Project Success or Failure Criteria – Case study

Project Success or Failure Criteria – Case study
Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................2
Background of the company..................................................................................................................2
Project success / failure criteria.............................................................................................................3
Analysis of case.....................................................................................................................................6
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................9
Recommendations.................................................................................................................................9
References...........................................................................................................................................10
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Project Success or Failure Criteria – Case study
Introduction
This report is prepared primarily to understand how a real-life project could be analysed from
the view point of project management. This report would also discuss many different
theoretical constructs that helps determine an appropriate project resolution, their success
factors as well as failure factors. In order to understand, how these factors affect the success
of project management, an implementation of ERP in Rolls Royce corporation was
considered.
Background of the company
Rolls Royce is a British corporation that designs and develops Aircraft engines and is
currently the second largest in the world. Apart from that, Rolls Royce also designs and
manufactures luxury vehicles. The company is now wholly owned by Rolls Royce PLC. Over
the period of time, Rolls Royce has become a global organization with operation that spans
across several countries and has over 14 services. Rolls Royce has developed over 1500
different IT programs that is quite difficult and expensive to operate.
Now, these 1500 different systems did not operate seamlessly, did not give consistent data
and were not tightly integrated with another. For instance, Rolls Royce developed MERLIN
for managing their logistics but this system lacked any communication whatsoever with IBS
which was their manufacturing system. There were many such instances where their
multitude of systems lacked cohesiveness. As a result, the company planned to launch an
ERP system which will integrate all of the other systems.
Case
Rolls-Royce also had planned an implementation of a specific ERP solution that was
provided to them by SAP. This also involved an implementation of R/3 Package from SAP.
This soltion involved a tight integration of all different functional process of Rolls Royce that
included but were not limited to Financial systems, Supply Chain, HR systems among others.
Rolls Royce also went ahead to hire EDS for managing the entire project whereas SAP
remained their ERP solution provider. Afterwards, a project team was created and then
further segregated into smaller teams for better management. Every business unit were given
freedom to prepare a plan for required activities and then post that a release strategy was
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Project Success or Failure Criteria – Case study
defined that involved validation, cleaning, identification etc of legacy data and also acquiring
of new hardware. The project was divided in three different phases and was expected to get
completed within 1998 to 2000. A steering committee was also created to help and assist in
financial guidance.
Project success / failure criteria
13 different factors were defined by the Jiang which included as follows:
 Clear Goals: Goals included the philosophy and project mission that helps
determine the goals of the project team.
 Competent Project Management: It was very important that the project manager
be well experienced and well versed with these kind of project and must possess
the adequate skillsets required to handle such a type of project.
 Management support: The project needs to get a nod from the top management
and executives of the organization.
 Communication channel: An appropriate communication strategy must be adopted
for communication and a commonly defined channel must be used to
communication information such as project progress, risks, feedbacks, issues and
status.
 Responsiveness: The PM must be responsive at all times to the client and must
keep them updated with the project.
 Competent team: The team members must be competent, available and must have
experience with such kind of projects.
 Good Resource allocation: Resources such as time, finance, human resources
should be allocated to the project appropriately.
 Control Mechanism: The project must have an effective control mechanism.
 Client acceptance: The client should accept the project and must understand the
importance and should accept the deliverables in a positive manner.
 Feedback capabilities: Formal channels for accepting feedbacks in connection to
project status and reviews needs to be established such that the team members are
able to provide their feedback quickly and effectively.
 Technical Tasks: Technologies used in the development needs to be efficient as
well as reviews provided by consultants as well as project manager should be put
in use within the project.
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Project Success or Failure Criteria – Case study
 Management of Trouble-shooting: Project team members needs to have a method
to record issues with the project and needs to be encouraged by the PM to seek
solutions for any kind of problems independently.
Based on the Chaos report, any outcome of the project could be easily divided in three
different resolutions and they include project success, challenges and impairment.
Success of a project: When any project is completed within the allocated budget and time
and has fulfilled all the desired requirements, it is considered a success.
Challenges of a project: When any project that is completed and is also operation with
majority of requirements but has exceeded either budget or time then it could labelled as
‘Challenged’ project.
Impairment of a project: When any project that has been cancelled during it’s lifecycle.
Then such projects are labelled as impaired.
The Chaos report would define both failure and success factors which include:
Success:
• User Involvement: For any kind of project that can be successful the needs and
requirements of the user must be met and if at any time they are unable to achieve
this, then the project will turn out to be a failure (Salmon, 2009)
• Managerial Support: Support from the top-level management is essential for the
project (Attarzadeh, 2008).
• Clear Requirements: Any base level of requirements never work in such complex
and large projects and thus the requirement specifications need to be detailed. If the
requirements are not detailed, then problem is likely to occur in later stages of the
project (Nelson, 2007)
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