Teradyne Jaguar Project Case Study

Many project managers thought

i. The new information systems project for an enhanced network firewall appeared to be on a very aggressive implementation schedule. When interviewed, the IT manager said that even if he put all the IT employees on the project full-time for the next two years, the project still couldn’t be completed on time. The IT manager indicated he had spoken to upper management about the issue, but upper management did not take any action.

The vast difference in cultures between the two groups caused friction in their collaboration of developing a project. The scientific group preferred working privately as opposed to team work. They believed in innovation and the promptness in completing a project. They did not value the importance of documenting procedures and new processes. The Information Management group on the other places emphasis on the importance of documenting procedures. They advocated following formal business processes as an attempt to resolve the differences between both the groups (Makarov). These formal business processes were eventually refused by the scientific team as they preferred a more informal method of communicating. This rebellion eventually led one of the scientists, Steve Levitt to conduct his own program on his own Oracle Database within his office. Steve continued his work on his private server. Most of the work that he did was not completely familiar with his fellow colleagues. He was repeatedly solicited by the Research Information Management group to document his computational procedures. He didn’t take any action on these requests. The next issue that developed from this lack of action was that some of the data that was generated from Steve Levitt’s computational work was incorrect. The Research Management team was requested to fix the data validation issue that was caused by Steve Levitt. Without proper

Gray, C. F. & Larson, E. W. (2008). _Project Management: The Managerial Process_. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hills Companies, Inc.

Everyone on the team shares the processes for performing project work, communication, conflict resolution, and decision making. The projectized structure enhances project productivity and efficiency because more time can be devoted to doing work rather than creating systems to support doing the work.

Teradyne is a 45 year old corporation specialized in testing equipment for transistors and other electrical components of the semiconductor industry. The company was founded in 1960 by two MIT graduates with a vision to bring a line of reliable, fast testing equipment to the industry. As the complexity and volume of components manufactured by their customers

*This was a build/design project. The idea of making design decisions after construction was underway is an recipe for catastrophe in a project of this magnitude. The city's insistence that this be held to a tight schedule yet allowing multiple design changes was unfortunate. There were too many players, lots of pressure, and the whole project was run by committee with differing agendas. The project administrators had to balance administrative, political, and social imperatives.

Business has changed in the past 20 or so years. Products are being produced more rapidly and with the introduction of globalization competition has become more abundant. There is a need to become more customer focused but at the same time quicker to market while still reducing cost. Doing business the old way is just not cutting it anymore. Project management gives companies the ability to focus on many things at once without losing focus on their core business model. Processes become projects that have a start and finish and can be tracked and quantified

Using project management offers a business a way for dealing with considerably lowered phase times. With businesses operating internationally projects that can have an effect on the company as a whole are not easy to manage without a proper line of attack. For this, project management would help cross functional teams to be more successful.

Firstly, R.Ryan Nelson (2007) referred to 10 of the most infamous IT projects to assert the importance of making a careful analysis of projects that have occurred to help future projects. In order to attest this opinion, he illustrated the case of United Kingdom’s

As could be predicted, each company had different levels of maturity in PM. Alpha had an EPM system and believed that their PM implementation was better than Honicker’s. Beta Company was just learning PM and did not have an EMP; they did have some templates that used for status report. Gamma and Delta did not know about project management. Additional to these PM differences, laws of the four company’s locations

In the process of going from a non-project driven firm to a project-driven one, the greatest resistance might come from the executives including the board members, company owners and the vice president. The strong and rigid culture has been instilled in the company since 50 years and as a result, the president's preaching fell on deaf ears. Authoritative support is necessary to execute such strategies and it seems that for Macon Inc., that will be the most difficult one.

Lack of project management clarity: the planning activity had lot of material but lacked content, clear action items and lack of consensus on the milestones. The difficulties in the project only increased with time and a more performance driven style would have kept things on track if introduced early on.

One of the first pitfalls with the Denver Airport was the lack of projected time. This was a very complex project that required much more time and planning than the amount allotted by the project management team. The BAE project offer was accepted because it had a significantly shorter deadline than the other three offers. While the project management team at BAE was convinced the project could have been completed in their proposed timeframe,

They are not tool specific. In today's software-reliant world, the reality is that the methodology and the organization's project management software tool are often heavily intertwined. Complication and sophisticated client expectations of the latest projects reveal the flaws of traditional project management methods. In addition usually project managers are expected to make a sense of balance between client expectations and business interests and also to improve the end product, decrease cost and duration of the project (Project Management Institute 2005). The disadvantages of traditional project management method are listed below.