The Bbc Originally Contracted With Siemens.edited

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1. The BBC originally contracted with Siemens, a successful and capable technology

solution provider. What happened to the DMI project when it was being managed by

Siemens, and what was the BBC's response?

The DMI Project was initially meant to transform BBC operations and help it to digitalize its

operations by moving from the traditional expensive and outdated databases. BBC directly

contracted Siemens trusting their judgment on project development based on previous working

experiences they had with them. Siemens took almost full control over the project with very little

communication flowing between them (Mohammed 2018). When Siemens began missing

significant delivery milestones and encountering technical challenges, the BBC became

concerned about the distant relationship that was forming between itself and the contractor. After

1 year, BBC lost its patience with Siemens and terminated the $65 million contract, and sued the

company where it received $47 million in a court settlement. The project had led to a great loss

of over 100 million euros for BBC; they, therefore, decided to assign its employees the DMI

project to run. The BBC CEO took full responsibility for the failure of the project and apologized

to the public for being at the helm of the company when the DMI project failed.

2. How would you describe the communication of project status from the BBC DMI project

team to their executive sponsors and government oversight team?

The BBC management exhibited poor communication with the stakeholders as it failed to give

concise and clear status on the performance of the project. According to reports, the BBC was

aware of the project's shortcomings as early as 2011, but the image is presented to the outside

world, including Parliamentary oversight committees, was remarkably sanguine. The was

asymmetry of information between the company and stakeholders as the management tried to

cover up for the ailing project that was costing the taxpayers a huge amount of money. In a 2011

meeting, the manager is reported having told members of parliament, "There are many programs

that are already being made with DMI and some have gone to air and are going to air". This was

never the case and was intended to hide the reality of the state of the project. There were

numerous reports that the DMI project was failing but the management dismissed these as

rumors and claimed that the project had been successful and was doing well. Some critics

claimed that internal politics was the cause of the project’s failure. The management continued to

deny the poor performance until the public failure during Thatcher’s funeral. This led to the

firing of the previous manager and another manager took over.

3. Summarize: List and describe FOUR bad project management practices that led to the

failure of this project.

Poor Communication. This was the main cause of the failure of the DMI project. The

management knew the real state of the project yet they continually went ahead to deceive the

masses and other stakeholders on the true performance (Gupta et al. 2019). The management

continually reported false progress to parliamentarians and to the citizens who speculated that the

project was ailing.

Direct contracting; "hands-off” attitude. It was a great mistake for BBC to directly contract

Siemens based on previous working relations. The tendering process should have been opened to

bidders to ensure that only a company with a great reputation on the same would be assigned the

contract. Siemens was not qualified to work on such a kind of project; this could have been the

reason behind the failure of the project.

Poor planning and scheduling. BBC company is short of clear plans as it exhibits a failure to

meet specific dates. The management conducted its operations abruptly and failed to first

conduct research or even evaluate the technical capability of its workers and partners (Hughes

et.al 2017). BBC never learned from failure; even after failing with Siemens, it goes ahead to

transfer the project to its workers without prior research to determine the ability of its workers in

dealing with the new project.

Poor decision-making. The director-general has numerous shortcomings including his inability to

make good decisions. The director-general makes mistakes that are detrimental to the

organization. He goes ahead to ignore the tendering process and gives the contract to Siemens

since they had a good working relationship. After DMI failed through Siemens, they decided to

issue the task to its workers. The director does not conduct adequate research on the ability of his

workers to deal with the new project and this later translates to enormous losses.

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1. The BBC originally contracted with Siemens, a successful and capable technology solution provider. What happened to the DMI project when it was being managed by Siemens, and what was the BBC's response? The DMI Project was initially meant to transform BBC operations and help it to digitalize its operations by moving from the traditional expensive and outdated databases. BBC directly contracted Siemens trusting their judgment on project development based on previous working experiences they had with them. Siemens took almost full control over the project with very little communication flowing between them (Mohammed 2018). When Siemens began missing significant delivery milestones and encountering technical challenges, the BBC became concerned about the distant relationship that was forming between itself and the contractor. After 1 year, BBC lost its patience with Siemens and terminate ...
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Tags: Siemens project development DMI project capable technology BBC management