Blue Spider Project

This document provides answers to questions related to the Blue Spider Project, including the stakeholders involved, project management issues, types of contracts used, and lessons learned. The project lacked effective communication, experienced project management, and appropriate contract choices. The lesson learned is the importance of effective communication, experienced project managers, and appropriate contract choices.

Running head: BLUE SPIDER PROJECT
BLUE SPIDER PROJECT
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Answer to question number 5:
a) The term project stake holder in an organization is referred to as a group of
individuals who are involved in the overall outcome of a project (Eskerod &
Jepsen, 2016). Project stakeholders in a project have the ability of getting affected
by the way of decision that is made within the overall project management.
b) The stakeholders included in the case study of Blue Spider includes, the prime
contractor of the program of Army’s Spartan program, lord industries, parks,
corporation, subcontractors of the project and the customers from the Department
of Defense.
c) In project management, communication management is defined as a process of
handling the communication within an organization while channeling between
organizations to organization. The process of communication management
includes process of systematic planning, distribution, creation, distribution
monitoring and finally implementation.
d) The issues that are identified from the project include:
i) Error in financial planning
ii) Inadequate or improper communication with the Lord industries from the
initiation of the project which led to heavy budgeting of the project as well as a lot
of time for in initiating the required communication.
iii) Gary did not receive Gable’s support during his need.

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Answer to question number 6
a) The project manager is a person who in charge for leading a project for its
establishment till execution based on planning, managing resources and
identifying the scope of the project.
b) A project manager must hold a bachelor’s degree in management or any
correlated field associate with the business application. However, the professional
certification and extensive related experience (Higgins, 2018). Along with the
academic skills a project manager must possess the skills to communicate both in
terms of oral and written perspective, have the ability to motivate people and must
express the dedication and commitment towards the project.
c) The project manager, in the Blue Spider project lacks the experience to manage a
project. He spent excessive time in testing for analyzing the quality result of the
project materials rather than supervising the project. The decision made by him to
reduce the cost of the materials on the bill indicates the lack of managing skills
and plans over a project. In terms of demonstrating the project he lacks the
involvement over team effectiveness which shows that a person with good
technical knowledge might not be an efficient project manager.
Answer to question number 7
a) In context of project management, the term mistrust is defined as the way of not
trusting an individual in a formal way within an organization during the emerging
risk or doubt within a project.
b) The most common cause of mistrust in project management occurs due to some of
the existing barriers in terms of communication within an organization or having
inadequate experience in the field of managing the project efficiently.

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c) The trust of Lord Industries have been broken by Gary Anderson from the
beginning of the project as no effective communication was initiated with each
other regarding the daily update of the project (Hargreaves et al., 2018). This lack
in miscommunication between the two made them believe that Park Corporation
is least interested with the project. Also Gary Anderson did not feel for informing
the Lord Industries about the interchanging of the new material –JXB in the
meeting that was formed where he was supposed to inform other customers about
the sudden decision in changing the material used within the project.
d) It was necessary that the Park Industries should have organized a regular meeting
with their customers in order to prevent the sudden rise in the cost of the project.
Regular meetings within project management play an important step to avoid
unnecessary testing and costs. Thus the Park Industries should have informed the
customers about their new change in material before they have used it within their
testing stage in project management.
Answer to question number 8
a) The generic types of contracts used in project management are :
i) Fixed-Price contract
ii) Time and material contract
iii) Cost reimbursement
i) Fixed-Price contract: In this type of the contract, the price is fixed for a
defined product (Kim, Roberts & Brown, 2016). The Fixed-Price contract is of
three types Firm Fixed Price (FFP) where the product price and services are
fixed and never changes until it is accepted mutually from both the sides,
Fixed Price Incentive Fee (FPIF) where seller need to fulfill the contractual

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requirement within the predefined fixed price and the seller would bare all the
extra costs and Fixed Price with Economic Price Adjustment (FPEPA)
where the contact is being executed by different countries and the payments
are made to the seller using different currencies.
ii) Cost Reimbursement: This type of contract the reimbursement is based on
the cost incurred after completion of the contractual job along with the pre-
defined costs representing the profit of the seller. There are three types Cost
reimbursement contracts, Cost Plus Fixed Fee (CPFF) where the seller gets
the allowed cost after mutual agreement regarding the deal, Cost Plus Award
Fee (CPAF) where the seller gets the genuine cost of the project as
reimbursement and Cost Plus Incentive Fee (CPIF) where the gets all the
cost invested in completing the project.
iii) Time and material contract: This contract is the hybrid combination of the
Cost and Fixed reimbursement contract. When the requirement is not
predefined this type of contract is used.
b) The advantage and disadvantage of the different types of project management
contracts are:
i) Fixed-Price contract
Advantage:
a) Allows the organization to stay in control with the amount owed
b) Helps in managing the hiring cost outside the company
Disadvantage:
a) Purchaser can able to predict the project cost
b) The sudden price drop puts the seller in trouble

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ii) Cost reimbursement
Advantage:
a) High quality
b) Less chance of project over bid
Disadvantage:
a) Risk of paying much on the materials
b) Surveillance and additional supervision are needed
iii) Time and material contract
Advantage:
Provides high visibility and transparency level.
Disadvantage:
The consultancy produces the bills with long deadline in a haphazard manner.
c) The time and material based contract is the better proposal which should have
been implemented in this project because it provides transparency and visibility about the
project and it would lead to the any negotiation to the stakeholders of the project.
Answer to question number 9
Initial
stage
Planning
stage
Implementation
stage
Closeout
phase
Average
Scope management 3 3 4 3 3.25
Time management 3 2 4 2 2.75
Resource management 3 2 3 3 2.75

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Communication
management
2 2 2 3 2.25
Stakeholder management 3 3 3 3 3
Risk management 4 3 4 3 3.5
Contract and procurement
management
2 3 2 3 2.5
From the context of scope management, the Lord Industries assumed from the beginning of
the project that it will fail as no effective communication was initiated from the initial phase
of the project. Besides this drawback, the project also lacked having effective planning that
were provided to the customers. The time management skill which is one of the vital factor
for successful project management was also not done evenly and the result was reflected on
the final outcome of the project. The project manager spent too much time while testing the
project outcome rather than managing the project effectively. The entire project lacked
various others factors like improper resource planning, ineffective communication with the
stakeholders and many more (Kutsch et al., 2015). The stakeholders of the project were kept
into dark as no information was conveyed to them about the change in the materials of the
project. With all this project management drawbacks, the only thing that was managed evenly
throughout the project is the risk related to the proect. The risk at the beginning stage were
pointed out clearly while the project manager became confused at the end and thus provided
wrong reports to the customers about the details of the temperature of the materials. In total,
the entire project was procured on the basis of wrong reports that were provided by the
project manager of the Parks Corporation.

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Answer to question number 10
a) The lesson learnt from the project that
i) Communication should be made effectively among the stakeholders
ii) Projects should be given in charge to an experience project manager who
has the ability to motivate people and managing capabilities.
iii) Appropriate contract choice should be produced to the customers based on
the project requirement.
b) The lesson learnt from this project that effective communication should be made among
the contractors and customers in order to visualize the issues to proceed with the project in a
proper way. This would provide the customer a higher level of satisfaction (Kerzner, 2019).
The project should be kept under the charge of an experience project manager who has the
ability to manager project, encourage and motivate people and effective strategies to
complete the task within the deadline. Appropriate contract choice should be produced to the
customers regarding the project requirement and cost breakup.

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References
Eskerod, P., & Jepsen, A. L. (2016). Project stakeholder management. Routledge.
Hargreaves, I., Roth, D., Karim, M. R., Nayebi, M., & Ruhe, G. (2018). Effective customer
relationship management at atb financial: A case study on industry-academia
collaboration in data analytics. In Highlighting the Importance of Big Data
Management and Analysis for Various Applications (pp. 45-59). Springer, Cham.
Higgins, K. L. (2018). MGT 408: The Art and Science of Project Management. Claremont
Graduate University.
Kerzner, H. (2019). Using the project management maturity model: strategic planning for
project management. Wiley.
Kim, Y. W., Roberts, A., & Brown, T. (2016). Impact of Product Characteristics and Market
Conditions on Contract Type: Use of fixed-price versus cost-reimbursement contracts
in the US Department of Defense. Public Performance & Management Review, 39(4),
783-813.
Kutsch, E., Ward, J., Hall, M., & Algar, J. (2015). The contribution of the project
management office: A balanced scorecard perspective. Information Systems
Management, 32(2), 105-118.

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