Project Failure - Migration of T-Star

Project Background
T-Star was a back-office software system for Asset Management Companies (AMC) operating in Japan. Around 80% of AMC in Japan subscribed to T-Star for their daily operations. This project was an application migration project and was outsourced to an IT services provider in India. The estimated project cost for T-Star’s owner was 14 million USD.



Project Scope
This system was to be re-engineered on Java technologies. It was developed using COBOL and had 1.5 millions lines of code. This project was divided into 4 phases (System Analysis, Design, Development and Testing). The total duration of the project was around two years. The team size remained around 35-45 persons including three project managers.



End Result
The project ran for twelve months and was scarped after the end of the analysis phase. All project managers employed by the IT vendor resigned. The vendor also lost market reputation. This resulted into an adverse impact on its Japanese projects.



Key Mistakes (From Vendor Side)
Project Approach
Feedbacks provided by customer on use cases and business requirements on many instances was informal, verbal or were on hard copies. This resulted in confusions and a lot of time was wasted in tracking and managing feedbacks. The methodology selected was object oriented and iterative in nature but it ended up in standard SDLC customized model.
Customer Management
An active customer engagement starting from Sr. management level up to team level was desired. Relationship should have been managed more effectively from onsite (Japan) with dedicated account manager/onsite coordinator from the start of the engagement.
Resource Management
Resources with required skill set were not found on time resulting in poor quality of work. Many crucial resources e.g. Test Lead, SQA expert etc. could not be inducted in time which affected customer’s confidence. Some key resources including project managers left the project midway.
Culture and Language
This project like any other Japanese projects needed managers with prior Japanese project experience. Communication was a big issue as all customer communication was in Japanese. Team members faced language barriers.



Lessons we can learn from this project failure
Before start of any project- deliverables, risks, format of delivery and assumptions need to be clearly defined & communicated to all stakeholders. Set reasonable customer expectations in terms of what would be delivered, how frequently and on what quality levels. Always report issues and problems to the customer, those faced by the team due to lack of clarity in requirements, frameworks or any customer specified items (this was most often ignored!). Further, closure of above issues should be tied up with project schedule and quality of deliverable. Always ensure that enough time is budgeted for internal as well as customer reviews. Take customer feedbacks on time or else inform the customer the impact on schedule & cost due to late feedbacks. Document each and every customer feedback and do not rely on verbal or informal feedback. Set up a dedicated project management office to monitor, track and resolve critical project issues.