Known Risks
Lucent had set an objective to deploy a new Call Server to its locations in five different countries. They identified a series of risks that needed mitigation in order for the project to succeed. First, due to the location of the offices, they knew that time zones would complicate live communications between project teams. There was no common business time across all five locations. As a result, someone within the locations had to participate in the update calls after their local business hours. In order to ensure fairness across the team, they rotated the time of the call so that the members took turns participating after hours.
In addition, Lucent determined that about 20 percent of the time, one of the groups working on the project would be away on vacation or holiday. The scheduling group was able to collect this information in advance and incorporate it into the project schedule. As a result, the scheduling team was able to build a timeline that was appropriate to resource availability. Lucent further developed contingencies into the schedule to accommodate sick time and personal leaves for its project team members.
Most of the balance of the known risks focused on technical issues. Lucent was well aware of the technical challenges with the new Call Server deployment and they developed a top notch team of technical support analysts to address any issues that might come up during the early stages of the deployment.
However, as the project developed, Lucent identified additional risks that were unknown to them during the initial project-planning phase. Their inability to respond effectively to the unknown risk events are the key problems that contributed to its project failure.
Unknown Risks
Lucent had identified the need to have a local project manager in each of the five locations. The local project manager would manage the daily operations of project execution and would report updates and additional risks to the overall project manager. However, Lucent did not anticipate that the skill level of the local project managers would vary and their different approaches would cause inconsistencies across the execution phase. In addition, the project managers and the project teams were unclear about roles and responsibilities, creating additional con fusion across the project teams. The overall project manager lacked authority and credibility with the local project teams in each location. Instead of a collective global team, they functioned like five separate teams. As a result, the project developed in five slightly different directions and created unnecessary confusion and complexity across the project teams.
The centralized technical support team became another key problem. Lucent did not staff the support team to align with the local time zones of the five project teams. As a result, the team was overwhelmed during times with business hours overlapped. In addition, the local resources became frustrated when they could not get in direct contact with a support person during the support teams off hours. In response, the local teams began sending email messages with support problems. However, the email message rarely included all the information that the support team needed to resolve the project. The support team would send a follow-up message in which the local team would respond with additional information. The email support communications went on for days and sometimes weeks before issues were resolved, further delaying key components of the project deployment.
Staff turnover is another risk that Lucent did not anticipate. Project team members became increasingly frustrated with cross-team communications and ongoing schedule delays. As a result, some of the key technical skill within the teams left Lucent for other opportunities. Lucent had to recruit replacements and train them on the new systems before they could proceed with parts of the project. The staffing problem caused additional delays and frustration as the project teams started to direct blame toward each other. Project managers stopped sharing local problems with the collective team in fear of further finger pointing. Communications continued to break down. The atmosphere across the organization became so volatile that Lucent eventually decided to cancel the project.
Conclusion
Lucent had failed to identify key risk areas during the planning stages. In addition, they failed to respond appropriately when the new, previously unknown risk events occurred. Organizations will only continue to grow and expand across the globe. If they are to expect success in project execution, they will need to effectively identify and manage project risk. Without proper risk management, project risks can lead a project to failure.
References
Garg, R. (2008). Delivering Multiple Sites and Time Zone Projects. PM World Today.
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