Critical Evaluation of a Real World Project

Running head: CRITICAL EVALUATION OF A REAL WORLD PROJECT
Critical evaluation of a real world project: “ERP implementation failure in HP”
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1CRITICAL EVALUATION OF A REAL WORLD PROJECT
1. Background of the company and the selected project case
Most often it is realized that, success or failure of any project is dependent on certain
criteria. During the project planning and implementation phase if the project associates fail to
identify all success criteria professionally then the project would fail to meet its objectives, goals
and aims. For successful critical evaluation the project that has been nominated is “ERP
implementation failure in HP”. HP is an American multinational corporation (headquarter
located in Palo Alto, United States. The company offers their product and software services to
different sectors like health, education and government also. In the year of 1983, David Packard
and Bill Hewlett had initiated their business of the electronic instrument company as HP in
California. The first equipment that HP developed was resistance capacity audio oscillator. This
equipment was designed and implemented to test different sound equipments.
In the year of 2004, the HP globally reported huge financial loss that was attributed by
certain challenges faced by the migration to a centralized ERP system. In order to implement the
ERP system whatever cost has been estimated was increased five times more. The company gave
this responsibility to an internal investigation team to check the cause for this huge loss. The
causes are not related to the system application product software. However, the ERP project
failed due to the execution of project for migrating to a centralized ERP system at North
America. The goal of the project was to allow all their consumers to place orders with one
delivery date and invoice. However before the implementation of the project the higher authority
of HP ignored all the valuable suggestions give by their employees. They warned the developers
regarding the migration challenges that become apparent once problem were challenging of
orders. The issues of order backlogs occurred as all the data from the older system were failed to

2CRITICAL EVALUATION OF A REAL WORLD PROJECT
get transferred to the new system. The company stopped spending additional money to fulfill
order by way of the flights and all direct orders through the distributors for speeding all the
things up. HP promised their consumers that these operational errors are all under control but
they failed to resolve those. In order to resolve these functional errors they were needed to
collaborate the IT and business group appropriate.
2. Discussion on standard criteria
The goal of the project is to allow their consumers to place order from various systems
and combine the orders into one order with one delivery date and feedback. There are some other
issues identified for this project include data integration, demand forecasting issues, poor
planning and improper system testing, constitution of the project team and inadequate training
between the project team members and inadequate implementation.
The above mentioned factors are very essential for project success though these are not
properly managed and considered by HP during the ERP implementation period. In order to
implement the ERP project the project head and company were required to consider and maintain
the above mentioned criteria but they failed to maintain this, As a result the ERP implementation
project for HP failed. Due to poor project planning and inadequate testing facilities the
employees and consumers were dissatisfied. It results bad reputation that makes loss in revenue
around $400 Million and loss in implementation cost. HP failed to give competition to both IBM
and Dell. The success of ERP implementation is dependent on planning that might have
considered the technical aspects along with business processes. The HP again failed to build into
the incident plan to have a manual backup for keeping orders graceful.

3CRITICAL EVALUATION OF A REAL WORLD PROJECT
2.1 Iron triangle
In order to successfully implement any project the project manager requires considering
triple project constraints in terms of project cost, time and scope management. It is responsibility
of the project manager to complete the project scope within estimated time and budget. The iron
triangle defines an idea regarding how important the triple project constraints are for managing
projects. The financial constraints of the project are also known as project budget. The scope
developed for the project requires meeting the project scope within the assigned timeline. While
implementing the ERP project, HP needed to estimate their cost through several methods such as
historic data, resource costs, bottom up, parametric, vendor bid, quality analysis, reserve etc.
Though, the project scope was designed appropriately by HP but the needful factors that
are to be considered for this implementation were not being followed professionally. According
to PMBOK project management practices, time management is referred to as one of the most
crucial project management knowledge area that needed to be followed by the project manager
and project team members. The project head of HP failed to consider proper cost and time
management plan as a result the project failed to meet the expectation of the consumers and the
employees as well. It has been determined that, commercial success of ERP implementation
project is partly dependent on project planning details. This also needed ot consider business
processes along with the technical perspectives.
3. Critical identification and justification of the criteria
After analyzing the detail ERP implementation project of HP it is defined that, the
products of HP are always excellent in their quality as well as reasonable price range. The
organizational structure of HP is highly decentralized and the business units were completely