Unitec
Institute of Technology
Assignment 2
Referring to the course 06.802 Managing IT Projects
Semester Two 2000

Critique of a real life IT Project

Name: Thomas Kramer 

Class: MComp Due Date: 17th November 2000
Subject: 06.802 Managing IT Projects

Table of contents

1 History of the Project ... 1

2 Major Decisions taken during the Project ... 1

3 Problems encountered ... 2

4 Attempted Solutions ... 3

5 Reported Evaluation ... 3

6 Analysis of the Project ... 5
6.1 Project Integration Management ... 6
6.2 Project Scope Management ... 6
6.3 Project Time Management ... 7
6.4 Project Cost Management ... 8
6.5 Project Quality Management ... 8
6.6 Project Human Resource Management ... 9
6.7 Project Communication Management ... 10
6.8 Project Risk Management ... 11
6.9 Project Procurement Management ... 12

7 My Approach ... 12

8 References ... 15

1 History of the project

The PRS (Performance Right Industry) is a non-profit organization in the United Kingdom that collects the royalties for the holder of the copyrights of music songs when they are performed at a concert or played at the radio. With the guardianship of the musical performance rights from over 750,000 copyright holders and a £155 million collected from 26,000 UK members each year the PRS has a complex role. It is controlled by the General Council, which is responsible for the administration and formulation of the policy. The management team consists of a CEO and his team of executive directors who are responsible for the day-to-day running of the business. For the complex administration processes several distinct applications are running on multiple mainframe computers.

The PROMS (Performance Rights On-Line Membership System) project was conceived in 1987 with its aim to get rid of the mainframe computers and replace them through several mini computers. The data and mainframe applications should be combined into one coherent database to reduce the redundant sets of identical information stored on different computer systems. The new system should allow 300 people to use the computers concurrently. Therefore a special OLTP application was needed to provide adequate response times for all users. Concerning this application, which required a high performance hard- and software environment, there was a heavy debate in the industry about the feasibility to use such a demanding software on minicomputers. For this reason the project required a careful design and planning. (The Performing Rights Society - Case Facts, no year)

2 Major decisions taken during the project

The initial phase comprised establishing a feasibility study and a requirement analysis by undertaking a series of investigations and preliminary designs. Reviewed by external consultants the results in form of a business case were submitted to the General Council in 1989. As the go-ahead for the project was given the hardware was purchased and the contractors started working on the system′s components. The project management decided to pay them according to their amount of work done rather than by what they delivered since it was planned that the system will be delivered on time-and-material. As the first problems occurred in autumn 1991 due to software and hardware difficulties nothing was done until February 1992 with six weeks to go to the projected implementation date. With the abandonment of this date the General Council demanded monthly progress reports. As further problems occurred the revision of an external consultant agency was conducted which claimed the project plan to be inadequate. But the suspension of the project was rejected and a new plan was produced to complete the system by the new implementation date in September 1994 with further investments of £6 million needed. But the General Council intervened and decided to suspend the project, having more than £11 million spent since the commencement of the project. The following assessment of an employed external consultant agency revealed that it was not feasible for the system to become salvaged any more. As many senior managers left the organisation a computer literate CEO and an IT director were appointed as a direct reaction of the PROMS disaster. Their first action was to install a new mainframe. (The Performing Rights Society - Case Facts, no year)

3 Problems encountered

With the project start in 1989 everything appeared to run smoothly until the autumn of 1991 when a 10-week delay was reported to the General Council. The contractor responsible for the software development of the database received insufficient information and to complete his tasks he made various assumptions that turned out to be wrong in some cases. As a result the database design was totally inefficient with unacceptable response times for its users. In addition the choice of hardware and operating system was not meeting the performance requirements needed to run the large 40Gb database. The implementation date in March 1992 had to be abandoned. Further problems arose with the hard- and software as well as the data files over the summer of 1992. The assessment of the project plan by an external consultant company revealed its inadequacy so that it had to be rewritten by the project management that cost a lot of time. But the new cost estimates turned out to be too high and the projected finish date of the project too far away so that the project could not be continued and was therefore suspended. (The Performing Rights Society - Case Facts, no year)