Blue Spider (BS) Project Case Study - Assignment Solution

Introduction

Project management involves controlling, planning, prioritizing, and organizing resources to achieve the project objective. Management of a project is across functional teams’ work that involves integration to attain common purpose and objective.  The Blue Spider Project was to help the Army improve their Spartan Missile fatigue failures and the project had time constraints for completion. However, the main challenge or problem with the project was that the constraints were ever changing. Gary, the project manager, made recurrent mistakes that caused negative reactions and affected the flow of the project. The mistakes made by Gary leave readers with questions whether he was qualified for project managerial role or not. An effective project manager should be an individual with both technical and managerial skills and experiences. It is possible or relevant to deduce that the problems experienced during the project were mostly because of assigned manager’s inexperience.   

The purpose of the current report is to review the approaches or strategies used by Parks Corporation in the implementation of the Blue Spider Project. The main aspects of this analysis are systematic and critical reviews and evaluation of the BS project management approaches regarding general failures of the project. The breakdown of communication, inadequate stakeholders’ engagement, project scope definition failures, project strategically decisions, project manager qualifications, major risks handling, project management team efforts, and functional employees responsibilities are the key terms and issues discussed in this report. 

The report structure constitutes four main sections, which are an executive summary, introduction, project appraisal, and conclusion. The first section provides a brief overview of the case study. The second section continues with the project brief but concentrates on the report deliverables and key issues discussed. The third section involves answering eight questions about the case study. Lastly, the report concludes with an inference section where a summary of the report is given and the eighth question answered. 

Project Appraisal/Body

Question 1: Scope Creep

No, the project scope was not defined clearly at the early stage of the project. One major scope creep was poor functional organization. From the start, the functional scope problem was evident since the project kickoff was done informally without specific guidelines, the proposal won unethically, and organization relations were not clearly defined. There was no or little comprehension of the connection between various functional organizations and this led to communication challenges between Anderson and other team members. The team’s capabilities to respond faster to functional scopes were affected by poor communication or lack of priority control on which projects or facilities to work on. Anderson lacked direct control on cost control and this affected the performance of the project since he could not control the performance of personnel. 

The functional scope rescheduling affected various stakeholders and project performance since there were times when Gary failed to realize the significance of timely communication with the functional department and this led to delay of tasks approval or change implementation. There are challenges that surfaced during the project life cycle that could not be realized at the time. The challenges led to issues that put the project manager’s qualification, functional employees’ capabilities, project management system, and contractor communication, into scrutiny and questioning. The stakeholders were affected by ineffective function procedures and systems since they had no room for free task implementation and in many cases, the communication of technical changes was issued late during briefing meetings.  In general, scope management was poor and led to poor project performance from all the relevant departments and functional stakeholders because they were not as motivated as necessary.