A project will not fail because of a project managers inability to use a particular project management software tool. What is the significance of relationships among the various project stakeholders and the projects schedule and budget?

Case study: Project Runway

Atlantas Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is one of the worlds busiest, with over 88 million travelers in 2005 and an estimated 120 million by 2010. In 2003, Dwight Pullen, a civil engineer for H. J. Russel & Company in Atlanta, Georgia, was named project manager for a $1.28 billion construction project to build a fifth runway. With only 13 years experience, a friend joked that Pullen was the youngest person in the country to manage a billion-dollar project. He may have been right.

The 9,000-foot expansion runway project was built over a two-lane highway, Interstate 285, which loops around the city of Atlanta. This included building a 1,264-foot tunnel for the highway and building the runway on top of the tunnel to accommodate large planes like the Boeing 747 and Airbus A-380 that can weigh up to 1 million pounds. The project was expected to provide a financial boom that would save the airline industry an estimated $5 million a week in delay costs and was considered a project of national significance. Pullen says that getting the project done on time and on budget were absolutely essential to the credibility of everyone involved in the project. The project was completed 11 days ahead of schedule and at $100 million under budget.

Pullen said that the biggest challenge of the project was dealing with the various stakeholders, which included Atlanta city council members, airport executives, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Georgia Department of Transportation, environmental groups, contractors, engineers, and architects. This required building and maintaining strong relationships with all of them. Although Pullen said that he didnt have to make best friends or go golfing with these people, he relied on these relationships to help with negotiations and to keep his team focused on milestones. According to Pullen, Some of my colleagues arent that good with the relationship side, and I think that causes projects to fail, be delayed, or go over budget. Contractors will hold up your project if they dont like youtheyre notorious for that!

The project plan entailed about as much time in the planning phase as it did in the construction phase. Moreover, the design phase was the shortest phase in the master project schedule and included more than 15,000 scheduled activities. These activities were input into a project management software tool called Primavera. Pullen contends that the work breakdown structure was critical to this project because it served as a common language for everyone working on the project and a best practice that allowed him to be successful in analyzing, forecasting, scheduling, and base-lining.

Pullen believes one of his keys to success was the idea of project celebrations to keep morale up and mark the completion of milestones along the way. For example, he instituted cake and ice cream parties for employee of the quarter, project team awards, groundbreakings, and safety records. At the end of the successful project, Pullen explains, We went out and had dinner at the end of the runway, then we got up on top of the runway while the lights were on. Its absolutely beautiful to see that up close, so that was a phenomenal moment. Then we put the whole team in company trucks and raced all the way down the nearly two miles of runway like an airplane would. It was thrilling and even though the celebration was inexpensive, everybody appreciated it. In

addition, the project team also got to take a ten-minute flight around the city on a 767 that took off and landed on the new runway.