Case Study 5.3: Project Management at Dotcom.com Dotcom.com , a software enginee
ID: 410462 • Letter: C
Question
Case Study 5.3: Project Management at Dotcom.com
Dotcom.com, a software engineering and systems development consulting firm, sells a wide assortment of Internet and computer-based solutions for resource planning, administrative, and accounting networks to organizations in health care delivery, financial services, and hotel management. Typically, a service provider approaches Dotcom.com with a list of problems it has and some targets for organizational improvement. Because most of Dotcom’s clients are not themselves computer savvy, they tend to rely heavily on Dotcom to correctly diagnose their difficulties, propose solutions to correct these problems, and implement the new technologies. The industry in which Dotcom operates is extremely competitive, forcing successful organizations to make low bids to win consulting contracts. In this environment, project management is vital for Dotcom’s success because poorly managed projects quickly “eat up” the profit margin for any job.
Unfortunately, Dotcom’s senior management team has noticed a recent upsurge in project operating costs and a related drop-off in profitability. In particular, Dotcom’s executives are concerned because the last seven consulting contracts have resulted in almost no profit margin because the software systems were delivered late and required several rounds of rework to fix bugs or correct significant shortcomings in the software. The firm decided to hold a weekend off-site retreat with the project managers responsible for these most recently completed projects in order to learn why project management was being done so poorly.
To a person, the project managers fixed the blame for their problems on the clients. A typical response was made by Susan Kiley, a project manager with more than five years’ experience, who stated, “We are put in a very tough position here. Most of the customers don’t know what they really want so we have to spend hours working with them to get a reasonable Statement of Work that we can develop the project scope around. This takes time. In fact, the more time I spend with the customer up front, the less I have to get my team to actually develop the system for them. It’s a Catch-22—If I want to get things right, I have to pry information out of them. The better I do getting a sense of their problems, the less time I have to develop and run the project!”
Jim Crenshaw, another project manager, spoke up. “It doesn’t stop there, unfortunately. My biggest problems are always on the back end of the project. We work like dogs to get a system up that corresponds to the client’s demands, only to have them look it over, push a few buttons, and start telling us that this was not anything like what they had in mind! How am I supposed to develop a system to solve their problems when they don’t know what their problems are? Better yet, what do we do when they ‘think’ they know what they want and then when we create it, they turn around and reject our solutions out of hand?”
After two hours of hearing similar messages from the other project managers, it became clear to the senior management team that the project management problems were not isolated but were becoming embedded in the firm’s operations. Clearly, something had to be done about their processes.
Discuss how you would begin redesigning dotcom.com’s project management processes to minimize the problems it is experiencing with poor scope management.
Explanation / Answer
For dotcom’s scope management, I will frame a new scope planning which will cater its current business scope as well as future business scope. A typical project management will have phases like Project Initiation, Project Planning. Project Execution, Monitoring and Control, Project wind-up and feedback loop.
I will first initiate with my clients by offering our services, expertise and customized packages for our annual and lifetime services delivery. We shall ask our clients to provide us the statement of work so that we can plan accordingly our offerings to them. Project execution will be redesigned as we shall care our clients with prompt delivery of services. It will also provide us some referral clients who wish to provide us their software related work. In this way, the scope of our business will be increased.
We shall work on a common platform so that work scheduling for various client’s project work can be traced with real time by me. I will plan according to the work in progress for monitoring and control on simultaneously many projects. Work scheduling as well as the allocation of resources will be done based on real time software utilized by our managers and employees. We shall try to sale our business offerings by creating a conducive environment in our famous.