Following is a mini-case from practice. Analyze the case and provide five recommendations for the IT Department.

You’ve just taken over a project from another project manager and have come back from a very uncomfortable meeting with your business sponsor. In the meeting, the sponsor told you how dissatisfied she is with the project’s performance to date and that she’s getting ready to pull the plug on the project entirely. Deadlines keep slipping, the application isn’t complete, and the sponsor feels like she can’t get in touch with anyone to give her an update on the project’s status and progress.

From conversations with your project team, you learn that requirements still haven’t been finalized, and the team is waiting for input before being able to proceed on several key parts of the application. Despite that, they’ve been able to push forward in other areas and are quite proud of the work they’ve done. However, they haven’t had a chance to show it to the sponsor.

To complicate matters further, your boss has made it clear that this project must be completed on schedule, because he needs the resources for another project.

What do you do? What impact do your decisions have on the project’s cost, schedule, and performance?