PRJ5001 Project Management Profession Case Study 3 Sample
Business Case Study Analysis
Assessment 3 Detail
The case study on Queensland Health and Payroll System will assess students’ knowledge of key content areas of PRJ5001, adequate Initiation, Planning and stakeholder engagement. For successful completion of the assessment, students are required to research on the case study and analyse it to provide an evaluation of reasons for controversy of this project attributable to lack of adequate care in project initiation, planning and stakeholder engagement and recommend improvements based on content/theories learnt in PRJ5001. The improvements need to focus on project initiation, planning and stakeholder engagement for this assignment. Students will have to research and find further information on the case study and related articles. Students are also required to review 4 relevant publications as part of this assignment and analyse/critique them for relevance to project initiation, planning and stakeholder engagement in context to the project induced problems from project management perspective.
Guideline for evaluating the Case Study and writing Critical Review (word count is indicative), Part A: ? Introduce the project (~ 200 words) ? Elaborate on the reasons for controversy (~ 300 words) ? Review 4 articles and critique them for relevance to project initiation, planning and stakeholder engagement in context to the case study. (~ 800 words – 200 words each) ? Provide critical review and evaluation of reasons for controversy attributable to lack of adequate care in project initiation, planning and stakeholder engagement (~ 300 words) ? Recommend what could have been done to improve the lack of adequate care in project initiation, planning and stakeholder engagement (~ 300 words) ? Conclusion (~ 100 words).
Solution
Introduction: This report is based on project management. The report is controversial, and the case study is based on the Queensland Health and Payroll System. Undoubtedly this project failed. This project lacks the expected results of Payroll application and implementation. University Assignment Help, Also, the lack of proper use of project management tools has led to the failure of this project. A number of legal, audit and administration aspects of this project have been reviewed. It proves that there are several significant reasons behind the failure of the project, or needless to say, there are several gaps that hinder the completion of the project. Due to a lack of proper planning, the project goes beyond the budget. Queensland Health is moving towards the early stages of rostering system implementation in 2010 with the goal of building a replacement system for existing payrolls. The project was adopted as well as implemented by Corptech, under the subsidiary of the State Treasury. The management team failed to deliver the project on time, which took more than two years but still, the project team failed to provide an immaculate payroll system. This report provides a critical analysis based on project management errors, and the reasons for project failure are also reviewed throughout the report.
Elaborate on the reasons for controversy:
There are many reasons behind this project which are causing controversy; these reasons are shown in this report. The project has failed due to some lack of time, budget etc., and either level of disappointment is working as a result. It is nothing less than a disaster. As a result of the shortcomings and lack of a management system from the very beginning, the project failed. The reasons are -
1. Insufficient Calculation- The main reason for the failure of this project is the management system, such a large project needed to handle such proper management. The project had 24000 types of wage payments, more than 8000 workers and the work was handed over under 13 contractors (Chisnall 2018). To prevent the failure of the project, IBM adopted a seven-month development plan for this project. The first two weeks of these seven months are spent just to find out the business requirements. Moreover, the lack of objectives leads to project controversy.
2. Inexperienced Leadership- It failed despite being associated with a popular global digital company like IBM, and it was IBM Australia's first work to handle such a large project. It is proven that it was not a suitable project for IBM to handle, and QHS was Australia's most complex agency (Robinson, Hearne & Lawlor-Wright 2020).
3. Players Cutting- Despite numerous board oversight and agency interventions and divisive work, it has created confusion that has resulted in unfulfilled stakeholder expectations and rendered everyone ineffective (Bennett 2018) -
? The Project Development Office.
? The Queensland Health Enterprise Solution Transition.
? Steering committee and
? Release Steering Committee.
Also, the Payroll program cost 101 million when it went live in 2010 but still did not work according to the system (Dunleavy & Evans 2019). The state also spent a lot of money on this failed project which has zero results. The state employs IBM, but that doesn't work. Many attempts failed, and controversy arose.
Review articles: According to the demand of this assignment, issues are related to 4 articles that were reviewed on the basis of initiation, planning and stakeholders management of the Queensland health and payroll system case study project.
1. Initiation: According to the observation of (Al-Nabae & Sammani 2021), project management practices are crucial because the effectiveness of project management begins with the integration of processes in ensuring performance enhancement. The project started with the purpose of this production as a government initiative to set higher standards for corporate service operations as well as reducing the cost of acquisition, IT manpower and licensing and presenting low cost to the government. The initiative is managed by CorpTech, which was under the Queensland Treasury, and in August 2007, IBM Australia was appointed as the main contractor for the allotment. As stated in the article, project management faces a number of challenges that require them to enhance their workforce to compete globally, as the workforce is recognized as a key component of organizations. Due to changes in 47 business requirements, the cost of the contract paid to IBM alone increased fourfold from $ 6.19 million to $ 21 million. In the case of Queensland, there is a considerable gap in project performance which is referred to as triple constraints; these are cost, time and quality. Attempts to measure project effectiveness require clear definitions and accurate measurements to properly understand as well as monitor project activities.
2. Planning: According to Lane F Donnelly's article, proper use of project success and sustainable quality management tools can bring fruitful experience in project improvement (Donnelly 2017). In 2010 March, Queensland Health completed the first phase regarding the implementation of a new two-stage rostering as well as a payroll solution plan. The duration of the project for the distribution of live systems was only eight months. On the opposite side, the predecessor of the live system, LATTICE, was introduced in 6 years, step by step (Dawber et al. 2017). Without structural methods, the chances of success are much lower. Donnelly presented in his article that an unstructured process and aimless planning can never lead a project to success. Due to a lack of proper planning, the project took more than two years and over 300% of the budget. The project should aim at overcoming any obstacles and progressing toward the established deadlines that are lacking in the Queensland health and payroll system. Significant customizations were made, including SAP as well as Workbrain, along with more than one thirty manual workplaces. These, in turn, initiate significant complications in the administration of the system that affect the functioning of the system. A key element to achieving success in a quality-improvement project is to define a proper plan.
3. Stakeholders management: According to the article of (Rezvani and Khosravi, 2019), despite improvements in the use of project management tools and strategies, many projects still fail to meet their goals. Queensland is a notable example of such a project. Arguments and lack of proper interaction with stakeholders often lead the project in the wrong direction, as seen in the case study of the Queensland payroll system project. The Auditor-General said in the case of project stakeholders that both parties ignored all the signs of the project without taking precautions in the face of serious adversity. As supported in this article, an early warning can be referred to as a broad concept that can be applied in any situation where finding specific clues at an early stage to prevent unwanted potential outcomes is crucial for future projects. Instead of taking decisive action to reset the project or keep it in a stable way, they have changed or reduced the boundaries that were set for protection. For a system as well as integration testing that IBM will provide, auditors find serious and significant errors in 1 and 2; The effectiveness of 90 test cases was suspended, and the test case was unable to be mapped to the Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM). Lastly, IBM became a failure in performance tests.
(Houghton et al. 2016) stated in the article that Corptech was well-known as well as skilled among other groups or contractors involved in the Queensland Department of Health's pay system. The main purpose of Corptech is to oversee aspects of the full implementation of strategies that are related to the payroll system within all departments of the government of Queensland, implement SAP strategies as a human resources (HR) practice, and perform work brain solutions and formulate major contractor management. The Department of Health uses a balanced scorecard method to measure the value of IT investments, but there is no doubt that this model has not been changed to take into account inter-departmental projects. In order to secure appropriate shaping as well as minimize risk, the parties hired an external auditor, KJ Ross & Associates, to verify the IT industry-standard test results, but the test was incomplete, and the test departure criteria were not sufficient (Mickan, Dawber & Hulcombe 2018). It is clear that the management team must maintain the technical feasibility to deal with the technical problems that arise and to find the right solution in the day-to-day management to successfully complete the project (Ma et al. 2018). The gaps in the Queensland project provide a lesson for the future about how much loss can be noticed without proper use of project management tools.
A critical review of controversy: Huge flaws remain in project implementation, planning and stakeholder management, as a result of which the project's failure is revealed. Those aspects will be analyzed here -
? Project Initiation- In 2010, Queensland Health released an implementation that was two-tiered. The project was launched in March for the implementation of the new payroll. The project is an initiative to launch a new pay system in collaboration with workbain and SAP. The Treasury Department assists in the management system of government agencies across the state. This was also done in the case of this project. Yet, the project is deficient and costs more than 300 per cent of the budget. With that, the management failed to pay 76000 employees (Carlton & Peszynski 2018).
? Planning- There was a lack of legal and administrative oversight during the planning of the project. Numerous technical discussions have taken place by attracting various experts and organizations. Yet it fails, and that's it. Development of ineffective projects, purposeless business requirements and non-compliance with business rules and regulations are responsible for failure. This project would have been better completed if business process discovery, modelling, and optimization methods had been completed in consultation with stakeholders. There was also a need to add more terms for both stakeholders and outsiders. Apart from that, a suitable business suit could be launched for taking all the processes and monitoring and understanding.
? Stakeholder management- The stakeholders involved in this project are -
1. Several groups of Queensland Health who joined as customers - QHIC, QHEST, Stabilization team, Share service providers.
2. CorpTech joined the payroll system as contract managers.
3. IBM, They were joined as contractors.
4. Premier and Cabinet department.
5. Public Treasury and Works department.
The parties agreed to complete the proper implementation of this project and to reduce the various risks related to the project. KJ Ross was hired as an external auditor for its standard testing verification (Carlton 2018). It was later found that the test was incomplete, and its results were not properly verified.
Recommendation: This report identifies some functional areas and requires some business processes. These are:
? Project management and Governance.
? Definition of business requirements.
? Dependency of Interface.
? Subcontractor management.
? Change Configuration management and Control management.
? Assurance of data quality.
? Monitor the life cycle of project development.
The challenges that this project faced have already been discussed. In that case, QH needed to be more agile, which required verification of shared responsibilities between business professionals and IT professionals. There was also a need for cooperation, consolidation, etc. When the government agreed on this model, it should have monitored a process so that everyone could complete their work on time.
If a BPM suite had been used to review this work, the various flaws in the QH project could have been fixed, as discussed below:
? Separate officials were identified before managing and successfully completing the plan. There were also many organizations and people involved in its decision making. Also, the structure of IBM and QH was changed many times.
? Clearly published business requirements, documentation could easily reduce the 47 changes that were supposed to happen, resulting in a waste of money, time, etc.
? The payroll system was cleared and agreed upon, but by then, it was too late. It was started in 2009, but the Go Live date was in 2008.
? The organizations under the Governance that were involved in the project did not have a compilation of business documents and no original or copy of the paperwork. This aspect should have been noticed by the management.
? Managers and senior officers could be told in advance about the following matters-
1. Lack of proper document ation.
2. The traceability matrix was rejected.
3. System and the results were unstable.
Conclusion:
This project is recognized as a complete failure project. Despite the intervention of a large company like IBM and the help and opinions of various government and independent companies, such a large project has failed. The reason for this has been realized, and it has been found that the recklessness of the management, carelessness is mainly responsible for it. Also, without proper planning, the go-live of such a big project is given in a hurry. Quick decisions are rarely successful. However, it will remain a big lesson in their minds.
References:
Bennett, E.A, 2018, Voluntary sustainability standards: a squandered opportunity to improve workers' wages. Sustainable Development, 26(1), pp.65-82. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/sd.1691
Carlton, D, and Peszynski, K, 2018, June, Situational Incompetence: the failure of Governance in the management of large scale IT projects, In International Working Conference on Transfer and Diffusion of IT (pp. 224-244). Springer, Cham. https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/situational-incompetence-an-investigation-into-the-causes-of-failure-of-a-large-scale-it-project/
Carlton, D., 2018, Situational incompetence: An investigation into the causes of failure of a large-scale it project, Dark sides of organizational behavior and leadership. https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/situational-incompetence-an-investigation-into-the-causes-of-failure-of-a-large-scale-it-project/
Chisnall, M., 2018, Why Do Major Collaborative ICT Projects in Government Fail?: A Post-structuralist Interpretation, with Reference to the Queensland Shared Services (Doctoral dissertation, University of Canberra). https://researchsystem.canberra.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/42378792/Full_text.pdf
Dawber, J, Crow, N, Hulcombe, J and Mickan, S., 2017, A realist review of allied health management in Queensland Health: What works, in which contexts and why. https://www.health.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/691431/ah-mgmt-in-qh.pdf
Donnelly, L.F, 2017, Avoiding failure: tools for successful and sustainable quality-improvement projects. Pediatric radiology, 47(7), pp.793-797. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00247-017-3823-z.pdf
Dunleavy, P, and Evans, M, 2019, Australian administrative elites and the challenges of digital-era change. Journal of Chinese Governance, 4(2), pp.181-200. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Patrick-Dunleavy/publication/331800961_Australian_administrative_elites_and_the_challenges_of_digital-era_change/links/5c8c677092851c1df94469e3/Australian-administrative-elites-and-the-challenges-of-digital-era-change.pdf
Houghton, R.J, White, C, Golightly, D, and Wilson, J.R, 2016, Span of control in supervision of rail track work. Cognition, Technology & Work, 18(2), pp.361-378. https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/preview/781602/HoughtonWhiteGolightlyWilson_SoCRAIL.pdf
Ma, X, Xiong, F, Olawumi, T.O, Dong, N, and Chan, A.P, 2018, Conceptual framework and roadmap approach for integrating BIM into lifecycle project management. Journal of Management in Engineering, 34(6), p.05018011. http://ira.lib.polyu.edu.hk/bitstream/10397/78061/1/Ma_Conceptual_Framework_BIM.pdf
Mickan, S, Dawber, J, and Hulcombe, J, 2018, Realist evaluation of allied health management in Queensland: what works, in which contexts and why. Australian Health Review, 43(4), pp.466-473. https://www.publish.csiro.au/ah/AH17265
Rezvani, A, and Khosravi, P, 2019, Identification of failure factors in large scale complex projects: an integrative framework and review of emerging themes. International Journal of Project Organisation and Management, 11(1), pp.1-21. https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1504/IJPOM.2019.098723
Robinson, A, Hearne, P, and Lawlor-Wright, T, 2020, The impact of the dark side of leadership on project followers. https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/5944/1/Robinson_Impact-of-dark-side-leadership-BAM-2020.pdf
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