Table of Contents

1 Project Background 3
2 Project Review 4
3 Reasons for failure 5
4 Alternatives to prevent failure 8
5 Lessons for Management 10
6 References 11 1 Project Background
Virtual Case File (VCF) was a software application developed for the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) between 2000 and 2005. It was built to replace the FBI’s old case management system named Automated Case Support (ACS) system. VCF was a third component of FBI’s Trilogy Project. The first component of the Trilogy project was upgrading of software and hardware (computer terminals, servers, printers and servers). The second component part was upgrading of FBI’s network infrastructure. The third component was modernizing the FBI's …show more content…

Due to the pressure, SAIC agreed to deliver the initial version of the VCF 6 months earlier than the original date.

3.6 Smaller Project Milestones
SAIC wanted to deliver a full working system without any milestones. This resulted in huge and major re-changes of the system during system review and testing.

3.7 Competent Staff
At the start of the project, the FBI had no Chief Information Officer. This resulted in the appointment of a project manager, who had no experience in IT project management (Goldstein, 2005). Considering the size and budget of the VCF project it was very critical to have a very experienced project manager to head the project. Having an inexperienced project manager can lead to poor project management practices and policies. For example, SAIC was awarded a weak contract that did not specify completion milestones, review stages and penalties for missed milestones (U.S. Department of Justice, 2005). In addition, the contract was based on hours worked rather than deliverables (Mueller, 2005). In a nut-shell all the FBI had an inexperienced IT team with no experience in software development projects and general project management.

3.8 Ownership
The VCF project had 15 different key personnel, this included 5 different chief information officers and 10 different project managers during the project span (U.S. Department of Justice, 2005). This high turnover in key personnel involved in the project lead to a lack of