read and respond to Peer discussions

Peer 1:One example that I know a lot of organization had to face with during the pandemic was productivity and meeting deadlines. Those of us who work on the healthcare field know that at the begging of the pandemic it was all hand on deck, however none of us knew what it was we where facing. One mistake that my team had to face with was not assessing the project complexity and accepting or developing unrealistic timeline estimates. At the beginning our project manager and leaders did not anticipate how much Covid was going to impact the department, until the personal started getting sick and whoever was covering had to complete all the work. This not only impacted the quality of the work, but it also impacted the timeline of the project and resulted in employee burn out. People were working 16 hours a day and sometimes weekend too to ensure that we were complaint with the healthcare laws and the stay up to date with all the Covid vaccine laws and workflow change. Later on, the project manager was more conscious when creating project deadline and having a back up on the projects to reduce the risk of delaying projects. This example is a bit uncommon because projects don’t get impacted by a pandemic every day, but we learned as a team that we had to access the complexity of the project and the unanticipated risk. We also worked on having an open communication with all the teams when developing timeline to ensure that each task had a due date was possible to meet. As mentioned by Bright Hub, when any project fails is the responsibility of all teams not just one, therefore is important to speak up when we have concern about complexity and timeline of the project (2009).

References

Bright Hub PM. (2009, October 21). The Role of Ethics in Project Management. BrightHub Project Management. 

Peer 2:Throughout the semester, the text and supplements have maintained various themes regarding why projects fail; namely that not including stakeholders in the project team or plans, which leads to user resistance and poor project planning. My own projects, though small and successful, could have benefited from the knowledge I have gained regarding stakeholders and work breakdown structures.

My research into it project failures reveals that the reason for each failure can encompass at least two of the 10 reasons identified by the Center for Project Management.

Looking Back and Not Ahead; Not Accessing Complexity; Overlooking Stakeholders

According to a US Department of Defense, Defense Acquisition Performance Assessment report reviewed by a Brookings Institute writer, the US government is “guilty” of understating IT project costs, risks, and technical readiness and projects fail because of the complexity of “legacy systems, the large number of stakeholders, and outdated project management approaches” (Yaraghi, 2018). Specifically, Yaraghi believes that the Department of Veteran’s Affairs current electronic health record (EHR) project will fail because VA personnel resist change. I can attest the articles findings. Many government systems are very old, and the way new systems are integrated can be very confusing and redundant, all because project teams don’t have the resources to implement changes from legacy systems to improved backbone systems and many personnel have so many systems to use that they refuse to have to learn new processes.

Lack of Complexity Assessment; Unrealistic Estimates

FoxMeyer, a former major player in the pharmaceuticals industry, failed at implementing a ERP that would make “complex supply chain decisions”, provider real-time information, and automate and integrate inventory systems, went 35 million over its 100 million budget, and, subsequently, had to file bankruptcy (Hamrouni, 2017; Widman, 2008).

Inadequate Communications (Status Reports); Poor Project Planning

Although Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor found that the management and security controls provided by a firm contracted to create a vehicle license and registration system were adequate, development process delays and vague communication about timelines on the states part hindered the states October 2018 target for launching the Minnesota License and Registration System (MNLARS) that was supposed to manage vehicle and driver’s license transactions (Decker, 2019; Douglas, 2017; Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor, 2017). The system has since been replaced by another, “Minnesota Department of Public Safety Driver and Vehicle Services (DPS-DVS) by Minnesota Drive (MNDRIVE)” (Wiese, 2021).

Looking Back, Not Ahead; Not Following a Robust Process Architecture; Half-baked Idea

In 1994 Apple planned to use its Copland operating system to restore its competitive advantage (Dormehl, 2022) by competing with Microsoft Windows 95 (, but the project suffered from scope creep as its various development teams vied for their project features to be included in the system (Widman, 2008) and the system did not work with its existing applications (MacRumors Blog, 2018). According to Dormehl (2022), Some of the system was released in 1996, but Apple deemed the system as wildly unstable, and it did not increase consumer’s confidence in the Apple. Parts of the system were used to create newer OSs.

Overlooking Stakeholders

Toronto is replacing its failed Quayside urban utopia with a new mixed-use development that is focused on indigenous culture and a lower carbon footprint. Quayside, which was to be sponsored by the owners of Google, i.e. Alphabet, failed because the planners didn’t take into account the culture of its actual stakeholders: tax payers who weren’t on keen on being tracked. Parts of the concept seemed to be cool and included “robo-taxis, heated sidewalks, and autonomous garbage collection” (Jacobs, 2022). However, Quayside also included a digital layer that would monitor everything and collect a massive amount of data —a personal security concern for its citizens (Jacobs, 2022).

No Functional Project Organization

Although it is tried several times, Florida state-wide information technology resources are decentralized: 50 plus state agencies and offices do not have centralized standards or means of communicating. Former Governor Bush tried to solve the problem, but taxpayers handed over 600 million dollars for an office led by someone who didn’t get the job done because of their experience. Florida attempted two additional times to centralize and failed. This colossal failure has led to IT project failures because of underestimating project costs and plans, the lack of qualified individuals to manage the project, and poor-project planning, such as its contract with Deliotte Consulting where the contract was amended 17 times (Mower, 2022).

References

Decker, A. (2019, December 28) 8 IT project failures of the 2010s. ITeach Recruiters. 

Dormehl, L. (2022, April 26). Today in apple history: Beginning of the end for mac OS copland. Cult of Mac. 

Douglas, T. (2017, November 29). After troubled rollout of vehicle license system, Minnesota hires outside developer. Government Technology. 

Peer 3:Training new employees have always been a problematic issue in the workplace; failing it causes problems. This problem becomes more concerning when it comes to the healthcare system. In this statement, I would like to discuss some ignored mistakes in a hospital pharmacy training project and delineate them from three different perspectives mentioned in this week’s discussion topic:

Not developing a comprehensive project plan

This is a common mistake in the hospital pharmacy system that there is not a comprehensive organized training system for new technicians that are hired in a hospital pharmacy, nor is there not any department assigned to this critical task of getting new hires into the workflow. The current technicians take this responsibility to pass the information to them as training. Since everyone has a different approach to certain tasks, the pharmacy would suffer from inconsistency in doing daily work.

Not designing a functional project organization

The larger the hospital, the more employees work in the pharmacy. Lacking an organized training program has caused numerous issues. Not all pharmacy technicians would be trained to work in different pharmacy work stations ( Like IV room, Narcotic room, OR, Heart center pharmacy, etc.). With the increasing number of team member callouts, especially after the Covid pandemic, we are facing mismanagement of work and failing to accomplish tasks in various areas of the pharmacy. For not having all pharmacy technicians get to work to cover the holes in shifts, those employees at work are overwhelmed and overworked. All of these have increased the risk of conflict in the workplace and job dissatisfaction, culminating in a high rate of quitting the job.

No assessing the project complexity

Healthcare is all about predictability for emergencies and having a realistic understanding of work complexity. When the Covid pandemic hit, the lack of concise training programs created critical issues in the pharmacy. With the increasing number of patients, there were insufficient backups to overcome the rising tasks. Instead of predicting to hire PRN pharmacy technicians and putting them in a precise training program accomplish tasks and building robust backup plans for emergencies, the management came to offer incentives to technicians and have them overworked. It is easy to guess how the risk of medical errors may grow.

POST

he Center for Project Management in San Ramon, California, examined 24 IT projects and compiled a list of ten dumb mistakes. The center then presented this list to 50 conference attendees and asked them to grade their organization on each mistake. The average grade was between a C+ and D. Here are the ten mistakes:

1. Mistaking every half-baked idea for a viable project.
2. Overlooking stakeholders, forgetting the champions, and ignoring the nemesis.
3. Not assessing the project’s complexity.
4. Not developing a comprehensive project charter.
5. Not developing a comprehensive project plan.
6. Not designing a functional project organization.
7. Accepting or developing unrealistic or unachievable estimates.
8. Accepting status reports that contain mostly noise and not enough signal.
9. Looking back and not ahead.
10. Not following a robust project process architecture.

Read the above list and find an example of a project for which this is the case. The project can be one that you have personal experience with or that you have read or heard about. Describe the example and state which of the mistakes was made with respect to the project.