Executive Management Support - Essay Example

A concise summary should be presented periodically to the steering committee with a clear outline of any expectations from senior management. Another way is to agree on a project sponsor within the client organization who champions the cause of the project and liaises with all stakeholders. The sponsor is then given the responsibility to maintain the “upper management link” for the project (Englund & Bucero, p.10). Underlining this involvement is continued communication while taking care that problems that could be resolved at a lower level are not escalated to the steering committee or the senior management (Lester, 2007, p. 87).
A clear statement of requirements: A clear definition of requirements for the project determines the planning and direction of the entire project. Requirements must be discussed and defined thoroughly and documented in a Requirements Specification Document. This is directly linked with the list of deliverables which then sets the direction the project will take (Cleland & Ireland, 2007, p. 271). It is also essential to keep in place change control procedures as some requirements may change over time and must again be clearly stated and incorporated into the project plan if accepted (Cleland & Ireland, 2007, p. 271). Accurate documentation of requirements results from interviews and discussions must be signed off by all stakeholders reflecting the agreement on their clarity, accuracy, assumptions, and correlation with the deliverables.
Challenger Shuttle –Failure Analyzed

An engineer at Morton Thiokol suspected that the O-rings in the space shuttle Challenger’s solid rocket boosters were faulty and would not work at low temperatures below the threshold of 53 degrees. On the ill-fated day of the disaster, the temperatures were expected to be 10 degrees below freezing point, much below the threshold of the O-rings. 24 hours before the launch he got the opportunity to raise the issue before the top management of his company and NASA in a conference call. While initially pushing their engineer’s view, Morton Thiokol caved in to pressure from NASA management and gave the go-ahead for the launch.
One of the basic precepts of Risk Management is to identify risks and avoid potential negative consequences by devising a plan to mitigate or avoid them. The failure to respond to the risk posed by the O-rings was in clear violation of the basic concepts of Risk Management. Secondly, in the two videos and the conversations shown, it was clear that a threshold for O-Ring effectiveness at 53 degrees was well-defined in Morton Thiokol’s testing database. This database should have formed a part of both Morton Thiokol and NASA’s Risk Management Plan. As part of the plan, contingency options (Schwalbe, 2006, p. 154) for the temperature conditions should have been specified in risk response documents which seemingly were not. This, then, left it to an engineer to raise an alarm much later into the schedule and only in response to a go-no-go decision in a conference call less than 24 hours before launch. Thirdly, even though the predefined contingency of aborting the launch in such a situation was not specified, the risk was explicitly discussed, though late, at the highest forum. The decision-making was faulty as it ignored the potential impact of the risk which should also have been part of the risk quantification in the Risk Management Plan (Lester, 2007, p. 65).

A discussion of Risk Management for Challenger leads to the knowledge area of Communications Management where the second big failure occurred. To put this in context, the launch decision based on a life-threatening risk was discussed at a very late stage under extreme pressure, only a few hours before the launch. The fault in the O-rings was known and has been under discussion at the engineering level. The engineer should not have been pushed to a level of desperation hours before the launch to have the issue escalated. It is obvious that escalation procedures (Schwalbe, 2006, p. 150) in communications planning (Harrington, 2006, p. 66) were not in place or were not followed rigorously in information distribution (Harrington, 2006, p. 66) otherwise a problem of this magnitude should have surfaced much earlier. Read More