preview

Business Management Problem Identification of at&T

Better Essays

Problem Identification Paper
Legendary management consultant Peter Drucker once said, "So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work." AT&T recently discovered how true that statement is, and in doing so cost the company both financially and in reputation.
The focus of this paper is on the botched attempt by AT&T to gain their competitive edge back from their main competitors. This paper will identify the problems associated with the project and discuss how project management principles were not used to reach project goals while adversity caused the project to implode. The discussion of relative legal compliance aspects causing difficulties for the company will be shown and recommendations will be …show more content…

The lack of direction was causing the project to unravel.
When all of AT&T Wireless's major competitors chose another company for wireless number porting, AT&T Wireless should have rethought its choice of a competing vendor, which meant extra layers of integration that ultimately failed. The due diligence of integrating a new system with AT&T's current system was non-existent and the company paid the ultimate price as Cingular, one of AT&T Wireless' largest competitors bought the wireless business from AT&T.
Management of employees and morale prior to, during, and after completion of the project was another significant factor in the failure of the upgrade project. While AT&T wireless was planning to outsource their customer service responsibilities to oversees companies, the management's lack of interpersonal action caused turmoil during the project, thus threatening the outcome. The company would have been better served to postpone layoffs and offshore outsourcing until the systems project was completed. Morale and productivity among AT&T Wireless IT staff were devastated by rumors of offshore outsourcing and layoffs that spun around the project but were left mostly unaddressed by IT leaders.
The lines of communication that should have been kept open and clear were anything but. If the company had planned layoffs or outsourcing is unavoidable during a

Get Access