This Monday, Michelle was quite excited as she had been put
on a very critical project of managing a multimillion dollar project which
would run for 2 man year(s). Michelle had to her credit a success of handling a
role of leading a technical team of more than 10 projects having international
clients, her communication skills were awesome and her clients had appreciated
her well in past. This was her third such assignment as Project Manager and like last 2
times, she chose to have brilliant team based out of Japan to execute this critical
project .
There were strict payment and penalty clauses for this
project but based on the success she had in past, she was full of confidence and
so was Management and all was set in for a good roll out.Her company had following terms for payment to be received
from client -:
- Phase-1 : 20% payment on completion of 25% of project on or before 6 months and 10% penalty per month in case of delay beyond 6 months
- Phase-2: Next 30% payment on completion of 50% of project on or before 1 year and 10% penalty per month in case of delay beyond 12 months
- Phase-3: Next 30% payment on completion of 75% of project on or before 18 months and 15% penalty per month in case of delay beyond 18 months
- Phase-4: Balance 20% payment on completion of 100% of project on or before 24 months and 15% penalty per month in case of delay beyond 24 months
As she had thought and planned, things were exceeding her
expectations and within 5 months, she had completed 30% of project with signoff
and got first payment released and post 10 months team had already completed 45%
of project and all was set for second payment and this time she was travelling
to London to meet her client and finish up upcoming 5% and get the second
payment released
On her way to Kennedy International airport, she switches to
FM to enjoy music and to her horror she learns that Tsunami had affected
several places in Japan and she immediately calls her office in Japan but she
is not able to get through and before she dials again, she gets call from her
boss who tells her that their office has been washed away with Tsunami and no
one is reachable
After couple of days in London, she learns good news that
her team has survived but badly injured and admitted in Hospital, Michelle
breaks up in tears with just 2 months and at 5% work left, she feels helpless.
Soon more bad news follows that it would take at least 4-5 months for most of
team members to get in a shape and Join back to work
Michelle gets into deep shock and wakes up in ER at hospital
with her husband at her bed side, after recovering from hospital in one week,
she flies back to NY and joins back office after one week of rest. She gets all
her code retrieved from TFS server in her office in New York and starts to
build new team and by this time, she has only 1.5 months to complete the next “5%”.
After review meet with the new team she learns that:
- Documentation of three important module(s) is not there
- Most of the code is not well documented and developers are not able to understand the code
- A Critical hardware lock which was must to be plugged in to one of development machine was destroyed back in Japan and although its cost was almost 1 million dollar but to get its shipped from Moscow it would take at least 5 day(s) because of festive season holidays in Russia
Suddenly everything was going wrong for Michelle. Still not
giving up she tries to give her best and
achieves phase-II at least 3 day(s)
ahead of time but in UAT client raises so many issues as most of the functionalities
were missing and all major bugs were introduced due to missing modules from
server which was not having latest version available on NY server
Finally Michelle was not able to deliver Phase-II by said schedule
and also attracted 10 % penalty and was due for another 10% penalty in next 30
day(s)
Most of us would collapse in this situation or think this
cannot happen to me and this looks more of script of some movie but we know
that disaster strikes to anyone and any time and this makes me recall important
lines from a famous show in Discovery Channel, “ Disaster just don’t happen they are chain of critical events”
Had Michelle thought in this direction, maybe she could have
avoided this disaster and just as after every air plane crash (NTSB) appoints
an investigator and in the end, investigator comes up with the cause and remedial
action to avoid such disaster to happen in future
In my next post, I would act as investigator and touch base
on steps Michelle could have taken to avoid such disaster to happen
Till then,
Sincerely,
