Information Technology Project Management: Sydney Water

Running head: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Information Technology Project Management: Sydney Water
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note:

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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
1. Introduction............................................................................................................................2
2. Discussion..............................................................................................................................2
2.1 Background of the Company and Brief Discussion on the Failed IT Project..................2
2.2 Identification, Discussion and Justification of the Appropriate Criteria for Measuring
the Selected Failed IT Project................................................................................................3
2.3 Analysis of the Case Study on the basis of the Identified Criteria...................................5
3. Conclusion..............................................................................................................................6
4. Suitable Recommendations for Future...................................................................................6
References..................................................................................................................................8

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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROJECT MANAGEMENT
1. Introduction
IT or information technology project management can be referred to a significant
procedure to plan, organize and delineate responsibility for the core purpose of completing
the respective information technology objectives of an organization (Larson and Gray 2017).
Information technology project management eventually involves overseeing of projects for
better data management, hardware installations, business analytics, software development,
implementation of information technology services, virtualization roll outs and even cloud
computing (Mir and Pinnington 2013). The following report outlines a brief discussion on a
failed information technology project in Sydney Water Corporation with proper details.
2. Discussion
2.1 Background of the Company and Brief Discussion on the Failed IT Project
Sydney Water Corporation or simply Sydney Water is the largest water provider in all
over Australia. It is a New South Wales government owned statutory corporation, which is
responsible for providing portable drinking water, portable waste water and even few of the
storm water services to some of the major regions of New South Wales, Australia such as
region of Blue Mountains, the Illawarra and also Greater Metropolitan Sydney
(Sydneywater.com.au. 2019). The entire supply management of this particular organization is
responsible for providing several services to the customers and hence making it one of the
most significant and innovation water supply organization in the entire Australia. They have
three distinctive principal objectives, which involve protection of the public health, protection
of surrounding environment and finally to become a successful business, which shows a
proper sense of corporate social responsibility (Fowler, Horan and Cope 2007). Sydney
Water Corporation have successfully accomplished few of the significant projects like 90
million dollars up gradation of Cornell sewage treatment plan, 460 million dollars Alliance

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INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROJECT MANAGEMENT
for the North Side Storage Tunnel, performance management system, online transaction
system, customer relationship management, quality management system and many more.
Customer Information and Billing System or CIBS project is considered as one of the
largest IT project that Sydney Water Corporation has even executed (Atkinson 1999). The
main objective of this particular project was to improvise the service to their customers, to
efficiently fill up the gaps within previously existing information systems and even providing
subsequent business efficiencies. The Customer Information and Billing System project
needed to integrate with twelve existing major internal business system and for this purpose
they contracted PwC in the year of June, 2000 for building as well as implementing the
project (Yeo 2002). There were three distinctive releases of this particular project of CIBS,
which were R1, R2 and R3. R1 or release 1 included a tool for servicing their customers, R2
or release 2 included electronic interaction with the commercial land developer and finally
R3 or release 3 included a substantial phase of this project and it was the major customer and
billing engine (Schwalbe 2014). The components of R1 and R2 were deployed, however R2
did not achieve complete functionality.
2.2 Identification, Discussion and Justification of the Appropriate Criteria for
Measuring the Selected Failed IT Project
The organization of Sydney Water Corporation terminated this project of Customer
Information and Billing System on 30th October 2002 (Lim and Mohamed 1999). This
specific project was not reaching to acceptable standards and that there were major delays
and huge budget overshooting. The management of Sydney Water Corporation expected this
project of CIBS to be operational within February 2002 within the cost of 38 million dollars,
however before they undertook the decision to cease the project, this budget increased to
more than 60 million dollars, although a further revision was pending (Duncan 2004). They
were able to understand the reason behind the budget overshooting, which was that there was