A happy gathering of the CFV project team at a popular restaurant down-town was called to
celebrate the successful completion of a 10-month project for Carnegie Fruits and
Vegetables, a produce wholesaler. The new information system registers product receipts
from growers, processes clients’ orders and produce shipments to clients (green grocers and
supermarkets), bills clients, and calculates payments made to the growers. The team
members were proud to emphasize that the project was conducted in full as originally
scheduled. The team was especially jubilant as earlier that morning each member had
received a nice bonus for finishing on time. The third speaker, the software company’s Vice
President for Finance, altered the pleasant atmosphere by mentioning that this very
successful project had actually lost about $90,000. During his remarks, he praised the
planners for their good estimates of the resources needed for the analysis and design phase,
and for the plans for broad reuse of software from other systems that were, this time,
completely realized. “The only phase where our estimates failed was one of the project’s
final phases, the client’s instruction, that where the client’s staff are instructed on how to
use the new information system. It now appears that no one had read the relevant RFP
(requirement for proposal) section carefully enough. This section stated in a rather
innocuous manner that the personnel in all the CFV branches where the software was to be
installed would be instructed in its use by the software supplier.” After a short pause he
continued thus: “Nobody tried to find out how many branches our client operates. Nobody
mentioned that CFV operates 19 branches – six of them overseas – before signing the
contract!” He continued: “We tried to renegotiate the installation and instruction budget
items with the client, but the client insisted on sticking to the original contract.” Though no
names were mentioned, it was clear that he blamed the sales negotiating team for the loss