Last week I went to a training provided by my company about Project Management. One of the best parts about the training was the instructor. He told some very amusing anecdotes about projects he had worked on in the past and where they went right and went wrong.
One of the stories he told was about a project a major technology company (but not my employer) did for the Mexican federal government in the late '80s or early '90s. The major technology company was hired to provide a computer system to completely overhaul the federal voting records and make all the records digital. This involved a lot of data entry at the central offices in Mexico City and registration of voters in regional centers. This was an important contract for the major technology company because it represented one of the first developing countries to have digital voting records and a successful completion of the project could mean many future contracts with other governments.
The first problem encountered was with the computers used for data entry in Mexico City. The major technology company started getting reports of high failure rates and very slow progress in migrating the data. The problem was how the employees in this area were hired. The Government was responsible for hiring these employees and rather than hire a temp. agency to hire workers skilled in data entry, the government sent people to the busy subway stops and hired people as they were exiting the subway. This meant that most of the people hired had little or no computer skills and little or no knowledge on how to treat computers. When technicians for the major technology company showed up to perform service at the office they found computers with food (tortas de tamale mostly) and drink spilled all over the computers. Generally the computers were treated badly and the progress was slow because most of the data entry was done by employees who typed using the good ol' hunt 'n' peck method.
The second problem had to do with high failure rates for the servers at some of the regional centers. The government was responsible for leasing the buildings for these regional centers, but had failed to check the condition of the roofs at many of these centers. When the rainy season started many of the servers at these centers started to get dripped on by leaks in the roofs. Workers at theses centers either didn't understand or didn't care that this was bad for the computers.
By this point news of the problems with the elections system started making its way into the press. Most of the articles didn't talk about the cause of the problems, but simply blamed the major technology company for "delays" in the deployment of the system. Eventually news of the problems made its way to the executive management of the company. Finally, the CEO of the company made a decision. No matter what the cost, even if it meant a loss on this project, the major technology company would fix the problems and complete the project on schedule. This meant hiring a temp. agency to hire qualified replacement workers for the data entry. This meant repairing and sealing the roofs at the regional center. This meant a lot of many spent by the technology company on non-technology solutions. The project did get completed, but at a significant loss to the company.
What did this teach us about Project Management? Well, for one, make sure that the contract spells out the responsibility of both parties and make sure both parties understand these responsibilities.
Posted by Noah Brimhall at May 29, 2007 11:21 AM