Project Management at Dotcom.com Dotcom.com, a software engineering and systems de costs and a related drop-off in profitability. In par- velopment consulting firm, sells a wide assortment of ticular, Dotcom's executives are concerned because Internet and computer-based solutions for resource the last seven consulting contracts have resulted in planning, administrative, and accounting networks almost no profit margin because the software systems to organizations in health care delivery, financial were delivered late and required several rounds of services, and hotel management. Typically, a service rework to fix bugs or correct significant shortcomings provider approaches Dotcom.com with a list of prob- in the software. The firm decided to hold a weekend lems it has and some targets for organizational im- off-site retreat with the project managers responsible provement. Because most of Dotcom's clients are not for these most recently completed projects in order themselves computer savvy, they tend to rely heavily to learn why project management was being done on Dotcom to correctly diagnose their difficulties, pro- so poorly. pose solutions to correct these problems, and imple- To a person, the project managers fixed the blame ment the new technologies. The industry in which for their problems on the clients. A typical response Dotcom operates is extremely competitive, forcing was made by Susan Kiley, a project manager with successful organizations to make low bids to win con- more than five years' experience, who stated, "We are sulting contracts. In this environment, project man- put in a very tough position here. Most of the custom- agement is vital for Dotcom's success because poorlyers don't know what they really want so we have to managed projects quickly "eat up" the profit margin spend hours working with them to get a reasonable for any job. Statement of Work that we can develop the project Unfortunately, Dotcom's senior management scope around. This takes time. In fact, the more time team has noticed a recent upsurge in project operating I spend with the customer up front, the less I have to get my team to actually develop the system for them. in the firm's operations. Clearly, something had to be It's a Catch-22If I want to get things right, I have to done about their processes. pry information out of them. The better I do getting a sense of their problems, the less time I have to develop Questions and run the project!" 1. How would you begin redesigning Dotcom. Jim Crenshaw, another project manager, spoke com's project management processes to minimize up. "It doesn't stop there, unfortunately. My biggest the problems it is experiencing with poor scope problems are always on the back end of the project. We management? work like dogs to get a system up that corresponds to 2. How do the company's consulting clients contrib- the client's demands, only to have them look it over, ute to the problems with expanding or changing push a few buttons, and start telling us that this was scope? If you were to hold a meeting with a po- not anything like what they had in mind! How am I tential customer, what message would you want supposed to develop a system to solve their problems the customer to clearly understand? when they don't know what their problems are? Better 3. How do you balance the need to involve clients yet, what do we do when they think they know what with the equally important need to freeze project they want and then when we create it, they turn around scope in order to complete the project in a timely and reject our solutions out of hand?" fashion? After two hours of hearing similar messages from 4. Why are configuration management and project the other project managers, it became clear to the senior change control so difficult to perform in the midst management team that the project management prob- of a complex software development project such lems were not isolated but were becoming embedded as those undertaken by Dotcom.com