Project Leadership Challenges: Hyundai Software Project at IBM

This project assignment explores the leadership challenges encountered in a software development project at IBM, specifically for a project involving 1430 sales representatives at Hyundai Motor Company. The assignment highlights key challenges such as leadership styles and competencies, change adaptation, communication of vision and objectives, and managing a complex web of stakeholders. The project involves a ten-person team, six remote developers, and a freelance writer, increasing the complexity of communication and coordination. The analysis covers the project's lifecycle phases, including initiation, execution, and closure, and provides recommendations for future projects, such as establishing effective communication plans and ensuring stakeholder involvement. The project emphasizes the importance of proper planning, communication schedules, and feedback mechanisms to address these challenges. The solution provides insights into how to address these issues and improve the project's outcome. The project also emphasizes the importance of a well-defined communication plan, proper stakeholder management, and the need to adapt to changes during different phases of the project's lifecycle. The assignment details how to overcome these challenges and provides recommendations for future projects facing similar issues.

Project Leadership
Challenges
Project Development at IBM

Project brief
 Leading the software development team as the leading software
developer at IBM.
 The system would be used by over 1430 sales representatives at
Hyundai Motor Company
 A lot of people is need to be dealt with from different positions and
from different organizations.
 This is the first leading project form the software developer.
 Establishing a communication plan is required

Information about the leadership
plan
 Planning for Leadership and communication
 The manager and the sponsor has agreed to share status reports
every week to keep them aware of the project
 To make the salesperson be aware of the situation, software will help
them improve their sales and commissions
 The project would work with six vendor-based contract developers
that will help the team develop the code for the software
 The six developers are not physically located near the project area
but are in Australia and in India
 A freelance writer works with the ten-person project team to write the
help system content for the application

Key leadership challenges for the
project
 1. Leadership styles and competencies
 The primary problem would be the selection of the proper leadership style
for the management of the project
 It is the first instance of the developer to lead a management project with
vast range of people coming from varied organizations
 The building of trust and personal accountability would be a problem being
a first time leader

Key leadership challenges for the
project
 2. Change adaptation and keeping project on track
 There would be so many different activities going on the project that
leading a change in the project would be difficult to implement
 The utilization of the ideas to keep each of the stakeholders be informed
about the project progression would be necessary for keeping the project
on track
 Understanding the information management and vast range of stakeholder
engagement to the project would be challenging

Key leadership challenges for the
project
 3. Communication of vision/objectives
 As important it is to make the people in the project be associated with the
generated information, it is challenging given the wide range of numerous
stakeholders, including the manager and the project sponsors to
communicate easily.
 Challenges would be there to identify the proper way to communicate the
vision or the objectives of the project to deliver the software for the sales
representatives to use.

Key leadership challenges for the
project
 4. Complexity of managing stakeholders
 One of the most important and difficult process in the project is to manage
the stakeholders.
 Complexity increases with the number of stakeholders involved.
 The end product users or product consumers are total 1430 except the
project manager and the sponsors and the 10-people team.
 Managing every stakeholder and keeping them posted would be difficult.

Tackling these challenges during different
phases of the project’s lifecycle
 Initiation phase: Proper planning of project communication must be
done as well as alongside the primary project budget and schedule
planning. A fixed investment for the communication must also be
initiated for feasibly communicating the project information.

Tackling these challenges during different
phases of the project’s lifecycle
 Communication schedule and plan: This would be necessary and
easier to implement with the understanding of the project team
members. Every member must provide a proper plan as schedule for
not just the fulfillment of the task but for also evaluating the
documented information about the project progression. This would be
communicated to all the stakeholders through periodical meetings or
information sharing.

Tackling these challenges during different
phases of the project’s lifecycle
 Project execution and closure phase: After the execution of the
project, there can be feedback taken from the users and other
stakeholders to suggest if any changes required. Before the project is
closed and handed over, changes can be made repeatedly as per the
stakeholders’ likings.

Recommendations for future
projects with similar challenges
 Changes must be informed
 Proper communication must be set
 Every means of communication needs to be initiated
 The sponsors should understand the project communication
importance
 The leaders would provide the vision for changes and communication
in the project planning phase to all the team members.

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