is a very cautious task which we should undertake very seriously.

In this way a cut of 25% of project budget and 33% of resources will have a far reaching impact in time scope and objective of our project