A new program at Signal Enterprises was supposed to track customer calls. Unfortunately, it took 20 minutes to load on a PC, and it crashed frequently. Management hired a new consultant to fix the application, but after three months the project was discontinued after $200,000 had been spent.

The project did not have a traditional reporting structure. For this project, it appeared that no one was actually in charge. The lead project manager quit halfway through, the in-house programmers were reassigned to other projects or let go, and the two other layers of management loosely supervised the systems analyst. Worse yet, the company did not check the references of the consulting firm it had hired to write the program for the new system. The outside consultants, who were located two states away, made many programming errors. Although the systems ana¬ lyst caught some of the consultant’s mistakes, the programming consultants grew increasingly distant and difficult to work with. They would not even furnish the source code to the project managers for fear of revealing their incompetence.

Required

a. Identify potential causes for the system implementation failure.

b. What steps should Signal have taken to successfully design and implement the call tracking system?