Cases and examples

Astro Bank

The management of the project teams for both the legacy and new systems started badly. Separate project teams were established for each. No roles, responsibilities, or rules were established. The project leader assumed that everyone had previous project experience and knew what to do.

The projects began to deteriorate. The new system project team had never worked together before. Many were junior people who lacked project management experience. The work was not getting organized. The team just started in and began on tasks. The legacy system team was the reverse. Team members had operated in a bureaucratic project management mode for years. However, the projects were merely maintenance, operations support, and minor enhancements. Their approach was ill-suited to development and major interface work. They treated the new work like the old. Their project meetings were almost social occasions.

The project leader faced change or failure. The first step was to impose project management similar to that described above on the new team. Members of this team were the least resistant and most accepting of organization. Once this process was in place, it was time to turn to the legacy system team members. There were two alternatives. The project leader could attempt to invade their existing culture in their organization. This was seen to be very risky and would run into management as well as staff resistance and dissension. The project could afford neither. The alternative was to involve the legacy system team members as individuals within the new system project team. This was the first step. Over time, the project leader then carved out a subproject for the legacy system team and ran the group under the same rules as the new sys- tems project team. Meetings were held in the offices of the new systems development area-away from the legacy system staff.

Questions

1. We have seen the same behavior again and again around the world-teams often work poorly together. Given that many team members have had limited project experience, this is not a surprise. If you were going to carry out projects in a company, what steps would you take at the start of the project to improve teamwork and team communications?

2. Following up on the preceding question, how could you detect a project team was experiencing communications problems?

3. Legacy system support is often a major issue in organizations. Given changing technology and business conditions there will always be legacy systems. There is just not enough resources to keep current with the latest technology. Nor is there usually a business reason to do so if the current systems meet business requirements. It has been said that IT staff who support legacy systems have rather different attributes than those for new system development. What differences do you think there are between these two groups? Discuss how you could migrate IT staff from maintenance of old systems to new work. Identify the barriers to accomplishing this transition.

Prioritising risk

Refer to the above Astro Bank case study on p. 138 of the text, Information Technology Project Management.

In this Assignment, you will imagine that you are appointed as the project manager to rescue this project from failure. In this project, recall that the less experienced team responsible for the new IS/IT system failed to work effectively with the more experienced team responsible for the legacy IS/IT system. Assume that these two teams are distributed across the globe.

To complete this Assignment:

Identify and analyse the four major prioritised risks that you, as the project manager, would expect in this case. Next, discuss how you would tailor the risk management processes to manage those four risks.

A typical paper should have 900-1,100 words and four references (well cited in-text), one referenced figure.