1. Research academic and professional publications that document examples of troubled, failing, or failed projects and the recovery strategies used.
2. I require two (2) examples of troubled/failing projects with Scheduling as the reason for the project’s trouble.
3. APA format with the following information:      

                  (a) Project summary

1. Provide a 200-word summary
   1. Diagnosis (what went wrong)

1. Provide a 200-word summary

• Category (list all that apply- budget, schedule, etc.)

• Recovery strategy(ies) utilized

1. Provide a 200-word summary

4) Provides two (2) academic sources and two (2) practitioner sources for both topics

Example/Format:

Lisa, Apple’s Costly

Scope and Requirements Failure

Project Summary

            The development of the Lisa computer began in 1979 for Apple. The product was first brought to market in 1983 after four years of development and was shut down after a year and a half of production. The Lisa had simple design goals to meet the needs of consumers, however, with a price tag of nearly $10,000 in 1983, there were not many buyers. The project costed over $50 million and 200 person-years to develop. The scope of the project was to produce a personal office computer that came with a mouse, and a suite of software called the Lisa Office System, later renamed Lisa 7/7. The software suite included 7 software programs: calculator, graph, write, draw, list, terminal, and project, which at the time was the majority of what personal office computers needed. Some additional requirements were for the Lisa to be able to connect to a printer and contain a graphics module for visual displays. Not only was the Lisa costly, it took nearly all of Apple’s resources at the time to manage and develop the program and in less than a year and a half of production, the Lisa was shutdown to allow resources for development and production of the Macintosh computer. (Walker, 1993)

Diagnosis

            The Lisa was a revolutionary design that was intended to be used as a personal office computer. The biggest cause for failure was the massive cost to develop and manufacture the computers created an even greater cost for consumers. At nearly $10,000 each, the Lisa was not a computer for everyday users, in fact, it was nearly 50% the cost of the average annual income in 1983. The average household income in 1983 was around $24,000, and less than 10% of households reported having a computer, less than 2% had computers with household incomes of $10,000 or less. The computers being sold had a small market and the cost to manufacture was too great. The scope of the project was to make technologically advanced computers available for personal office computers, but the development of the product greatly out costed the benefits. Whether it is to blame on the scope or the requirements, the computer met all the needs for the time, however, the investment was a poor choice and over allocating resources to a single project increased costs of other projects simultaneously. When the product line was eventually scrapped, there were more resources available to develop and support the Macintosh and supporting software, which had a larger market share and was a third of the price of the Lisa. (U.S. Census, 1995)

Category

            The category of failure for the Lisa computer would be a combination of multiple factors, but the biggest is the requirements and scope. There was a need for a high-end computer in 1983, however, they did not belong in every household and the drive to create it quickly and meet many needs, created a series of bad decisions. The first was developing competition for their own less expensive Macintosh, followed by heavy resource investment into a single project that was already very costly. The budget of the project was also excessive, and had it been reduced, there was greater opportunity to continue selling and improvements after 1985, had they not shut it down.

Recovery Strategy

            Apple did not create a fully developed recovery strategy for the Lisa because the invention and support given from the Lisa project over to the Macintosh product line. For what recovery strategies they did use, the biggest was add resources. Apple had nearly 400 of it’s approximately 1,000 employees on the Lisa project and only a handful of less than 20 on the Macintosh project, which was the bread and butter of Apple in the 1980s and today. Because the Lisa was such an expensive project that was ended and netted negative revenue by the end of the 5-year program, dedicating resources to the Macintosh program was the recovery strategy. Had Apple invested a little more time and money into the Lisa project, there may have been a way to recover the program and have a different tier of computer like we do today, just many years earlier. For example, gaming computers have much larger memories for processing tons of information at one time, in the age of Macintosh, users were able to connect to one another and play games on them. If the Lisa was reinvented to meet the higher processing demands, it may have been able to overcome the original program designed and scope, and meet a new requirement that produced better technology, earlier in 1980s, for the uses that high memory and performing computers do today. (Heagney, 2022)

References

Census, U.S. (1995). Money Income of Households, Families, and Persons in the United States: 1983. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1985/demo/p60-146.html

Egeland, B. (2010). Project Recovery Strategies. Retrieved from https://pmtips.net/article/project-recovery-strategies

Heagney, J. (2022). Fundamentals of Project Management. HarperCollins Leadership.

van den Berg, H. (2012). Project recovery: don’t always recover the project—rethink the business case. Retrieved from https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/project-recovery-don’t-always-recover-project-5998

Walker, J. (1993). The Legacy of the Apple Lisa Personal Computer: An Outsider’s View. Retrieved from https://www.cs.oberlin.edu/~jwalker/lisa-legacy/#Lisa_Tech