Assignment – Denver International Airport (DIA)
Individual Case Analysis
Nicholas Y. Foo

City University of Seattle
PM501_03_IN: Intro to Project Management
Larry D. Mitchell
October 17, 2014

DIA – Individual Case Analysis
The Denver International Airport was built and finally opened on February 28, 1995. It took the project nearly six years to complete with project costs initially estimated at $1.2 billion to the final cost of $5.0 billion. From the case study in Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling and controlling, DIA provided improved airfield configuration, improved efficiency in the operation of the regional airspace, reduced noise impacts, a more efficient terminal/concourse/apron layout, …show more content…

The city of Denver, Greiner Engineering and Morrison-Knudsen Engineering (MKE) formed a Project Management Team (PMT) that was responsible for schedules, cost control, management of information, and administration of 100 design contracts, 160 general contracts and 2000 subcontractors. Sadly, they did a poor job. Stakeholders should not take the role of project management. Understandably, they needed to be involved. Yet, they pushed a lot of the project management responsibilities to the architects. This shows that these stakeholders did not understand their role to be fully engaged and involved.
It was three years after the DIA project construction started when BAE was selected to create a baggage handling system that had eight years of work to be done in two years. BAE was told they needed to make a specified deadline of October 1993. The late involvement of the BAE, who was selected to build this baggage handling system, meant that they had to play catchup and become the scapegoat in the finger pointing game when the DIA opening day was delayed again. There should have been more oversight and other stakeholders should have been made accountable.
As can be seen from the given facts above, the DIA project construction needed more stakeholder involvement and accountability through one or more prescribed course of action(s) to mitigate the many identifiable problems, conflicts of interest, increased scope changes and