Project Risk Management - Holyrood Project

No effective control and goal orientated leadership was visible. Nowhere during the four months did she ask for progress reports from the stakeholders, if she took any interest in the project and ask for progress reports, she would have seen that the project was behind schedule. No milestones were set to make sure that project goals were on track.

phase arose. The Project Manager made a decision to announce the date and in doing so attempted

Risk #4: Lack of clarity - The lack of clear and concise goals and or confusion about the goal of the scope.

Although the initiation of the contract, work breakdown structure, and the total outlines was created, stated clearly and effectively the project still turned out incredibly way outside of scope and cost as it was predicted early on in the project. These delaying and costly factors were caused not by the use of project management, rather a malpractice of it. One of the biggest contributing factors of delay and ever increasing expenses was, the production of the final product before a successful first test flight. Meaning Lockheed Martin, did not follow the set outlines it created for itself and jumped to the finish line by starting final production of the aircraft before working out all of the flaws that were currently present. This meant that the United States government would receive a faulty and unfinished product. Along with several other contributing factors such as engineering issues, poor staffing, and software

*A lack of efficient and effective communication between the city, project management team, and consultants. This manifests itself in basic issues like vendors blocking roadways for other vendors, the city canceling orders for electrical filtering components that were critical path, and too many unilateral decision made because "no one was in charge".

To manage the project, Mark Penny, project manager for the stadium construction, “began developing a long-range project schedule in 2001” (Burma, D). As a part of the schedule, Mr. Perry had various plans that included: “ plan to ensure the project was built to the right specifications, budget control plan to make sure it stayed within the budget and procedures inside that plan for processing changes, reviewing owners budget, and reviewing designs and plans that accommodated safety programs to make sure that safety was upheld throughout the process of the project, scheduling plan to keep the project on the time frames and overall risk management plan” (PMI, 2010)

The first Scottish parliament building was created in September 1997 after a referendum in which people of Scotland voted by almost three to one. The client, the Scottish government decided on building a complex building from a mixture of steel, oak, and granite. The procurement route chosen by the Scottish government was construction management. The web address www.parliament.uk explains the procurement route chosen was to turn out to be the most significant decisions during the project, and also states Construction management offers the advantage of speed but with the disadvantage of price uncertainty until the last has been leased. Construction management was chosen not only for allowing the project to be started quickly and the reduction in overall construction. But the procurement route allows for change in design during the project and problems are generally solved rather than passed around the separate contractors.

A respecified project was planned and approved, and on 19 February 2003 DIMIA transferred responsibility for delivering the facility to the Department of Finance and Deregulation (Finance). DOTARS remained responsible for providing the associated infrastructure. The respecified project had a new budget of $276.2 million. Despite the initial projects’ failure due to the indicative budget blow-out, the new project reported upon its conclusion in June 2008, another exceeded budget to the sum of $396 million, a further $119.8 million over the budget.

Furthermore, a project plan was never formally established to define the work breakdown structure, determine a schedule and analyze existing and required resources. This led to many construction delays and unsystematic project changes such as changed layout plans and facilities after-the-fact. Finally, the DIA Project Management Team (PMT) failed to implement a comprehensive tracking system for three years. As a result, the PMT failed to track the project’s progress and were prevented from making better adaptive decisions relative to changes that were occurring.

Most of the project fund was supported by the City, State and Federal. The project was originally funded $ 50 million AUD each from both the State of Victoria and the City Council. It was estimated to cost between $ 100 to $ 150 million AUD. Later at its completion, the total final costs was blown out by $ 300 million AUD on top of $ 150 million AUD, reaching at $ 450 million AUD and it was further projected that the final cost will reach at $ 470 million AUD (Misiak 2003). As a result, The State had to wrapped up the budget overruns by giving another $ 230 million to cover the prolongation of project schedule delay.

Since the early stages, the project was inundated with concerns and issues with the project scope. From the perspective of project management, the initial scope was not defined well enough. Details of the design were over looked and aspects such as the details of the air conditioning ended up increasing the original scope by $200 million. This supposedly led a prosperous project to an uncertain economic ordeal. Initial estimates of the project had been $5.5 billion and by the time of its actual completion it been delayed by a year and increased to $15

The project did not achieve desirable standards as far as customer requirements, scope, environment and execution were concerned. It was important that the project integrators to ensure customers do not escalate during the implementation of the project, being the first adopters of the software FoxMeyer should have exercised caution by adopting the software in phases rather than implementing the project directly, furthermore, execution was the biggest problem, despite knowing that the project needed skilled personnel FoxMeyer did not train staff during the early stages of the project and had to rely on consultants. Finally the company should have gained control over the project from the start to ensure that all the staff and management were involved but in this case despite knowing that the project would not work as envisaged the management did not take control or stop the implementation of the project.

Lack of project management clarity: the planning activity had lot of material but lacked content, clear action items and lack of consensus on the milestones. The difficulties in the project only increased with time and a more performance driven style would have kept things on track if introduced early on.

Risk allocation is performed as part of the development of the project structure, which takes into account the distribution of responsibilities and risks during the planning, construction, financing and operating phases (Corner, 2006). The aim is to identify an efficient and effective structure that optimises the costs of the project and ensures that the risk occurrences do not damage the project (Delmon, 2009). According to Grimsey and Lewis (2007) risk allocation has two elements: optimal risk management and value for money. The first implies that the

The completion of any project depends on the execution of various parameters mostly set at the beginning of the project. In order to complete the project to satisfactory levels, the project must be completed within the stipulated timelines, fall within the approximate budget and be of the required quality standards. However, most of the projects are affected by adverse changes and unforeseen events that occur during the execution period. Research shows that the magnitude of change is dependent on the size of the project, with large projects experiencing more uncertainties due to several factors including; planning and design complexity, interest groups having deferring opinions, resource availability, Economic and political climate and statutory regulations, which may necessitate change of plan. Most of the uncertainties are known to occur in the concept phase and if not intervened, they may affect the entire project. The burden falls on the management of such risk as some managers choose to ignore the uncertainties since they call for additional costs. Other inherent risks may go unnoticed and therefore remain unsolved,