Read this Case Study: Project Failure at Payton Financial Services. Post an answer to each of the first four questions of the case study.
Payton Financial Services (PFS) provides loan services for a variety of automobile and motorcycle dealerships throughout the southwestern United States. The computer systems at PFS are in need of an update as the current system is not able to manage the increasing customer volume generated through an aggressive sales campaign. Recently there have been several system failures including a major "crash" that took the entire loan-processing function offline for more than eight hours. Steph- anie Bryant has been assigned to oversee the upgrade project at PFS. Her team consists of various customers from key business units, a half dozen IT developers, and two junior project managers. The project is behind schedule and senior management is getting frustrated with the lack of progress. The initial difficulty focused on gaining clarity in regard to the specifications for the upgrade. Each business unit made requests for features that would fit their needs, but gave little thought to the impact these changes might have on other business units or the developers tasked with creating the functionality for these features. Stephanie was not able to broker an agreement and the debate over what needs to be done to improve the current system at PFS is still unclear to the team. Further, the Chief Information Officer, Venkat Nair, has complained to Stephanie about the demands being made on the six IT staff assigned to the project. It seems one of the business unit leaders, Director of Consumer Operations Joe Moore, complained to Venkat that his IT employees are not used to working as hard as the staff in the Consumer Operations unit. Joe went on to tell Venkat that he had assigned employees with "poor skills and a bad work ethic" to the project team. These comments surprised and upset Venkat as he had personally selected the six IT employees working on the project. Venkat was so frustrated by his encounter with Joe that he asked Stephanie to reassign the IT developers back to him so that he could personally oversee their work. Stephanie was reluctant to make this shift in reporting structure, but she agreed any- way as she did not want to further anger Venkat or Joe. This change added a layer of communica- tion complexity and made it more difficult for Stephanie to communicate with the IT staff assigned to her team. It also decreased the interaction between the IT developers and other members of the team as the IT staff insisted all communication be filtered through Venkat. The current computer system at PFS is continuing to have problems and Stephanie and her team do not seem much closer to getting the updates completed than when the project started. Many of the business unit leaders are asking for a new leader to be appointed and Stephanie is feeling like she is losing control of the project.
Discussion Questions:
1. Why do you think this project has derailed?
2. What advice would you have for Stephanie to get the project back on track?
3. How might Stephanie work to resolve the dispute between Venkat and Joe?
4. Have you ever been involved in a project where the team was not aligned? What caused this problem? How did you (or could you have) improve the situation?
5. Are the leadership challenges different in ad hoc project groups than in established long-term teams? What are the differences? How can these be managed?