Question

The Center for Project Management in San Ramon, California, examined 24 IT projects and compiled a list of ten dumb mistakes. The center then presented this list to 50 conference attendees and asked them to grade their organization on each mistake. The average grade was between a C+ and D. Here are the ten mistakes:

1. Mistaking every half-baked idea for a viable project.

2. Overlooking stakeholders, forgetting the champions, and ignoring the nemesis.

3. Not assessing the project's complexity.

4. Not developing a comprehensive project charter.

5. Not developing a comprehensive project plan.

6. Not designing a functional project organization.

7. Accepting or developing unrealistic or unachievable estimates.

8. Accepting status reports that contain mostly noise and not enough signal.

9. Looking back and not ahead.

10. Not following a robust project process architecture.

Read the above list and find an example of a project for which this is the case. The project can be one that you have personal experience

with or that you have read or heard about. Describe the example and state which of the mistakes was made with respect to the project.

(Note that there may be more than one for a particular project.) If you choose a project in the news, provide a citation so that your classmates

can read more about it.

Answer 1

Overlooking unlikely stakeholders during project development

In the school district when my oldest son was in kindergarten, I was on the committee to help increase parent involvement. We had the idea to start having Family Reading Night & Family Math Night at the K-2 level. It was a hit with everyone. We sold pizza, popcorn, juice, water, & drinks to raise funds for additional needed classroom essentials. It was great success that increased month after month.

After about four years, the project began to decline and the new school principal could not understand why. I told her that when the project was created the family dynamic focus was much different, and these things have drastically shifted from what they were in the prior years. We focused on the young families; the situation she was experiencing was children being left in the care of older people. The family dynamics including grandparents as the primary caregivers, the parents may register them in school and that is all the connection they have with the school district. Many grandparents are over 65, disabled, do not drive, or have no or limited transportation.

So I suggested the offering of transportation if they reserve in advance, although I know that the cost would have to be approved by the superintendent before being presented to the school board. The school board approved it on a tentative basis at first, but it is still going strong. She as I know that as times change, so must certain essential elements to keep the project focus align.

ALTERNATIVE ANSWER:

1. Half - baked idea to an project : Taking an practical example of an zip file searcher which searches over an server for text inside the files, as we have requirement we should never start developing as in this case there can be many factors which can inhibit the searching resulting in the waste of the efforts.

2. Before start putting effort to any requirement it is very much required to look at the business prospects affected from that. For e.g if take the Cab system such as the Uber which is an market leader in the cab transport. Now building similar to this would have be considered because the amount of the investment and building an repo so that the user can leave the established business should be consider. Another best example is of Google+ less success due to the Facebook.

3. Requierment analysis is the most important part of any project. If we do not have an proper approach for the same and we do not create an proper plan to solve the issue. Because as we start building any thing we actually should have proper view of the complexity because this can cause very bad delays and blockage later. for e.g if we want to build highend generic crawler, then to whether resue and existing crawler such Nutch or to build and custom crawler as per our requirement is quite necessary.

4. It is quite essential keep an track of the project while building because a delay in the development can cause an heft financial or even effort wastage. The best example of such an situtation is of an Go Live stage in project where we need to keep the project on proper track so that the date is postponed or something goes wrong.

5. Project Planning : Most of the important parts of the initial project planning. For e.g if you have an project related to an analytics it is quite necessary to know properly the technology stack and members of the people and the assigning the initial stage responsiblity for everyone, which would give an clear view

7. All the effort estimates have to be appropriate. It affects two ways: if you have an bad estimate it would have effect on the project and the team members. The project can be extended early causing the wrong estimate resulting an bad impression on the client. Also, if an project member is assigned an task which requires more time than the assigned then the member would not be able to complete the task and that would directly effect the project planning finishing period.

8. Detailed and correct status report to make sure that if we can plan ahead on an project. Now if you have an module where we are not sure about the current status and we move ahead to the next module then on the integration this minor drop can cause immense delay for the same.

9. It is quite necessary to keep the soffar modules developed in stable state, as if we do not do this we would not be able to move ahead on the new modules if we re-develop older modules again and again.

10. Architecture: It is the most important part before starting the project. An architecture failure can cause financial and effort wastage. for e.g if you have multi sytem integration project we should use JMS for the message protocol but instead used an JMX then the changes can cause cost of the server and additional effort from the developing team