How the Lessons Learned from the Sinking of the Liner Titanic Can Be Applied to Modern Projects - Essay Example

Titanic Project was studied and analyzed from the perspectives of both technical blunders and project management failures from its conception to its operations. The technical investigation methodology aimed to find out the technical and operational reasons for the sinking of the Titanic. Project Management methodology used information from the technical investigation to analyze the reasons for failures from the project management perspective and develop an analogy to modern Project Management practices and standards in an attempt to identify the actions that could have prevented the disastrous occurrence.

From a technical viewpoint, overconfidence in the invincibility of the Titanic led to several critical compromises like the selection of inappropriate material for the ship hull, the height of bulkheads, and changed engine configuration during the design and construction phase of the ship since the team believed that altering the original pans would not affect the safety features of the ship. Besides, compromises were also made during the testing phase of the Titanic where only partial testing was carried out trusting the track record of the Olympic liner as excellent, which was not the actual case.

From the project management point of view, the major element that was missing from the Project plan of Titanic was risk management. Much effort was laid to precisely define the functional and non-functional requirements; however, more emphasis was laid on functional requirements on the cost of compromising the non-functional requirements. These compromises resulted in risks to the project which were neither identified nor planned for mitigation. Ignoring these risks during the design phase led to the sinking of the Titanic ship.

Risk mitigating actions could include introducing a double hull, compartmentalization and raising the height of the bulkhead, and incorporating and balanced keel for such a large size ship to protect against wave capsizing. Studying successful projects can help project managers to apply common experiences to new ones, and learning from failed projects can help to avoid similar mistakes from recurring. In this report, lessons learned from the failure of Titanic were analyzed in analogy with modern project management practices and were studied for application to present-day projects.