Business Report And Project Management

Running head: BUSINESS PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Business Project Management
Name of Student-
Name of University-
Author’s Note-

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Executive Summary
The report below includes project details of the Blue Spider Project. This project was the project
of Lord Industries and Parks Corporation was selected as sub-contractor of Lord to complete the
project. With successful completion of this project proposal, the engineers were appointed to
enhance structural capabilities of Spartan Missile that was used by Army. The objective of this
project is to find out several ethical issues that included in Parks Corporation while submitting
the proposal for the project. This report discusses the issues and the wrong selection of contract
in the project and recommendation is provided in this report stating the activities project manager
should perform in completing the project.

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Project Appraisal.............................................................................................................................2
1. Ethical Issues...........................................................................................................................2
2. Handling Risk..........................................................................................................................3
3. Stakeholders and communication management.......................................................................5
4. Selection of project manager...................................................................................................5
5. Issue of mistrust.......................................................................................................................6
6. Review of Firm Fixed Price (FFP)..........................................................................................7
7. Evaluation of project management..........................................................................................8
8. Recommendations....................................................................................................................9
Bibliography..................................................................................................................................11

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Introduction
Parks Corporation in this case study is a company that deals with electronics as well as
structural design. Parks Corporation wanted to take the opportunity to perform R&D activities as
proposal for the project. The Blue Spider project was for Army’s Spartan Program and the prime
contractor of this project was Lord Industry. Perks Corporation joined the project a sub-
contractor and decided to complete phase 1 for the project. If the R & D activities for the project
gets approved, that could result in $500 million program for the next 20 years. This project was
designed to have better structural capabilities for Spartan Missile. Henry, director of engineering
of Parks decided to give responsibility to Gary Anderson to manage the project and make it
successful.
But the project was a failure due to many reasons while performing the R & D activities.
There was unethical decisions that were taken in the project and there were factors that resulted
in risk of completing the project. The project encountered many problems and if treated properly,
could have been mitigated. This report discusses all such issues and ineffectiveness of handling
the risks that occurred in the project. This report also states recommendation for Parks that could
have resulted to complete the project successfully.
Project Appraisal
1. Ethical Issues
“Truth doesn’t always win proposals” was not a proper approach in the project that was
taken by Henry and Gary. For a proper project execution, there are certain factors that are needed
in the project. The unethical issues that are in the project were not having proper open
communication, integrity in customer dealing, negotiation, as well as reporting the project status.

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Gary was only a puppet and has to listen what harry told him to do. Gary had no proper and
direct communication with the lard industries or with the functional managers who were
associated with the Blue Spider project.
At starting of project only, there was dishonesty. While preparing for the R & D, the
technical specification of the project was altered. The technical specification that was mentioned
for the Spartan Missile was it should work with a particular temperature range that is within -65 °
to 145 ° F but the testing system of R & D at Parks resulted that this project would not be
successful above 130 ° F. When informed to Henry, he instructed not to inform the officials
about the issue and took unethical decision for getting the twenty years contract.
Knowing the fact that Henry wanted Gary to be dishonest and to be manipulative with the
project, he accepted the promotion offer of being program manager from engineer. The testing
processes that were carried out in the project was not according to the specification of the client.
2. Handling Risk
Risks are considered to be the inherent part in project and because of risks, technology
projects faces difficulties in completing the project successfully (Lock 2017). There are certain
ways that can help the project manager to handle the risks. For each phase in the life cycle of the
project, there should be process of risk management that helps in identifying the project risks and
handle them properly. Certain steps are mentioned below that helps in handling the risks.
a) Creating Risk register: The risk register for a project should be done on a spreadsheet
and that should include the description of the risk, it occurrence time, its impact and the
likelihood of risk in the project.

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b) Identifying risks in all phases: All risk that the project might occur are to be identified
in the project along with workers working in the project and the stakeholder of the spider project.
c) Identifying the opportunities: The risks that provides opportunities in the project are to
be identified in the risk handling process. The unlikely success of the project risk is to be
identified in this project.
d) Determining risk likelihood and risk impact: The risk that are identified are to be
stated using risk likelihood and the impact that it will have on the project (Nicholas and Steyn
2017). The risk impact is determined as per the cost, quality, benefit and quality of the risk
included in the project.
e) Determining the risk response: The risk that have highest priority should be focused
and likelihood and the impact of the risk is to be defined in defining the risk response.
f) Proper estimation and assigning owners: After determining the risks, risk estimation is
an important step that is to be followed. Mitigating the risks will cost the project and estimation
is to be done before mitigating it. For risk mitigation, proper owners are to be assigned for the
project. Owner associated should know about how to deal with the project risk.
g) Reviewing the Risks: Time should be left out to identify all the risks in the project and
monitor the risk progress. Risk reviewing should be done all the phases of the project.
h) Preparing report on the identified risks: All the risks identified in the project are to be
reported along with the risk impact and likelihood on the project (Fewings and Henjewele 2017).
The risk priorities and mitigating methods are to be included in the status report.

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3. Stakeholders and communication management
The stakeholders who were associated with the project were Parks Corporation, the army
for whom the Spartan Missile program was carried out and the Lord Industries who was the main
contractor for the project.
In the project, communication was not done properly. Gary Anderson was not capable to
communicate properly with the stakeholders and with the team members. He was not able to
communicate internally and externally for effective communication project (Marchewka 2016).
Gary Anderson was not able to update the status report and he was not able to update the project
status daily. Without any communication with the Lord Industries, he implemented a new device
JXB-3 without informing the stakeholders of the project. There were no satisfied experimental
results for the testing process that was carried out. When Gary was busy with Paul in the
laboratory, the stakeholders were not able to communicate with Gary was he spent 12 hours in
laboratory solving the issues and testing the system.
There was also no communication from the administrative personnel when Gary was
busy in handling the technical requirements. Anderson was not able to handle the project
properly as he was not given the change to communicate directly with Lord Industries. He was
only allowed to arrange meetings and have discussion weekly by Henry.
4. Selection of project manager
Project manager for spider project was selected based on new joining and inexperienced
project manager who was previously an engineer. Gary being an engineer was provided with
responsibility to manage the team. He was good at engineering and had no experience in
handling a team. He did not knew about how to handle a project team and about how to maintain
communication with internal stakeholders and with the external stakeholders.

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Project manager was not able to assign proper roles to the project team members and was
not able to carry out responsibility in the project team. He was not able to provide a proper
guideline on the processes and procedures to the team members to carry out tasks in the project.
For selecting the project manager, there was no succession planning. Gary was not in a position
in managing the project team and was not able to successfully complete the project.
This project could have been success if Gary and Functional managers of the team
managed the project successfully. The personals who worked in the project were to report their
functional manager and objective of the functional manager and Gary were not similar. The
functional managers were most of the time not informed and they did not know what to do.
Selecting the project manager on the fact that good engineer can be an efficient project manager
was the greatest mistake that Henry made in the project causing risk for the project manager as
well as for the project.
5. Issue of mistrust
For the first time, when the technical specification in the R & D activities were altered
and were not informed to the customers, mistrust was seen. The requirement specification of the
customers were that the design should work for certain temperature range but for getting
approval on the project, Gary and Henry lied Lord Industries about the temperature constraints.
Second issues of mistrust occurred when the developing team at Parks Corporation implemented
new material for testing JXB-3 in the project. This JXB-3 material was first tested by Henry
Gables and Paul Evans and even Gary Anderson was unaware of it.
When Gary submitted the handout to Lord Industries, they were shocked to see the new
material that was being tested and was not informed prior testing. This a high level mistrust that
Lord Industries had on Parks Corporation. As a feedback Lord said that with other companies,

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they have a policy to arrange weekly meetings to get the update as Lord does not trust anyone.
But they were not doing that were Parks as Lord trusted them because of their prior project
earlier. But with their trust being affected, they were thinking of implementing the weekly
meeting policy with Parks as well. In the project, Lord was even uninformed about the increase
the project cost. Even after the project completion, the extra cost of the project was not informed
to Lords.
6. Review of Firm Fixed Price (FFP)
Firm Fixed price refers to a price that does not include any adjustments on the cost
experience basis of the contractor that is performed in this project (Eskerod and Jepsen 2016).
This contact provides a risk for the contractor and all the extra cost that the project might include
are responsibility of the contractor. This contract provides incentive for the contractor for
controlling the cost and perform efficiently in the project.
To impress the customers and to pass on the project contract to Parks, Gary included FFP
contract in the project. As this was a long term project and a large project, cost of the project will
differ to some extent as scheduled in the project cost timeline. Thinking of that Gary should not
have chosen this contract. Being an unexperienced project manager, Gary did not knew about
which project would be the best to carry out the project.
The best contract that Gary should have chosen Unit price contract. As to complete the
project, the project team members were working overtime and they were not paid for the
overtime they were spending in the laboratories or in making the reports (Young 2019). The
contract that Unit price contract provides is that the customer will pay on the basis of the time
that an employee for on that project. This would be profitable for Parks Corporation. They can
make preach hour the employee spend working for that particular project.

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7. Evaluation of project management
Initiation
Stage
Planning
Stage
Implementation
Stage
Closeout
Stage
Average
Scope
management
5 4 3 3 3.75
Time
management
4 4 3 3 3.5
Resource
management
4 3 3 2 3
Communication
management
3 2 1 1 1.75
Stakeholder
management
3 2 3 2 2.5
Risk
management
3 2 3 1 2.25
Contract and
Procurement
management
2 3 2 1 2
Note: 5 being highest and 1 being lowest score
As Gary was not able to manage the project properly, there were problems in each stage
of the project. The starting of the project was efficiently but at the project completion all things
were mashed up. Project manager was not able establish communication properly with the

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customer and there was even issue of trust among the customers and the contractors. This lead to
project completion delay. The bills for the procurement and the resources were also not paid in
time within the project because Gary was no able to communicate information among other
departments of the project.
8. Recommendations
The lessons that can be learnt from this project is handling project is responsibility of
project manager and has to make this team members work on project. Project manager needs to
document all the requirement and not down which job is to be assigned to which team and the
time schedule allocated for the team members to complete the project. There should be proper
communication process included in team members and with project manager. Project manager
also has the responsibility to arrange weekly meetings to get update on the work done and select
a proper contract that can profit the company.
There are certain recommendations provided below based on the learning from the
project.
1. Pinning down all the details of the project required.
2. Preparing the team to work and assign job accordingly.
3. The project leader’s roles are to be embraced while completing the project.
4. Project manager is expected to have an effective management of time.
5. The communication line are to be left open on either sides.
6. The project manager should do documentation of the project completion or should give
responsibility to some others who can document the project activities properly.

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7. Project scope and project risks are to be maintained.
8. After the project gets completed, the completed project is to be evaluated before handling over
to the customer.

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