A new program at Jones and Carter Corporation (JCC) was supposed to track customer calls. Unfortunately, the program took 20 minutes to load on a PC, and it crashed frequently. The project did not have a traditional reporting structure, and it appeared that no one was actually in charge. The lead project manager quit halfway through the project, the in-house programmers were reassigned to other projects or let go, and two layers of management loosely supervised the systems analyst.

Management hired consultants to fix the application, but after three months and $200,000, the project was discontinued. JCC did not check the references of the consulting firm it hired to create the new system. The consultants, who were located two states away, made many programming errors. Although the systems analyst caught some of the consultant’s mistakes, they grew increasingly distant and difficult to work with. They would not even furnish the source code to the project managers, most likely because they were afraid of revealing their incompetence.

Required

a. Identify potential causes for the system implementation failure.

b. What steps should JCC have taken to successfully design and implement the call tracking system?