Provide 2 recommendations for the case. Provide an overview of the problem for each of the recommendations and clearly outlines the issue the project team is facing.

• Outline a comprehensive strategy that specifically addresses what must be done to resolve the issues discussed in the scenario.
• Provide a detailed description of the impact of the team's decisions on the following areas detailed in the scenario, including:
  • project's cost
  • project schedule
  • project performance
• Provide a high-level overall conclusion as a result of all the detailed recommendations provided above.

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 some 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.

Your team is broken into two main groups: The first group consists of the project manager, business analysts, and management and is located in the United States. The second group consists of the development and QA teams and they are located in India.

The WBS was developed based on estimates from the teams in India. The development team agreed to provide daily updates to you about progress against the WBS to make sure that the project's milestones are going to be met.

However, by the time the development team got close to the first milestone, it became obvious that they were behind, even though their daily updates indicated that they were on track. In addition, part of the team adopted a different design approach than the one agreed upon at the beginning of the project.

The lack of meaningful updates from the development team along with a different design track has possibly jeopardized the whole project because its possible it will render the plan obsolete, which means the team is now at risk of not delivering the project deliverables.

Despite that, there have been a push forward in other areas that have finished multiple milestones and deliverables and are quite proud of the work they've done. However, the acceptance testing is not go as smoothly as planned. They have found after completion that the application has defects that weren't anticipated, and some core functionality is not able to be tested. The project team doesn't feel they are getting the direction they need to continue moving forward. Additionally, some of the application functions are out of the original scope, and the business sponsor has asked you when she can expect to test it. Finally, with your project's deadline rapidly approaching, you also see that there are interproject dependencies that make it unlikely that you will be able to achieve your launch date.

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?