Information Technology Project Management: Sydney Water

This report discusses the failed IT project of Customer Information and Billing System in Sydney Water Corporation. It explores the background of the company, the reasons for the project's failure, and provides recommendations for future projects.

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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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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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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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

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some of the major scope changes as well as few of the underestimation of time needed for the
respective system, testing of system integration as well as user acceptance. Sydney Water
Corporation then launched a legal action against their contractor PwC for the failure of this
IT project, CIBS. They dumped the project for its lengthy delays as well as huge blow out
within the anticipated costs of the system from the initial budget of 38.2 million dollars to
more than 135 million dollars (Cleland and Ireland 2004). Due to their poor management and
governance, they were unable to resolve the issues and hence the project became a major
failure.
The major criteria for such failure of the project are as follows:
i) Increase of Budget: The first and the foremost major criterion of the failure of this
specific project of Customer Information and Billing System is the increase of overall budget.
Sydney Water Corporation had given the contract to PwC and they incurred huge costs and
expenses for the project (Thomsett 2002). For this specific issue, they were unable to deal
with the subsequent constraints and the organization was forced to stop the project work after
two years.
ii) Lengthy Delays: The project of Customer Information and Billing System by
Sydney Water Corporation became a failure for another significant criterion. There was
excessive and significant delays in the project work and they were unable to overcome these
issues easily and promptly. According to the management and legal advisor of Sydney Water
Corporation this type of delay occurred for the involvement of PwC (Natovich 2003). The
contractor PwC incurred huge delays and this reason costs were increased to almost 135
million dollars.
iii) Lack of Proper Scope in Project Plan: This is the next important and significant
criterion of the failure of this specific project of Customer Information and Billing System of

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Sydney Water Corporation. The project plan lacked proper and relevant scope and hence they
were able to complete their work within time. The obligations of this specific organization
increased majorly and they were unable to deal with the issues subsequently (Christensen and
Overdorf 2000).
2.3 Analysis of the Case Study on the basis of the Identified Criteria
The several information technology objectives or goals are easily fulfilled with the
help of this type of project management (Devos, Landeghem and Deschoolmeester 2008).
This is also required for better management of confidential data or information and
implementation of the IT services. A successful information technology project management
is responsible for making the project either successful or a major failure. Numerous such
projects have been registered in all over the world that depicts that the project became failure
or successful in respect to IT project management (Chua 2009). Moreover, there are some of
the core issues, which could cause any particular project to fail and the factors, which could
subsequently negatively affect the overall success criteria of the IT project majorly involve
changes in the infrastructure impacting data management and security management,
advancement in the technology while executing the project as well as unknown dependent
relations amongst the data, network infrastructure, software and hardware.
Sydney Water Corporation was unable to proper disclose the actual status of the CIBS
or Customer Information and Billing System project (Davis 2013). The nature and
complexity of the IT projects was inevitably over the budget and was delayed. They also
believed that the respective commentary on the CIBS annual report did not properly
discharge obligations of Sydney Water Corporation for the accountability. There were three
distinct criteria for project failure, which were lengthy delays, increase of costs and lack of
scope (Berntsson-Svensson and Aurum 2006). According to certain research, the approach of

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the respective organization to the project of CIBS eventually stand up well for the objective
scrutiny, however there were clearly several drawbacks within the execution by contractors.
After analysing the failure of CIBS project with SDLC approach, it is being observed
that in the project planning phase, Sydney Water Corporation should have confirmed the
project feasibility like technical, organizational, economic, schedule and resource feasibility
(Thomas and Fernandez 2008). However, it turned out that the technologies selected was
made up for making an incompatible and complex system. Moreover, they should have done
a feasibility analysis for understanding the entire scope of the project, however, due to lack of
this feasibility, the scope was not clear and the project became failure (Cooke-Davies 2002).
In the analysis phase, they should have gathered information, however PwC admitted that
inadequate time was spent in analysis and they did not get enough time to build up prototypes
and thus project specifications were insufficient (Marchewka 2012). This resulted in major
increase in project delays and expenses.
3. Conclusion
Therefore, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that IT project management
is one of the major and the most significant requirements in an organization for managing
their information technology projects. One of such significant and popular example of a case
study is the subsequent failure of CIBS within Sydney Water Corporation. This particular
organization has incurred major legal as well as related expenses that were associated with
the litigation. The above provided report has clearly outlined a detailed discussion on the
failure criteria of this typical project by identification of failure criteria and proper analysis.
4. Suitable Recommendations for Future
The major recommendations or suggestions for the project of Customer Information
and Billing System in Sydney Water Corporation to re run in the future are as follows:

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i) Detailed Estimation of Project Costs: The first and the foremost recommendation
or suggestion for CIBS project in future is to make a detailed estimation of their project costs.
This specific project became a major failure since the budget of the project was over shooted
to almost 135 million dollars and hence with a proper budget planning, they can avoid this
issue in future.
ii) Agreement with Legal Constraints: The second important and significant
recommendation or suggestion for the project of Customer Information and Billing System in
Sydney Water Corporation to re run in future is to make a proper agreement with legal
constraints that there should not be any type of delay in the project, like similar occurred with
PwC. This is required for maintenance of a proper and efficient time period to complete the
work and if the contractor violates the agreement and excessive time is undertaken, strict
legal actions will be taken against them.
iii) Proper Project Planning: Another subsequent recommendation or suggestion for
the project of Customer Information and Billing System in Sydney Water Corporation to re
run in future is to make a proper as well as effective project plan that comprises of perfect
scope and user acceptance as well as time of testing the system integration. This type of
effective project planning even ensures that no extra cost is being incurred in the project.

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References
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Berntsson-Svensson, R and Aurum, A 2006, ‘Successful software project and products: An
empirical investigation, International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering’,
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Christensen, CM and Overdorf, M 2000, ‘Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change’,
Harvard Business Review, March-April, pp.66-76.
Chua, AYK 2009, ‘Exhuming IT Projects from their Graves: An analysis of eight failure
cases and their risk factors’, Journal of Computer Information Systems, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 22-
30
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