Importance Of Project Management And Ethics: Blue Spider Program Case Study

Introduction to Project Management

In the modern era of faced passed digital industrialization, every activity, be it business or personal, can be found to represent a group or array or tasks to be performed with some proper planning and consideration, with most of them requiring involvement of multiple heads. Therefore, managing the entire function or activity has led to the emergence of project management techniques which are essential to be followed to ensure successful completion of the project or activities. Besides ensuring overall success, project management ensures managing the resources and associated aspects to make sure the project is completed within anticipated time, plan and budget, along with defining the roles and responsibilities of the members associated with the project. For a better evaluation of the importance of various project elements a case study of a critical project, referred to as the Blue Spider program has been presented. The purpose of this assignment is to understand the importance about various essential elements in project management like price contracts, handling project team, ethics, manager selection, stakeholder communication, and so on.

The main objective of any business organization is to earn profits. In order to sell the products or services or win proposals, many situations arise before the organization, when the decision makers become unethical in their decisions and further actions. In case of the Blue Spider Project of Parks Corporation there were some unethical actions undertaken by the management of the organization. The Blue Spider was a project on Research & Development (R&D) which aimed to make the Spartan missile better by enhancing the structural capabilities of the missile. The Parks Corporation was inclined to win this project. The basic incentive to win the project was that it would help the organization to get a program of $500 million spread over two decades. In order to win this proposal, the management of the Parks Corporation, mainly Henry Gable, decided to be unethical. Their reputation was at stake and they even made false statements about their technical specifications. With the greed of winning the project bid and for entering into the business, they took the help of forgery and deception. Finally, with the falsification of facts and specifications, Parks Corporation managed to win the Blue Spider Project bid. Business has some ethics which were broken by the organization for monetary gains. Gary Anderson, the project manager had to be unethical while hiding the true information from the customers and clients. According to Trevino and Nelson, (2016) the business organizations need to keep their social responsibility in mind while operating in any society as their unethical steps could incur huge social costs.

The Importance of Ethics in Project Management

The Project Life Cycle has many phases associated to it. The life cycle of a project starts with the project conception and its initiation (Team, F.M.E., 2014). This concept has to be approved by the management for moving to the further phases. The next stage involves defining the project and making the required plans for the same. It is very important to define the project because the project manager and the team members must all have clarity about the project and its objectives. The third phase in the project life cycle is the most significant stage. In this phase the main project is launched. The execution of the project takes place in this phase. While the project is being executed, there is need for monitoring the project performance and controlling the various issues arising during its execution. This mainly takes place in the fourth phase of the project life cycle. Finally the project ends with the reporting about the project. There are many risks involved in any project like technical risk, executive support risk, financial risk, market risk, risk of cultural integration, etc. In the Blue Spider Project, the risks were like the failure in catering to customer needs, the project execution required subsequent expansion of budget, extra work time was required, budget falls short at the end of the project life cycle, finding a fresh material, etc. The project manager, Gary who tried to explore newer materials while curtaining the costs, retained the risks. The time scheduling for the work was also changed to handle the time risks. All risks were informed to the stakeholders of the project at the end.

The stakeholders in a project are the ones who affect a project outcome or its execution, are affected by the project directly or indirectly, etc. In every project there are some people who have their interest vested in the project like the investors. The customers might be affected by the outcome of the project. In case of the Blue Spider Project, the major stakeholders were:

• The Parks Corporation as they were awarded the project,
• The customers or the society who would be affected by the structural development of the technical aspects of the Spartan missile,
• The organization’s management, especially Henry Gable,
• The project manager Gary Anderson along with his team or employees working for the project and
• The project sponsors

Lord Industries was a stakeholder and the main contractor of the project Spartan missile and so they will also be affected by this project. These are the main stakeholders in this case study. Communication management is a crucial part of any project. Rakshit (2014), states that communication in any project is very important as it help to develop public relations. One of the major reasons for the failure of the Blue Spider project was their lack of communication management. There was no communication between the stakeholders and the project manager. Gary failed to understand the needs of the customers regarding the project agenda or technical specifications. Effective communication can build better relations with stakeholders and reduce costs of formally arranged meetings for formal interactions among stakeholders. The ideas can be developed and risk can be mitigated through better communication management.

Project Life Cycle

The project manager has to lead the project from its conception to close. They must have leadership skills, administrative knowledge and executive capability (Sunindijo, 2015). Gary Anderson was a wrong choice of Henry Gable for a project manager. He was an engineer and did not have the managerial skills. He was mostly involved in making the technical issues right rather than addressing the managerial and administrative problems. He could not efficiently manage the risks as he failed to mitigate and communicate the risks with other stakeholders. The team management to the communication management, Gary failed at all of these. The skill to manage a project team, handle the risks, motivate the team members, etc. lacked in Gary. He had to realize that he was not an engineer in the project but the project manager. There is much difference between project engineering and project management. This difference was missing in the blue spider project. Gary did not provide timely agendas, status reports and conduct regular meetings. When there were risks increasing with the project management kept it all to himself. The lack of good customer relations also impacted the project. Henry Gable had given some false statements regarding the technical specifications which won them the project bid. But Gary Anderson, being an engineer, himself knew the forgery involved.  Therefore, he faced a lot of ethical and moral issues while working for such a project as a manager knowing that the requirements of the project will never be met.

Whenever a situation of mistrust occurs in a big project, worth multi millions, then primarily the authorities doubt or question the project management team regarding the viability of the progress and the fate of the activities downstream the project (Kerzner and Kerzner, 2017). Sometimes the customers feel the need to employ their own administrative and monitoring team to the project management department to closely check each of the activities being performed during the course of testing and activities. In case of Blue spider project, similar instance was observed when the Lords industries had appointed their own team to look into the development phase, thus making it difficult for Gary and his team to be flexible in their development process. In fact, the end client, the Army had been doubtful regarding the fate of the project thus expressing discontent and demanding detailed test results to be presented before them. Rather, it was required to produce minute details of every activities and ongoing process, which seem to unnecessarily burden the already overloaded work schedule of Gary and his program management team. In the case study, it was also observed that the main contractor, Lords Industries decided to delay the review meeting with the clients, The Army thus adding up to the complexities and budget of the overall project, also resulting in failures to meet deadlines and milestones.

Stakeholder Management and Communication

In a project dealt with uncertainties and stakeholders, having low tolerance of risks and low level of willingness to accept something new to the proposed project, fixed price contract is well accepted. Lords Industries have been the main contractors, outsourcing the project to Parks Corporation. In cases, where the project management team must be given flexibilities to conduct tests and additional improvement over the suggested program, there are chances to incur additional expense for the changes, possessing the risk of escalating the budget. Therefore, the Firm Fixed Price (FFP) is appropriate for the Blue Spider program. Another appropriate type they could have chosen is the Fixed Price Incentive Fee (FPIF) contract, where there could have been provisions for providing incentives for exceptional performance, which could have motivated the teams associated with the program to perform at their best, working on even holidays. The other types related to cost fee contract could never be suitable for high value projects which has been outsourced, since the program involved R&D and testing modules, which can result in attracting absurd costs to the project budget (Kerkhove and Vanhoucke, 2016).

Designing, monitoring and evaluation all comprises of elements of results-based project management. The fundamental idea of this project management cycle is aiding those with the responsibility of managing the activities and resources of the project for enhancing the development results, as per a continuum. Managing for impact signifies the steering of project interventions through a chain of results, namely, inputs that produce outputs, which engender outcomes that eventually contribute to the impact. This is can better represented using the following illustration. 

A project is accountable to achieve the outcomes and contribute to the development of the impact. It is expected that all outcomes of the project have the capacity to contribute to the impact that is intended. Through the progress of the project, fundamentally the local partners increase the responsibility to convert the outputs of the project into outcome and at times when the project has needed, the outcomes contribute to long-term, broader impacts. It is the accountability of the project management to facilitate the transition process and therefore, it is of high significance to negotiate an exit strategy at the start-up stage of the project. This can be better represented through the following illustration. 

Managing for impact implies that the project manager and the officials of Blue Spider Project are required to adapt with the changing circumstances and make appropriate adaption with the project, so that there are more opportunities to achieve the intended objectives.

Selection of Project Manager

The rating has been done on a scale of 5 with 1 representing minimal and 5 representing maximal ratings. 

(Source: Author’s creation)

During the initiation stages, Gary Anderson has been specific enough to look into the program details, but the entire project specifications were handled by Henry Gable, Director of Engineering. Thereafter, Anderson was asked to manage the entire Blue Spider program and submit project proposal. After receiving RFP from Lords industries, Anderson could notice the trouble areas, which depicted about the lack of management in time, scope and materials procurement. The inability to deal with the technical specification clearly indicated the lack of risk assessment and resource management, which were rectified to a little extent in the planning stage, as tried by Gary later onwards. However, the lack of human resource in the implementation stages, leading to over time and overload of the program manger himself, marks for low score, as presented in the above table. The final reports of the testing of the new procured materials and their test results to be presented before the meeting, comprising of Lord Industries and the army, serves as the project closure. However, the test results were not satisfactory as per the anticipated or proposed values, which was well known by the Project Manager, Gary and the same should have been communicated to the contractor. However, the senior manager of Gary had advised Gary to not convey the test results and therefore, the entire project closure process was lacking proper communication and delivery of the project report upon closure. Based on these information, the ratings as presented in the table have been developed.

One of the most important lessons learnt from the Blue Spider project is regarding the need for establishing transparent and efficient communication process in the project management, so as to ensure trust of the stakeholders. All of the stakeholders unanimously agreed that they feel discontent or highly dissatisfied about being late to come about any aspect of the project. All of them want to be clearly communicated about minute changes and updated about the project (Martens and Carvalho, 2017). Therefore, the most obvious recommendation for the program manager of Blue Spider is to establish proper communication channels with regular reporting through effective media, even that include high volume of paperwork. Separate provisions are required to be made for conducting this time consuming yet mandatory paperwork.

Next another lesson learnt is regarding preparation of project reports at short and regular intervals. The stakeholders are keenly interested to receive project reports regularly, as a part of showing their importance in the ongoing project. it has two benefits, one is related to keeping documentations about the persons informed about the changes and progress, so that they cannot blame each other and create chaos later on, and second is related to maintaining a habit of project tracking system to refer in case of worse situations awakening. The Project management Office software has developed at large to provide all the necessary functions related with managing a project, however maintaining a customized dashboard is highly recommended, in terms of physical and virtual records for avoiding unexpected situations and ensure proper functioning of the project tasks even during absence of one or more persons, working in pivotal roles of the project.  

References

ILO, n.d.  Project evaluation. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—exrel/documents/genericdocument/wcms_172679.pdf [Accessed 09 October 2018].

Kerkhove, L.P. and Vanhoucke, M., 2016. Incentive contract design for projects: The owner? s perspective. Omega, 62, pp.93-114.

Kerzner, H. and Kerzner, H.R., 2017. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Martens, M.L. and Carvalho, M.M., 2017. Key factors of sustainability in project management context: A survey exploring the project managers’ perspective. International Journal of Project Management, 35(6), pp.1084-1102.

Rakshit, S.K., 2014. Communication management method and system. 6^th ed. Abingdon: Routledge.

Sunindijo, R.Y., 2015. Project manager skills for improving project performance. International Journal of Business Performance Management, 16(1), pp.67-83.

Team, F.M.E., 2014.Project Risk Management. 8^th ed. New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons.

Trevino, L.K. and Nelson, K.A., 2016. Managing business ethics: Straight talk about how to do it right. 5^th ed. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

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