Queensland Health Project Failure: A Case Study

Queensland Health
The case of project failure

Project Information
Queensland Health project faced failure while
implementing the IS operations.
The project was 18 months behind the scheduled time
frame and the costs exceeded the budget amount by
300% (Eden & Sedera, 2014).
 It affected resource allocation capabilities and
retention of the employees due to issues in the payrolls
and rostering of the workforce.
The total costs that were incurred by the organization
were estimated to be around $1.25 billion AUD. On the
other hand, the mismanagement of the project due to
lack of communication affected collaborations (Eden
&Sedera, 2014).

Introduction
 The organization, Queensland Health, is a public sector health care
provider, which is located in Queensland, Australia. The organization
aimed at providing different healthcare facilities like dental, medical
and aged-care in the diversified regions of the nation.
 The organization formerly utilized LATTICE and ESP (Environment for
Scheduling Personnel) for rostering and paying off their employees
(Eden and Sedera (2014).
 In 2008, the existing LATTICE system became obsolete. The
organization thereby installed the latest software to control their
payroll operations. Shared Services Initiative (SSI) was implemented
in order to support the smooth functioning. IBM forwarded the
utilization of “Workbrain” rostering system, which is a complex
method. It required intervention of manual labor through
implementation of SAP and ABAP programming language. The efforts
of the manual transactions failed to comply with the IS standards
which resulted to the loss of the Queensland Health project (Abbasi et
al., 2014).

Major Issues
Complexity of the project design affected governance
The case of project failure of Queensland Health is related to the
complexity in the design of the project and lack of formalized
project management strategy.
Lack of formal approach in strategy formulation and vague goals
of the organization have affected the project outcomes.
Lack of efficient communication between the stakeholders
Lack of efficient communication within IBM, Queensland Health
and CorpTech resulted to gaps in coordination while operating
on the common goal of the business to implement SSI
 Lack of discussion with the stakeholders on the objectives of
the venture would have helped the Queensland Health in
managing the project parameters more efficiently.