Organizational Problem Example of an Organizational Problem Essay

Organizational Problem

Example of an Organizational Problem

An Analysis of a Failed IT Project at the Los Angeles Unified School District

Case Overview

In January of 2007, the Los Angeles Unified School District began using a new ninety five million dollar IT enterprise system built by SAP with Deloitte Consulting managing the project (Bowers, 2009). The system was built because the entire existing infrastructure was outdated and consisted of a variety of different software systems that were put together piece by piece over the years. As a result, the schools administration capacity was deemed to be very inefficient and many of the IT functions were redundant across departments. Therefore, the entire school system could reduce the amount of administrative work needed to maintain the schools if the system was modernized.

However, the project was deemed to be a horrific failure in regards to the schedule and the budget. Furthermore, once the system was up and running, teachers and employees were under paid or over paid; in some circumstances, not even paid at all. Many of the employees had no idea how to use the new software and as a result many of the names in the database were simply deleted by mistake. It is fairly common for these types of projects to be late or over budget, but this case failed in an exceptional manner.It later took an extra thirty seven million dollars in repair costs as well as an extra year to fix the bugs; not to mention the chaos and embarrassment that the school had to deal with while the system was being fixed. This analysis will look at some of the organizational problems that were responsible for the project's failure.

Discussion

There are a multitude of organizational failures that are evident in this case. For example, it is easy to speculate that effective change management was not instituted in this example in the slightest. However, given the space requirements, this analysis will focus on another example of an organizational behavior problem; the lack of effective training. Rapidly changing the technology that an organization is using also requires thorough training to make sure that the users are comfortable with the new system. Apparently in this case there was a lack of effective training that resulted in poor change management.

All training programs are definitely not created equally. There are a wide range of different methods available to teach people how to use new….....