Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of this textual analysis has been the revelation that a considerable amount of the original
case study seems to be directed at colourising and novelisation of the reported events,
at setting the reader's expectations and, from the very beginning, at leading the reader
to reach very specific conclusions at the end of the case - mainly that the project should
have been de-escalated before its ultimate failure. While many of these writers' strategies
can be attributed to the intended use of the text in teaching IS students, the selectivity
of the text and its clear omissions hint at yet another agenda. In particular, the majority
of the case study text seems to rely on an interview with the then President and Project
Manager for BAE, Gene Di Fonso. Much of the substance of Di Fonso's statements seem
to be a defence of the BAE involvement in the project and an attempt to lay blame for
various aspects of the failure on everyone else. If the authors' intentions were to direct
the reader to sympathise with a wronged BAE then that goal has definitely been achieved.
In the process of 'peeling off' the layers of the case study authors' intentions and preju-
dices, and by reconciling the two distinct horizons of understanding as developed by
both investigators, new observations started to emerge. In particular, we were struck
by a large number of issues hinting at the inherent rigidity in the project administration
and management.
Fusing the horizons led further to re-evaluating all the findings collected thus far. In
particular, in cycles one and two, rigidity and/or flexibility seemed quite irrelevant and
nearly all observations could have been explained by assuming the basic laws of project
management had been violated. In cycle three, gender parity, work practice conformity,
imposition of authority and autonomy reduction were rediscovered, and seen by the
researchers as a serious decrease in flexibility.
While some of the inflexibilities could have been attributed to the nature of the project,
such as its size, complexity, relative novelty and task granularity, other inflexibility
factors, such as inflexible business processes, state and project policies, hiring policies,
staff and contractor duties, schedules and expected deliverables, relationships and alli-
ances, finances and contracts, designs, coordination and communication modality, could
all only be explicated by the inexperienced and unwilling project management.
The fourth hermeneutic cycle further enhanced the understanding of the case and re-
vealed that while there was initially considerable flexibility in the system as a whole,
that flexibility was taken away in the later stages of the project when it was needed
most. And that seemed to be inextricably linked to the death of Chief Engineer Slinger.
Sixth cycle
In the last project phase, the researchers sought to include additional documents that
were substantively about the DIA project and to apply the hermeneutic principle of
adding new knowledge into an existing system of understanding that has already been
developed, and using Myers notion of continuing to make sense (1994a, p. 191), to either
confirm understanding, or to extend the understanding to accommodate the new
knowledge.
The new text document was by Montealegre, titled 'De-escalating Information Technology
Projects: Lessons from the Denver International Airport' (Montealegre and Keil, 2000).
The goal in the introduction of this new document was to determine if there was any
new knowledge about the DIA project that had not been previously revealed, and
whether this knowledge maintained consistency with the understanding built to date.
The focus of the document was to analyse the project failure from the standpoint of de-
escalation. The first new piece of knowledge was the fact that several government
Search WWH ::
Custom Search