NORTH AMERICAN FINANCIAL CORPORATION Case Study Solution
Introduction
The North American Financial Corporation had acquired one of its competitors, First Blixton in the March of 2001. This acquisition had left the company in the possession of the two obsolete mortgage loan management systems, in the face of the most urgent requirements of the market. However, neither of the applications of the acquired company had the capability of the volume of the transactions of North American Financial Corporation. As a result, the decision to invest in the system and develop the system had been made by overhauling the entire mortgage management systems. The project had been outsourced to a third party vendor as the company did not have the in house technical resources that were required for executing the project.
The vendor, CeresOpt, had decided to develop the new consolidated system for a fixed price over a 12 months’ period. However, on the onset, the project has seemed to fail as analyzed in this report. The project has been failed due to the catastrophic costs that had been borne by the company as a result of the series of unexpected incidents and poor planning of the project. Secondly, the project as a whole has also failed as it had also faced schedule overruns and this had led the firm and its management to review the approach of the IT project that had been initially taken by them.
Analysis
There are several criteria for a perfect project and we would be discussing each of these criteria, their success and contribution to the failure of the project so far. These are analyzed and discussed below:
Scope
First if we talk about the scope of the project then we see that all the objectives of the MLM project were well defined by the management of the company and it stated for the MLM project to add to all the missing functionalities so that the project could handle the large and the combined volume of the transactions for the project(Bjarne, 2008). The primary objective was to develop an integrated mortgage loan system through which all the necessary resources could be put in place for meeting the new requirements of the market.
The purpose of to centralize the mortgage loan management system. Therefore, the scope of the project was well defined however, the management did not defined the deliverables and milestones for this project clearly(Bjarne, 2008). However, the approach to the project management that had been selected by the management of NAF-BP was not the right approach for this project. The management had decided to redeploy the existing system of Blixton and to build on it. However, since this system did not have the capability and it could not be integrated with the existing systems of North American Financial Corporation, therefore, this approach would have never worked for this project.
Instead of this approach, the management should have decided to purchase a new system or software from the pan Canadian bank that had the capability of handling such large volume of transactions and it could be integrated with all the IS and IT systems of North American Financial Corporation by modifying the system. Therefore, the scope was well defined but the wrong approach to project management had contributed to the failure of the project.
Stakeholders
This project had been launched in a much similar way as many other projects of the bank by first recruiting an in-house team leader, Gilbert Gascon and his primary responsibilities was the coordination of the functional team and also to act as the intermediary between the technical and the functional team for bridging all the communication gaps. The technical team was led by Ron Samson. Although it was clear to all of the participants that a good knowledge of the mortgage market and the expertise in their processes was required by this project(Kerzner, 2013).
However, the team leader was not successful in managing the stakeholders and as a result severe communication problems had started to emerge as the months went by. This project had initially begun with just 25 to 30 people and this number had then grow to 60 people. All the extra people that had been hired were not aware about what was going on in the project and I assume that the global scope of the project would not have been clear to them. These people were just talking within their small groups and they were never aware about what other people were doing in the other groups.
NORTH AMERICAN FINANCIAL CORPORATION Harvard Case Solution & Analysis
As all the activities were interrelated and functional applications had to follow a sequence therefore, the waiting time was also high for the programmers, functional team and the test people. Lastly, the manager of NAF-BP did not have any control over the coordination and supervision with the technical team of the vendor and both the team were blaming one another for errors and delays. This was a clear miscommunication and lack of stakeholder management from leaders of both teams which led to the schedule overruns for the project and its ultimate failure so far(Kerzner, 2013)....................
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