Critical Analysis of Maximo Consolidation Project - Case Study Example

MAXIMO CONSOLIDATION PROJECT By (Name) Course Institution City Date Maximo Consolidation Project In 2009, the Sydney water company came up with the Maximo consolidation project. Its main purpose was to consolidate and modernize customer management systems. According to the project’s management team, Maximo consolidation project aimed at restoring Australia’s current water management systems. However, the project failed. Halfway through the project, it had spent all its funds required to complete the project. Investigations on this project indicated various reasons; including inadequate planning that facilitated its failure. Additionally, the company failed to achieve its time budget plan, which indicates that it delayed to complete its project. According to strategic project planning, such cases should not occur since they indicate poor management skills. Critical analysis of the Maximo consolidation project enables development managers to identify, correct and learn from their mistakes. Project Stakeholder Analysis The Maximo Consolidation project aimed at improving the customer systems of the Sydney water company. This means that Sydney residents would benefit from the proposed project. They would able to receive their billings on time and the information placed in their bills would be more accurate. Customers are also able to save the time used in acquiring data since they receive electronically sent data through various ways such as via the e-mail and mobile text messages. Furthermore, Sydney Water Company would benefit greatly from the project in various ways. For instance, the project would ensure that the data presented on individual customer is accurate since it would have minimized lose of files. This would improve the company’s analysis of its profits and losses. The Australian government also benefits from the project. Accurate data of water usage means saving up more water while increasing the company profits, which earn the government more income. Therefore, the project weighed and balanced the competing demands from relevant stakeholders on the firm, thus arriving at some of its obligations. Facts Maximo Consolidation project received a tender from the Australian government in 2009 to modernize Sydney’s customer management systems. These projects existed in different faces such as Sydney Water Information Management (SWIM) as phase 1, Field Resource Management (FRM) as phase 2 as well as Enterprise Portal Integration, Email System Replacement and Customer Business Intelligence. It managed to complete these projects while failed in the rest. Conversely, it overspent its budget. Initially, the proposed budget was A$18.4 million (Charette 2009, 1). However, after revision of the budget, the overall spending leapt to A$ 31.3 million while the delivery date extended from August 2009 to October 2010. Additionally, stage 1 project forecasted a total cost of A$55.3 million that differs from its original budget of A$21 million. Despite having completed the Field Resource Management, it still extended its delivery time by 4 months from the initially proposed date. The only successful phase was the Information Management, which met its planned budget and managed to maintain its delivery date. Critical Analysis Basing o n the different angles of analysis, it is evident that the Maximo consolidation project managers did not observe correct planning strategies. This is because before writing the budget, they should discuss about the relevant factors that are likely to affect the progress of the project. For instance, they should have consulted various companies in order to compare the most of materials, labor and other external factors before coming up with a budget. According to NSW report, the project needed an additional cost on top of the originally proposed budget. Additionally the cost extended the original budget by 58% displaying their poor strategic management skills. This because a well planned project should meet its proposed budget but if it fails, an additional 20% is reasonable. The bigger difference in the budget changes indicates the project managers’ precision in planning the project, which is low. Furthermore, the company failed to meet its delivery dates, which was in August 2009. It extended the dates to October 2010 while reporting that the delay was due to their underestimation of the project. Conversely, this should not be the case with well-trained strategic project managers (Görög 2012, 62). This is because before commencing a project, they should carry out necessary research pertaining to the specific area their dealing. This involves understanding the complexity of the project while approximately calculating the period needed to complete the project before presenting it to the relevant authorities. Delaying service delivery not only displayed the managers as incompetent but also earned the organization additional spending costs. The overall delay of services resulted in an additional A$9.0 million on top of the proposed new budget of A$31 million. This means that the overall additional costs were twice that of the proposed budget. The company experienced losses in terms of profitability since the present situation forced it to use more money than it had early budgeted for the project. Moreover, according to project management studies, managers in this field should use past experiences in the field while integrating new techniques. It also indicates that successful project managers often fail in their first projects in order to succeed in proceeding ones. This is because they use the failed projects as reference points and a base where they learn from their mistakes. However, the Maximo consolidation managers seem to stick to the trending situation of Sydney water projects (Sydney Water 2014, 1). In 2002, Sydney water terminated its Customer Information and Billing System (CIBS) while it was halfway through. Furthermore, the outcomes of the project were similar to the current water project. This is because the CIBS project increased its development costs from the original price of A$38 million to A$64 million. Similarly, the delaying reasons for 2002 project are the same as those of the Maximo consolidation project. These are inadequate specifications and planning which resulted in numerous changes, which involved addition of costs and time required for completion. Therefore, the project managers failed to learn from their previous mistakes, which show their inefficiency. Every project undergoes through five stages (Baguley 2008, 44). The initial stage is the most important since it involves identifying the objectives and goals of the project while specifying how the involved tasks would be integrating in achieving the goals. This is the backbone of the project and evidence of any loopholes only means that the project would fail. Based on this definition, it is clear that project managers failed in their project initiation stage since they did not attain their goals. The second stage involves planning. It is from this stage that project manager’s create the Project Management Plan (PMP), which guides the selected team throughout the process. Nonetheless, the employed teams in the Maximo consolidation project did not put much thought about most factors in this stage. This is because after project execution, no changes pertaining to the planning of the project should change. This includes the proposed delivery date and utilizing the original budget. Therefore, the associated teams of project managers did not observe the importance of each stage of project life cycles. Conclusion Nonetheless, regardless of the team managers inability to meet their intended goals, there are instances where they succeeded. This includes the first nine projects with which they not only utilized their original budgets but also completed them on time. The essence of generating a project is always to improve a specific sector if it achieves the desired goals regardless of the outlined plan. Change is the only constant aspect in the world and projects are no exception. According to Sydney water reports, the task required additional days in order to analyze, test and develop the Hydra efficiently. It further explains that the project utilizes Fujitsu as the systems integrator and IBM Maximo management software. Moreover, it implemented its ICT projects such as Siebel client relationship system. All these changes aim at achieving the desired goals while focusing the needs of both the customer and the organization. Eventually, implementation of these plans resulted in increased need for monetary funding and time. Therefore, the project managerial teams altered the original budgets and proposed benefits in order to benefit the organization and the clients. Recommendation Clearly, the Maximo consolidation task provides insights pertaining to project management. Project managers should ensure that they understand and integrate the five project life cycle stages while considering the specific details required in each step. This would help to reduce the numerous changes that normally evolve after the project has already started. This would benefit both the companies involved and the teams since they would utilize the proposed budget and deliver on time. The task also displays the challenges associated with carrying out of projects. As a project manager, one should be prepared to face any changes regarding the project and be ready to solve the problem and thereby completing it. This is regardless of the fact that the project might run out of the proposed time and utilize more money than anticipated. The most important fact in carrying out projects is to attain the goals while considering the effects on the involved stakeholders. References Baguley, P 2008, Project management, New York, McGraw-Hill. Charette R 2009, Sydney Water Doesn't Seem to Learn Prior IT Lessons Well, IEEE Spectrum, viewed 6 May 2014, < http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/sydney-water-doesnt-seem-to-learn-prior-it-lessons-well> Görög, M 2012, ‘Beyond the myth of best practice in project management’, Dynamic Relationships Management Journal, vol.1, pp.60-72. Sydney Water 2014, Why Projects Fail, Calleam Consulting Limited< http://calleam.com/WTPF/?p=3085> Read More