Organization ‘O’ is an upcoming software firm.

Project manager Vishal is assigned a project ‘X’ which Organization ‘O’ has bagged a
few days back. Project ‘X’ was the first of its kind project taken by the Organization O.
The project ‘X’ requires component ‘C’ for completion which is produced by Company
‘S’.

Initial estimation was 8PM. Resources identified were 4 and project was to be delivered
in 2.5 months. The estimation was done on gut feeling.

There is no process or Quality management in the beginning of the project

However, while development phase was going on, process and quality assurance became
a prime focus of the organization.

The hurdles found during the project are:

1. One of the team member after 1.5 months from start of project met accident and was
hospitalized for 3 months
2. Company S got into huge trouble after the CEO declared forgery in balance sheet
Component C delivery got delayed by a month due to issues in company S

By the end of 2 months it was evident that the delivery can not be given in the foretold
time and extension on schedule was taken for 2 more months.

By this time customer asked for 3 enhancements in the existing project.

While incorporating these changes V realized that he needs extra Efforts too.
Customer was ‘not happy’ when this was communicated. He insisted V to finish X in
previously agreed effort but after several communications and pleading more efforts was
agreed.

The Project Team of V was relieved finally after delivering the project in 5 months
however there happiness was short as they received poor customer feedback on Quality
of product.

As process management was already a key area in organization by then, further RCA
showed the Quality of product was faulty due to the bad test cases (i.e. insufficient test
coverage) provided by the customer only.

Based on the above situation please answer the following Questions.

1. Scope of the project should be clear to both Project Team and customer by what phase
of the project?
a) Before doing the estimation
b) After doing the estimation
c) Scope can be changed so there is no point in defining the scope
d) Anytime before development starts

2. How the project planning can be done so that efforts exceeding is required only in
exceptional cases
a) Give customer the worst case estimation
b) Ask team to come on weekends
c) Add buffer time for each stage while doing project planning
d) ‘Adjust’ with customer

3. Why you think the customer was ‘not happy’ when asked for more efforts
a) He was not willing to spend
b) He was not communicated properly about the project development on periodic basis
c) Customer had just given a schedule exceeding
d) He was expecting these to be small changes and not require that much extra effort

4. As learning from RCA, what would be the next step for future projects?
a) Review test specs provided by any customer hence forth
b) Requirements once freeze cannot be changed
c) Change requests/ enhancements to be tracked to closure
d) Learnings to be shared with the organization

5. What is the best way to overcome the hurdles mentioned above?

a) Prepare risk plan
b) Maintain backup for resources
c) Communicate dependencies to the customer
d) All of the above

6. Based on the above scenario, the process management will ensure quality checks on
which phase?
a) Requirement /scope
b) Development
c) Testing
d) All of the above

Answers:
1. a
2. c
3. b
4. a
5. d
6. c