A Basic Project Management Framework and the Proper Staff - Literature review Example

 The Project Management Institute defines project management as “…the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements.”1 Depending on the strategy adopted by this Agency to wade through passport season relied on its experience in the past to be enabled to advance output by broadening overtime, this Agency speaks volume about project management. “Each project management [step] has been designed to build on the previous level and thus provide…a clear…path [for project management].”2 Not only this, but it has also come to light the fact that bringing on staff that would be casual was a factor. Additionally, the processing problems had to be sorted out which occurred in the two workplaces with the new regime. The plan was based on several erroneous conjectures, which include but are not limited to: 1) the demand for passports was much greater than was anticipated with larger amounts of child passports than was originally thought to be what would be a “normal” number; 2) both offices were not able to achieve the output levels that were the goal of the overarching agency; 3) the Agency did not step up its involvement even after it realized that the turnover in passports was rather slow. Additional factors are as follows. Basically, the Agency could not predict the drop in confidence by the public. This crescendoed into a large number of applications, as soon as the delays in the approval of passports became a well-known issue among the public. In the latter half of April the amount of passports that was requested rose by quite a bit. The next month, the amount of passports approved was 55,000 more than averaged in the year prior. Meanwhile, the time it took in order to get a passport was extended. In turn, this heightened the public’s awareness of an already very sensitive issue. The government encouraged the public to go abroad later on in the summer. This was so that people would not have to wait a long time to get their passports. This encouragement from the government prompted even more people to inquire about passports the month after that. The number of applications soared through the roof at almost 30% past expected numbers of passports to be issued. Obviously, the measures that had been put in place were not working, in July emergency measures were put in place. This included free two-year extensions to passports as well as many other drastic measures. One such measure was to add 100 staff to places issuing passports, and there was a phone line set up to deal with inquiries over the phone. In addition, more measures were put in place in order to improve the lines at passport offices. Even though the Agency set up a goal of reaching the deadlines for processing passports by peoples’ dates of departure, there were still about a half of a grand missed dates of departure. This is not to mention all of the hand-wringing going on by customers who were anxiously anticipating their passports being processed. It was an accepted fact that the goal did not measure up to being a failsafe shining example of good-faith effort to remedy the passport situation. Another aspect of this whole fiasco was that, throughout the ‘90s, some of the concerns of management were to lessen costs as well as make the organization more effective, at the same time keeping good quality customer relations. Management thought that perhaps the Agency had done well for itself, improving in both of these senses of the word, and that it boded well with other agencies comparable to itself—costs to the consumer being competitive with other places around the country. Regardless, both management and the Agency realized that they had not taken into consideration, along with the fact that there was increased demand for passports, that the Agency was working out of deference to how many passports were coming in at one time rather than taking into account the fact that the Agency was dealing with a higher demand. Consequentially, what happened when the amount of passports being delivered at a few of the offices fell behind in the count and there was an unanticipated rise in demand for passports, the Agency was left at a loss to be able to react in a timely manner. In any case, this was not the first time the Agency had experienced problems. Twenty years ago, when the Agency became technically proficient, the Agency delivered a completely revolutionary system to one of its offices, although there were setbacks and less output in the head office. There was a heavy workload for passport agency workers, as there was quite a pile of passport applications stacked up and ready to be reviewed. Unfortunately, poor communication between staff dissolved much of the Agency at that time, and it had to be rebuilt. It was found through research that the Agency had high hopes for the introduction of a new system into its organization. However it had underestimated the fact that certain problems would not crop up again. These problems included that: there were not enough failsafe in place in order to handle increased demand in passport applications; a greater amount of measures could have been taken in order to ensure that any chances taken were within the bounds of the Agency to handle; and finally, that the new technology implemented served to help rather than deter progress of workers at the Agency. The cost of this misadventure undoubtedly pointed to problems that were inherent and/or unavoidable as a result of being a profit-making industry. The total cost associated with this entire folly was somewhere on the order of twelve-and-a-half million pounds. This did encapsulate some one-time costs such as certain fees associated with passport applications, as well as the costs of processing which included more workers being added as well as other implemented aspects of the business. Secondly, there was two million pounds paid to one of the offices due to giving the public gratis extensions for their passports for two months. Undoubtedly the Agency has a liaison with its offices in order to ensure the management of passport applications. At the time new standards were implemented, however, the Agency was not responsible for this problem. There were, however, additional financial problems, and the resultant factor of some of the offices having difficulties was that extra workers had to be hired. Since the Agency operates based on the amount of passport applications that are approved, the measure in which output was delayed lessened the Agency’s cash flow. Costs were not always financial ones, however. Critical activities were overlooked. “Critical activities lie on the critical path and are worthy of…special attention. If one of these critical activities goes wrong the project will be delayed.”3 Sometimes costs were opportunity costs, or trade-offs. For example, increased productivity in churning out multiple passport applications resulted in the fact that security was more likely to have been breached. The Agency tried its best to deliver a supreme product although it is very possible that some errors were bound to occur. Today, the amount it costs to produce one passport is about three pound more than it was circa 1999. The idea behind the implementation of increased cost of a passport was that there would be more security as a result, and that the advent of new technologies would keep the person’s passport safer. There were other costs that were contingent upon acquiring these new technologies, including computerization of the Agency’s systems. As such, the cost of the average passport went up by fourteen percent. The additional security needed to cover the cost of the passport was ten percent. This cost showed up in the annual amount that passport application fees were tallied. With the advent of a system that would operate to increase output of passport applications, it is hoped that in the future the cost of a passport will lessen. That being said, the Agency wants to begin making customer service a priority as well as take other measures (which were not foreseen that could have been used to handle increase in demand). Unfortunately such changes could indeed cause the cost of the passport to rise by a substantial amount. The target goal was to process passport applications within fifteen hours of having received them by mail, which turned out to be an ineffective policy. Since the Agency had such a difficult time meeting their goal, it was doubted whether the Agency could, in effect, indeed keep up with any kind of increase in demand. In turn, the Agency decided to change some of its obligatory reactions to the increased demand in passport applications. Also, it was found that the company responsible for issuing these passports had difficulty with the paperwork that was supposed to be part of the actual application itself. Since the Agency was under pressure to make sure that the applications were held to a standard necessary to agree with the technology, this gave the processing company added precious time to work on the amount of paperwork for passport applications—which was time sorely needed. Now one of the cogent questions one must ask is how a catastrophe like this can be circumvented in the future. This has a great deal to do with good project integration management. “Project integration management ensures that the project is properly planned, executed, and controlled. It includes the exercise of formal project change control.”4 Of course, intense planning would probably be a major factor. However, how the Agency responds to problems such as these with regards to the amount of passports it could handle is a key factor, as well as making a solemn silent promise to itself that it will try to help meet the customers’ needs as best it can. One must look for some solutions in order as to how one would go about making sure that passport applications are dealt with and processed in a timely manner, regardless of demand. In order to circumvent such a mishap occurring again, the Agency needs to maintain a better hold on what the demand will be; and whoever anticipates the demand must try to be fairly accurate in his/her assertions. Thus, the Agency will be better prepared to handle such increased demand with better products and services. “Perhaps the best measure of the effectiveness of a corporate culture is the way it reacts to a crisis project or unforeseen problems that could be damaging to the company as a whole.”5 In fact, “Project management is not just scheduling [but] the what and the how.”6 Looking ahead, a number of key aspects will affect what the passport application demand will look like for future years. Passport renewals are expected to be one factor. The applications for childrens’ passports would probably remain about the same. Not only is the Agency predicting the number of passports that will need to be issued in future years, but the Agency’s ability to do well under pressure is also a key touchstone in making sure it is able to handle a sudden upsurge in demand. In order to deal with these problems, one of the factors affecting the situation is the number of staff employed by the Agency. “Global standards are crucial to the project management professional because they ensure a basic project management framework is applied consistently worldwide.”7 This may seem like an obvious solution, however it could probably be proven that an increase in permanent staff would tremendously help the Agency in completing its work. One signature of good management is that the proper staff is in place in order to ensure the livelihood of an organization. Without superior customer service, no organization can run smoothly—whatever that organization may be. This Agency is no different, and the people in charge would do well to make sure that their staffing is adequate as well as well-prepared for a sudden change in demand, whether it be up or down. One of the key factors in determining the efficiency and effectiveness of staff is readiness. If staff are not equipped with the right tools they need in order to produce a product (passports), then they are not going to be ready to serve the public in a capacity which can outlast an increase in demand such as the Agency saw in 1999. A second factor which would aid in the Agency’s swift recovery from a crisis is whether the Agency’s computer systems would be able to handle increased demand. The point is that people should be ready for glitches to occur, and that is no less true than in the area of having enough proper computer technology in place in order to deal with problems when they arise. Of course, no computer will ever be sufficient enough to replace human customer service, most likely. But partially this problem stemmed from not enough people being trained to properly operate technology that could have enhanced the customers’ experience. If enough people were sufficiently trained as to how to process passports, most likely all of the work would have been completed in a timely manner. However, because of poor management, obviously people—who were behind the scenes trying to supply the public with a high demand for passports—were at a loss to be able to keep up because of their technological and/or other inferiorities with regards to training. Thus, employees of the Agency must be ready in the future to deal with such foibles. Part II. This section builds upon the reasons for project failure cited in section A or (Part A). You are required to critically analyse the case study, discussing the issues which went wrong during the project and linking them to the reasons described in the first Part A of the Essay. [Word Count: 2,246 words] There are ten main reasons why this project failed, and reference to Part A will be ascribed to as needed. 1. The Agency should have been able to keep up with demand. Truly, there is really no good reason why the Agency shouldn’t have been able to keep up with the upsurge in demand for passports. Siemens, the company processing the passports, could not fulfill its obligation and thus this company should have been forced to pay some sort of penalty for not being able to have held up its end of the bargain in their contractual obligations to provide this basic service. For all the factors that were errors, this one was perhaps the most key because essentially the Agency let down the public. The Agency basically missed their performance targets and then expected an angry public to be understanding. Truly, though, why should the public have been understanding? Passport applications are submitted with the hopes that perhaps in a half a month or less some action is supposed to be taken. In lieu of issuing new passports, the Agency decided to give free extensions on a number of passports (which cost their company money) as well as invoke other measures in order to make up for their apparent lack of management. It is safe to say that this was a project management disaster, mainly because the Agency was not prepared to deal with this problem. This leads us to our second point. 2. The Agency should have foreseen the potential problem of an upsurge in demand. The fact that the Agency did not have the foresight to deal with the problem of added demand is almost unconscionable if one thinks about it long enough. Sincerely, the Agency should have thought about these potential problems ahead of time. Just as one prepares for an act of God or a disaster, this is the same way in which the Agency should have prepared for the rise in demand of passports. In a natural or other kind of disaster, there is a plan in place to make sure that everyone knows where they are going, what they are doing, and how to navigate certain situations. In short, there is a protocol in place. The Agency was stuck in a particularly embarrassing spot on this point because it had not fully considered the extent to which such potential problems might occur, and as such had no proper protocol in place for how to deal with their particular project management crisis—because indeed this was a crisis which involved control of the situation. It seems as though they were caught like a deer in the headlights—without any knowledge of who should do what next—which is a very frightening prospect for such a large Agency, which deals with thousands of passport applications every year. 3. The technology should be provided to deal with any changes. Unfortunately, at the time of this regional assault upon the Agency and its outlying offices in Liverpool, Newport, and so forth, the proper computer systems were not in place to help deal with the upsurge in demand for passports. Had the technology been in place to help deal with this monstrous dilemma, perhaps things would have turned out differently. Unfortunately, however, one must look at the problems that were at hand. Not only were outdated computer systems part of the problem, but obviously there had to be something wrong with the people working for Siemens if they didn’t know how to operate the technology they had. This is the only logical conclusion one can come to, that the use of technology actually slowed or even brought the passport application to a grinding halt. As mentioned in Part A, new technology not only had to be installed to computerise the Agency, but people also had to be trained to know how to effectively use it. This delay in updating the technology of the Agency was probably one of the biggest corporate downfalls it ever experienced due to this lack of foresight about its importance. Not only the computerisation of the Agency, but also the fact that certain passport applications could not be scanned and so forth due to the paperwork having the inability to be processed correctly was a major problem. These kinds of mishaps should not have been part of this epic fail, but unfortunately they were and as such had to be dealt with to ensure that nothing like this would happen in the future. 4. There should be a back-up plan in case something unusual or out of the ordinary happens. The fact that the Agency had a serious lack of contingency plans for just such an emergency is rather astounding, if one thinks about it. Ultimately the responsibility for such planning falls squarely on the shoulders of the project managers who were in charge of the Agency to make sure that a disaster of this kind would be the exact thing that didn’t happen. Unfortunately, no one had had the forethought or insight to really come up with or develop a plan that would encapsulate the possibility that yes, perhaps there would be a greater demand for passports in the summer of 1999 than in previous years. However, as it turns out there were no contingency plans. That was the contingency plan. All of a sudden, people in the Agency were scrambling around trying to figure out what they were going to do. This is exactly how one should not behave in an emergency. In an emergency, one is supposed to be calm, cool, and collected. Unfortunately, because there were no such plans in place, everyone was grabbing at straws trying to decide how to handle this crisis while in the middle of the crisis—where one’s thinking is most cloudy. As one can see, the project managers of the Agency should have thought long and hard before this catastrophe ever happened. 5. Whoever is managing the project should ensure that the system works beforehand with a drill. There was no drill. That was because the Agency didn’t even have a contingency plan to practice beforehand. This is what the Agency should have done. About a year in advance of its summer 1999 travel season, the Agency should have prepared itself for an increased demand in potential applications submitted—just because of pure commonsense logic. More people tend to travel during the summer months, and as such it would be quite logical that more people might apply for passports in order to do this. The Agency should have had the ability to predict this fact, but it did not. If it had, perhaps the project manager(s) could have practiced how the employees were to work at a little bit faster pace, thereby increasing productivity, as well as having gotten their computer systems updated simultaneously. Unfortunately, no one had the oversight to be able to think about this and thus it never got done. This should not be so. The Agency and its managers should have thoroughly thought about something like this happening before it did happen, and the fact that they did not speaks testaments about their poor project management skills. 6. Tests conducted on the system should be made, and a plan should be in place for any overflow that would flood the system. Not only should a test have been conducted on the system for a normal workload, but also, the system could have been tested for what it would have been like for the employees to deal with a heavier-than-normal workload. Unfortunately, there was no system in place to begin with—speaking of protocol—so adverse conditions could not be replicated anyway. System tests are critical factors in project management because they assume the underlying difficulties that already come with the project and test what needs to be kept and what needs to be changed, altered, or otherwise considered to perhaps summarily eliminated. Good project managers would have seen this in advance of the problem happening and would have insisted that the Agency have some kind of a protocol in place, therefore. In some ways this concurrently fits with reason #5. Tests on the system are necessary to ensure that the system in place is working functionally and could deal with an upsurge in demand. However, rather obviously, one can’t test a system that isn’t there, or probe protocol measures that are not in place either. So really it is the failure of the Agency to, again, not only have foresight but have good planning. And, a marker of good planning is to be able to predict problems cropping up before they happen. This is major. 7. Project managers should make sure their employees know how to work the system. This is one of the key strategies to ensure that any project goes over well. Employees must be able to know how to use the technology they do have, and when technology is there it should be compatible with the processing system being used. In this case, the paper applications were not compatible with the technology, and as such couldn’t be scanned. This is a major error of foresight on the part of whoever developed the paper application. After all, what is the point of developing an application if it cannot be processed by one’s employees? This is absolutely incredulously bad oversight and planning. If one can’t access the proper technology to process an application, how is that supposed to help with the project moving forward? It can’t. This is precisely why employees need to be trained in the proper protocol (if a protocol were in place) to deal with specifically these types of situations. Perhaps if the employees had been more well-trained and well-versed in crisis management with regard to the upscale in demand, they might have been able to better deal with the sudden onslaught of passport applications. However, they weren’t and, as a result, peoples’ passport applications were delayed thus resulting in a huge number of people being summarily disappointed in the system and the Agency’s good-faith effort to deliver on its promise to have a passport to the customer within a certain time frame. 8. Project managers should makes sure they can contact someone in the event of an emergency to help with increased demand. Part of the Agency’s problem was its inability to reach out to regional offices to make sure everyone was working effectively and coordinating with each other to ensure the timely processing of these passports during the summer of 1999. Coordination is key, and the project managers who were at the Agency should have realized that they had avenues to reach out to other offices to ensure effectiveness of their processors. Siemens did not, in effect, as the company in charge, take care of their “end of the bargain,” so to speak, as it failed to deliver the promised product. It was up to the project managers of the Agency to ensure that everyone was communicating in a proper manner so that everyone knew what was going on in each department. If one part of the department suffered, everyone was going to suffer in some manner, due to the fact that the public was not being informed in a proper way. This resulted in a public outrage when the public did eventually find out, because basically they were being lied to when the Agency said it would deliver passports within a certain number of days and failed to meet its target output. 9. The Agency has a duty to make sure that the morale of public confidence is high. The Agency had a duty to the public to keep it well-informed about the situation at hand. As it was, the Agency delayed in telling people about the difficulty it was having. This was most likely due to the embarrassing nature of the topic, because, in reality… who would want to admit that such a poor job of project management had been done? The computer systems were out of date, the workers were either being incompetent or slow, and there was no contingency plan in place for seeing such a rise in passport applications. Of course, that is something the Agency did not want to readily admit to the public, and why should they have? To admit that one is a failure is a difficult business. But ultimately, in order to ensure the morale of the public, the Agency had to “come clean” and ultimately confess what was really going on in its departments, and basically tell everyone that everything was not running as smoothly as it could have been. The Agency’s basic job was to keep the public not only well-informed but assured that it could do its job properly and produce passports in a timely and efficient manner. They failed to do this, and the result was public outrage. The Agency is likely not to do this again and hopefully with better project management in the future, it won’t. 10. Organizations should have some kind of review to ensure future success. Organizations must have in place a sort of review in order to make sure that every “i” has been dotted and every “t” crossed. In other words, in addition to having a protocol, there should be a checklist for all the necessary actions that need to be taken, both before and after some kind of emergency were to take place. That being said, it’s of singular importance. REFERENCES A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 2000 Ed. Newton Square, PA: Project Management Institute, 2000. Association for Project Management Web Site. Association for Project Management (APM). http://www.apm-training.com/apm-introduction.asp. Retrieved 14 October 2009. Kerzner, Harold. Advanced Project Management: Best Practices on Implementation, 2nd Ed. USA: Wiley, 2004. Lewis, James P. Fundamentals of Project Management. USA: Publisher Unknown, 2002. Lewis, James P. Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control, 4th Ed.: A Hands-On Guide to Bringing Projects in on Time and Budget. USA: McGraw Hill, 2005. The Project Management Institute (PMI). Global Standards. http://www.pmi.org. Retrieved 11 October 2009. Reiss, Geoff. Project Management Demystified. New York, London: Taylor & Francis Group, 1995. Read More