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Project Scapegoats: Lessons from the Titanic Project [MP3 Audio]
[9781897326985]

$9.99

Displaying 1 to 1 (of 1 reviews)

Result Pages: 1

by Reader Views (Regan Windsor)

Date Added: Wednesday 09 April, 2008

What does the sinking of the Titanic have to do with project management today? Mark Kozak-Holland presents a wealth of information relating the best practices of project management to the pitfalls of the Titanic project.

The Titanic spent four years in development, for only four days in operation. Although the story of these four days is well-known, it is the details of the project from architecture to operation that provides fascinating insight into what ultimately leads to project failure. What lead an unsinkable ship to sink? The same thing that leads today's IT projects to fail - poor decision-making.

The business world of 1909 was not overly different from today - stiff business competitive pressures. What White Star needed was new business strategies that took advantage of emerging technology. By focusing on customer service they wanted to differentiate through increased quality of crossing and customer experience, building the ship based on comfort and space rather than speed. The project had a solid business case and addressed the needs of all three classes of passengers.

Today's IT projects must also ensure due diligence in examining the business problem, articulating competitive services, defining potential costs, and assessing risk. Projects must also determine by segments customer/target audience, value propositions, and create both profiles and scenarios for each of these. Also, establishing desirable service level targets is important for guiding the architecture.

The Titanic architecture stage was solid. Large investments were set aside for state of the art, emerging technology in safety and operations features (non-functional requirements). They also made a shipbuilders model (equivalent to an IT pilot project) and used it to analyze all exposures to the possibilities of loss.

The construction stage integrated many complex technologies and selected safety features to reduce risk. As construction progressed, overconfidence around the abundance of safety designs (non-functional requirements) began to result in a perception that the Titanic was unsinkable.

As the Titanic moved into the design phase some conflicts between functional and non-functional features began to emerge. Decisions were made that compromised individual safety features and escalated the level of risk. Business pressures for the Titanic to go live were enormous due to the large investments tied up in the four-year construction. Sound like some IT projects you know of?!

Due to the pressures the Titanic moved prematurely into the operating stage, where the new pressure became to prove Titanic to be superior to Olympic (its sister ship). And thus the thread of poor decision-making continued. While entering Iceberg Alley, not only did the lookout deck not have binoculars, the bucket test was forged due to rope too short to reach the water, but the ship was actually picking up speed to maintain an unrealistic schedule. While some of these errors occurred due to "skipping out" on the testing phase, the error in judgements that contributed to the crash were a result of business and marketing pressures.

"Project Scapegoats: Lessons from the Titanic Project" is a taping of a lecture by the same name. The DVD also includes on screen slides full of interesting and valuable insights not only on the details of the Titanic project but also the lessons learned in relation to IT projects. Also included in the discussion of each phase of the Titanic from architecture, to construction, planning, testing, and operating are slides covering Best Practices in IT projects. While a couple of slides are blurry or unreadable, the key slides coupled with the lecture information provide an invaluable resource.

"Project Scapegoats: Lessons from the Titanic Project" takes a fascinating historical project and turns it into an interesting and informative lesson in project management.

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]