What went wrong? - Wish, we had Tarot Cards for Projects

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,

Rajeev Koul

Read Part-II, click on the here