I know it has been a while since my last post, it’s not that I’m just being lazy or something but I have a very good reason why I wasn’t able to update my blog.  Yes, I got pregnant -We ARE expecting!!  After months of trying and a miscarriage, we finally made it! :)  Being sick for months made me stop most of the usual things that I do, blogging being one of them.

We are now anticipating the arrival of our precious baby girl.  In 7 weeks or so I will be more occupied as I will be juggling my role as a wife, an IT professional, a part time Graduate Student, and most especially as a mum.  I don’t know yet how I’d be able to handle all these but for sure it’s gonna be a lot more challenging (but fun for sure!!!).

In all honesty, all I know is how to carry a baby in a way that his/her back is supported, but aside from that I know nothing about child care.  I don’t know if my new busier schedule will permit, but I would definitely love to account every new stuff that I’m gonna be learning about being a mom.  If anyone of you reading this blog would be interested in sharing some tips about child care, then please do so… It would be a great way for me to start learning while I still have a few more weeks till my baby finally arrives. 

Whew! It’s been a while since I last posted an article, it’s not that I’ve been lazy, but rather, I have been utterly utterly busy! Busy about what? Well, a lot of things - chasing my broker, the bank, my solicitor, the real estate agent, the developer, and even the bank’s solicitor about settlement. I have been very persistent and I hope I didn’t annoy anyone, but I have to do what I’ve got to do. The truth is, they’ve been very helpful and friendly as well. I know to some extent I have pushed them to their limits, so I am deeply sorry for that to be honest.

Anyway, the battle is over, I am now (together with my husband) a proud owner of a brand new double storey house in a very nice suburb in the west of Sydney. I am quite delighted with it, it’s not the first time that I have owned a house but this one gives me a different effect! I know my husband feels the same, I have never seen him this engrossed to household chores! Mind you, he even goes home at lunch time (from work) just to clean the house! I just hope this will never ever end!

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Mobile phones, fax machines, computers, mp3 players, do they really make things easier for us? At the top of our minds we’ll definitely say “yes” they do, however, if you think about it, these things make things a lot more complicated than ever. Sure it took weeks for mails to be sent and received before, in previous years people used telegrams wherein now we just send a quick sms and our friends in a different part of the world can reply back in no time. Sounds comfy isn’t? Well for me, I prefer the times when things were simpler. My grandmother seems happy not knowing how to send sms, life things less complicated for her as she grew up not knowing how to operate a computer and for her she’d rather not try it at all. If you analyse it, the more you know the bigger your responsibilities will be. It’s like Spiderman saying “great power comes with great responsibility”, which is very much true.

I often times complain about not having to communicate with other people at work, simply because I work with machines, and software which couldn’t even understand what I’m typing. For me it isn’t healthy because I only deal with other people at work when the system is down, or a new function has to be added in our financial application. This is what new technology has caused me, isolation.

It’s not all bad in fairness; new technology opened different opportunities for most as well. It has created a lot of jobs that didn’t even exist years ago, treatment to illnesses where finally discovered - it has introduced a lot more diseases at the same time.

Anyway, the moral lesson here is that despite having all these new things around us, we should try and appreciate all the things that used to give us happiness and contentment. And besides, life is a lot less stressful before anyway.

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I hope it is not too late to save mother earth from the gruesome effect of global warming that each of us are guilty of participating in one way or another. I am neither an influential person nor a rich one who could donate millions to support research for this cause; all I can offer is a small act to help save mother earth. Living in a country where the use of hot and cold water is an option and litres of it wasted in the shower I commit to give my fair share as follows:

1. Boil a litre of water.
2. Use a bucket to contain the litre of hot water to be mixed with sufficient amount of cold water.
3. Use this bucket of water instead of wasting gallons of it in the shower.

This idea is not new; this is actually a practice of some of our fellowmen who lives in third world countries where hot and cold water option could only be found in hotels. Through this we do not only bathe with warm water but at the same time avoid consuming more energy that warms the earth and help save water if we stick to one decent size bucket to use!

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It is such a wonderful feeling to share a little bit of something to someone who is in dire need, whether you know the person or not. This is the concept behind organizations such as World Vision, their’s is a very noble endeavour whose vision is to see through our fellowmen who are less fortunate than many. As a fellow dweller on this planet I believe that it is somehow our duty to extend a helping hand to these people. People who are victims of some unfortunate events that occurred in the past, some are the ones severely affected by a number of powerful people’s greed, and sad to say there are few who are victims of the laziness of their own parents who are not responsible enough to meet their family’s needs (I’m referring to the little ones - of course).

Indeed, helping others is a splendid thing to do, however we also have to consider the means of doing it. We cannot just send money and clothes to these people; we cannot just put a small tent to provide them shelter. We have to make sure that we do it in a way that these people won’t abuse and ask for more. This is what WorldVision and other charitable organizations are here for. They make sure that our sponsored child receives what he/she really needs. WorldVision protects both the sponsors and the child in every way possible, and this is the reason why sponsors are not allowed to send anything directly to the child. Imagine what will happen if you give an XBOX to your sponsored child, this will cause jealousy and sadness to the other children who do not receive such a generous gift.

What can we get from sponsoring a child? ‘My child’ was four (4) years old (a little boy from Zambia) when I started sponsoring him; he couldn’t even write an alphabet then, well, just because he’s still almost a baby. I felt happy the first time I received a drawing from this little angel, receiving a letter from WorldVision about the present condition of the boy and his family gives fulfilment on my part. I feel that somehow I have found a little way to ‘be a blessing’ to these people who needs it the most.

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Yes, I’m trying to juggle married life, work, and post graduate studies!  Despite my busy schedule I do my best to allot ample time for my assessments.

This part of my blog is dedicated to the reports and cases that I have written for my course called Masters of Business in Information Technology Management.  I will filter the assessments that I will be posting and will limit it to only those that do not involve sensitive information about any particular organization.

Students may find some articles helpful in their studies, however, remember the rules about plagiarism.  All assessments posted in this blog were submitted to the University which keep them in a secure database and may detect cases of plagiarism.   And besides, it feels better to earn a good mark through hardwork and diligence anyway!

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Executive Summary 

This report aims to identify the root cause and factors contributing to the Grove International’s Customer Service Online project fiasco. Upon identifying these factors, this report should present valuable lessons derived from that failure, and from them determine an appropriate project governance strategy for future project success.

The Grove International’s Customer Service Online project was developed to improve the organization’s customer service, but apart from this, there is no evident necessity for developing the project.  The Project Manager’s enthusiasm has convinced the user project team about the benefits of the application.  This enthusiasm lead to chaos as limitations were not pointed out, due to this, unrealistic targets were set.  Whilst everyone was focused on the end result, the important bits were missed, the management failed to provide an experienced project development team, and more so, they have failed to instill rigor in risk management throughout the project lifecycle. 

Several issues arose even at the earlier stage of the project, some of which political.  On a very crucial time members were found not being productive, and the worst lead to removal of one of the team members.  The Project Manager had several meetings with the User Project Team to provide progress reports and present the system design specifications, however, failed to be truthful in delivering these reports.  The Project Manager tend to accept every requests made by the user project team without considering time, and the scope of the project, and even acted without prior approval from the authority.  These changes were not even documented.  The Project Leadership’s incapability, lack of true mission and objective, and the failure of the Management to provide guidance and support introduced sufficient risk to compromise the project’s success.

Other significant recommendation pertains to stakeholder management and organizational change management.  Implementation of the initial phase should have been done and whatever additional requirements be considered as enhancement to the system.  It is always best to properly educate all stakeholders about how the proposed project may benefit them.  This will positively fuel their enthusiasm and will ensure cooperation from all stakeholders.

Introduction  Background 

We all know the standard way of measuring project success as its timely delivery, being on or under budget, and if the system works as required.  Project success is more than these measures and according to the lecturer of this Project Management course, even the ability of the management to stop a project when the objective has changed or is obviously gone can be considered a success.  But what is really causing projects to fail, especially the case of Grove International’s Customer Service Online project?

    Top 10 Sources of Project Failure 

·        Failure to appreciate the impact of a multi-project environment on single project success

·        Irrational promises made due to a failure to take into account the variable nature of task performance.

·        Irrational promises made due to a failure to take into account the statistical nature of project networks.

·        Insufficient identification of dependencies necessary to deliver the project.

·        Focus on (and active management of) only a portion of what should be the full project – a true bottom-line value adding outcome for the sponsoring organization.

·        Reliance of due-date, train-schedule, and actual-against-budget-to-date performance to drive project performance, resulting the wasting of any safety included in the project and in the effects of Parkinson’s Law – Work will expand to fill the time allowed.  The whole concept of “time allowed” is a major culprit.

·        Wasting of resources through underutilization because they aren’t the “best resource” for the job.

·        Wasting of the “best” resources through over-utilization, multi-tasking, and burn-out.

·        Delivering original scope when conditions/needs change.  Flip-side: accepting changes to scope without sufficient analysis of impact on the project.

·        Multi-tasking, multi-tasking, multi-tasking, and multi-tasking.

Top 10 Sources of Project Failure (Focused Performance n.d.)

The above list relates so much in the case of Grove International and we can say that the organization is guilty of all of it plus more.  The project was originally for the headquarters but then due to the Project Manager’s excessive enthusiasm the project which was supposed to work on an eight-month time frame grew in scope as the time frame continues to lessen.  The project failed to start immediately as planned due to unavailability of human resources, the management failed to provide support in this aspect as they were unable to free experienced personnel that would support the project.  However, when given an inexperienced staff, the Project Management wasted time and resources as he underutilized the allocated staff, instead of training them he spent time complaining and pushing the management to release experienced staff in their other commitments. 

‘In an effort to take advantage of valuable new opportunities, multi-project organizations, more often than not, tend to launch projects as soon as they are understood, concurrently with existing projects, simultaneously with other new efforts, and unfortunately too often, without sufficient regard to the capacity of the organization.  A common result is that the responsibility for sorting out an array of conflicting priorities often falls to project resources and their managers.’ (Patrick, 1999)

The project manager is also guilty of providing estimates with regards to time frame without taking into consideration the ambiguity of the project.  Below is an illustration of the critical chain’s 2-point duration and iteration estimates.

‘The two-point estimation process is an excellent vehicle for further understanding risks and ways of addressing them.  The first, commitment-level estimate should reflect the inherent task or iteration risk associated with the piece of the project in question.’ (Patrick, 1999)  The project leadership failed to be realistic about the time frame and tend to agree with all the demands of the user project team.  This can be seen as a way to cover the deficiencies of the project.At some stage of the project came an experienced analyst who took a lot of the responsibilities, however, “over-utilization” of this supposed to be best resource occurred.  There was obviously no clear description of what the analyst should and should not do.  This caused him to clash with the user project manager, thus wasting the ‘best resource’ that the project has.One of the top ten sources of project failure relates to delivering original scope when needs have changed.  In the case of Grove International, it was the opposite.  During one of the meetings with the user project team, new system design specifications were raised which the project leadership failed to negate, therefore, the assumption that the project team agreed to these new specifications arose and caused further turmoil.  I have listed below the identified problems in relation to the Grove International Customer Service Online project.

• Lack of clear mission and objective.
• The Project leadership failed to be firm with the scope of the project.
• The Project leadership’s inability to say no.
• The Project leadership underestimated the user project team and did not realize that it is harder to deal with users with very little knowledge of IS as they tend to be more demanding and think everything is possible.
• The Project Manager does not have enough experience managing a project.
• Lack of real guidance from the management.
• The Project leadership wasted time complaining instead of training the available resources.
• The Project leadership failed to communicate properly to the project team members, therefore only one was productive.
• Lack of documentation for every change initiated.
• The Project Manager wanted to run his own show and even bypassed crucial approval.
• The Project team changed specifications and plans without proper consultation to the user project team.
• The Project Manager failed to provide truthful report and updates about the progress of the project, or lack of it.

Recommendation 

Stakeholder Management and Organizational Change Management

In an economy where companies need to persuade investors to hold their stock, employees to work cooperatively with others, customers to buy a broader array of their products and services, and contractors to maintain strong supply chains, collaborative stakeholder relationships are key….The term stakeholder refers to individuals or groups who can affect or are affected by a corporation’s activities (Svendsen 1998, p.1).

In whatever project an organization may have all stakeholders will definitely be affected, directly or indirectly.  Therefore, it is very important that all information about any project is properly disseminated from the very beginning.  The stakeholders should be made aware of every single aspect of the project, this will entail cooperation from everyone knowing that they too will benefit or be affected by the project.  In this case of Grove International, this is one of the things that are missing, the supposed to be stakeholders were very passive and the enthusiasm was left to the Project Manager.  Let us start from the user project team who seem to be very inconsiderate and demanding.  Their demands were very ambitious and unrealistic.  This should have ended in the first place if the Project Manager only knew how to be realistic as well in his commitments.  On one hand, the management failed to provide the true guidance that the project needs, from the moment human resource was requested.  In order to further understand the relationship of stakeholders let us check the table below which illustrates the characteristics of old and new approaches to corporate-stakeholder relations.

Characteristics of Old and New Approaches to Corporate-Stakeholder Relations (Source Svendsen 1998, p.4)

Looking at the table above, it is quite interesting to see that stakeholder collaboration make so much sense to the Grove International case.  If assigned as a consultant for this project, I would definitely suggest application of the above.  The stakeholders in the Grove International case showed no genuine commitment to the project.

In whatever project, big or small, it is always best to involve all the stakeholders.  To what extent does the public have to participate?  All stakeholders should have been made aware of its roles to in achieving the project’s success.  The following should be taken into consideration:

·        Scope of representation

·        Mode of participation

·        Delegation of authority

·        Locus of final decision

(Source Mazmanian & Nienaber 1979, pp. 33-34)

Everybody in a project should have a clear idea of how they will be affected by a proposed project.  The best scenario in the case of Grove International to prove this was when the analyst was not even aware of what the scope of his role was, this lead to him being removed from the project.  This was again, failure on the side of Project Manager to inform his team members of their roles and duties.  The case also did not present a clear evidence of regular meetings, workshops, and brain storming.

The team should have also make use of a change request method instead of agreeing to every demands of the user project team or not disagreeing to it.  The users may come up with wrong assumptions out of this.  It is said that, ‘the use of information has a supplementary and supportive function for other methods of change, no matter what their target.’ (Katz & Kahn 1967, p.392)

One final recommendation I would like to make refers to proper identification of the user requirement.  ‘This is where many projects fail, in that they do not specify correctly what the system should do. In fact many systems have just been given a deadline for delivery, a budget to spend, and a vague notion of what it should do.’ (http://www.coleyconsulting.co.uk/require.htm, 2001)The user project team of Grove International failed to provide clear requirements and expected that sky is the limit in that project. 

Conclusion 

Apart from the above recommendations from various resources, I strongly believe that if the Project Manager focused on his original project scope and did not give in to all the users’ changes, success would have been possible.  Too much enthusiasm on the project manager’s part lured everyone to the belief that a project that complicated is feasible despite the time constraints and lack of resources.  The project manager should have been firmed to the users about the delivery of the project he envisaged for the headquarters and upon successful completion of which, consider branching out to modules which will cover the field offices.

Reference 

Katz, D. 1967, The Social Psychology of Organizations, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., NY

Mazmanian, D.A. & Nienaber J., 1979, Can Organizations Change?, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.  

Svendsen, A. 1998, The Stakeholder Strategy, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., CA 

Frank, F. S., 1999, Program Management — Turning Many Projects into Few Priorities with TOC, Focused Performance, viewed 01 September 2007, http://www.focusedperformance.com/articles/multipm.html 

Top 10 Sources of Project Failure, Focused Performance, viewed 01 September 2007, www.focusedperformance.com/toptenpm.html  

What is a Requirement?, 2001 Reducing Your Acceptance Testing Risk, Coley Consulting, viewed 02 September 2007, http://www.coleyconsulting.co.uk/require.htm 

Report by:  “Susana Oliver”

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In most studies conducted, and papers written, most people agreed that success cannot be measured by the monetary reward.  Happiness, they say is the true gauge of the success of an individual when it comes to his career.  I have to argue that and say that these no longer apply in real life, in fairytales - maybe it still does.  I totally agree that one can never buy happiness, and it is indeed more important than material things.  But how can we really achieve happiness in times when we have to stress about paying our mortgages, looking after our bills, the cost of the kids’ education, and our daily expenses, yet our household income does not suffice?

It is really sad to admit that because of the way our lifestyle have changed, some of our values have to change as well.  If you think of a married person with all the commitments mentioned above, happily doing his dream job, and earning less than what he needs, this person will end up unhappy because of the stress brought about by his inability to support the needs of his family and to pay the bills.  Compare this to another person, doing something that he does not really like doing (but is legal and decent!) and being compensated more than what he needs to meet his obligation.  At the end of the day you will see the latter one happier than the first because after the boring job that he endures doing he can come home - leaving work related things behind and spend some quality time with his family without worrying about the unpaid bills that are waiting for him.  At some point in these two individuals’ lives, they are both unhappy about something, but the other one can sleep well, knowing that he doesn’t have any overdue bills.

I am not saying that we have to be greedy and value money more than anything else.  What I’m trying to emphasize is the sad reality that these days, the old saying that “You work to live, and you don’t live to work” is no longer true.  To be honest, I myself, am guilty of this.  I have been telling some mates that I really do not like IT and that I only do it because I have to - for the monetary reward.  I’m trying my very best to commit to my responsibilities at work and continue to hope that someday soon I would be able to quit my job for something that I’m really passionate about, be happy, and not think of the mortgage that we have to repay.

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It was Labour Day on 1st of October here in New South Wales and people around the state must have travelled intercity (and even interstate) or at least did something to relax and enjoy the long weekend.

I spent a day in the Central Coast fishing with some of my family. I met a good couple who seemed to enjoy the dishes that I prepared. Our conversation then lead to vegetables, the gentleman innocently told us a story about how most farmers in some parts of China manage to make their vegies grow bigger and “healthier”. According to him the water from the poo tanks are used to water the Vegies, and use the poo itself as a fertilizer.

I know chicken manure can be a fertilizer, but not human poo please! We, humans become inflicted with different illnesses at some point in our lives, we take medicines, and some are even using illegal drugs. Ours is the dirtiest of all wastes so why use it as a fertilizer? Vegies should make us healthy not sick, so please, to those who are using human poo as fertilizer please, I beg for all mankind, stop this insanity.

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Choosing between a small or large corporation for an employer really depends on the individual’s priority. There are two ways to look at it, if you are after a better chance of promotion I will say that it is better to be in a small organization where your assertiveness can easily be seen and rewarded. To work in a large corporation means having to compete with a lot of people who have the same aim which is towards career progression. One’s initiative is quite more visible and gets easily rewarded in small organizations than in the large ones. On one hand, if you are after job security, better salary, and attractive benefits, I would definitely say choose the large corporation. However, choosing to work with a these giants may mean waiting for a lifetime to get the promotion that you have been waiting for, unless of course you start at a managerial level wherein you will have a say to most things.

The best advice that I can share to the younger ones who are fairly new in the industry is to set a career goal and start in a small organization where you can shine and be visible until you reach your goal. Upon reaching this certain goal and contributing to the organization explore the opportunities with a larger organization. Therefore you would not have to start at the lowest level in a big organization where visibility is almost impossible.

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