Span Systems has been contracted by Citizen-Schwartz AG (C-S) to build a java based transaction processing system to assist with their plan to break into the American Market. Citizen-Schwartz is based out of Stuttgart, Germany with revenues exceeding $20 billion. The one year contract between our two companies is worth $6 million dollars and if completed successfully, can lead to a bigger e-CRM development contract. As the project manager for the Span Systems project team, we are continually facing change management issues, as well as quality and schedule of deliverable problems. We are now eight months into the project and Span Systems is faced with losing the current contract to build the transaction processing system and any subsequent programming contracts. Leon Ther, a C-S IT Outsourcing Director, has stepped in to deal with the ever mounting problems with the contract and he is not pleased with the product so far and feels that Span will be unable to meet the deadline for the release of the software. Ther has asked for a transfer of the unfinished code and is demanding the rescission of the current contract. Span Systems cannot afford to lose this contract or the potential contract for the e-CRM development.
As the project manager, I have reviewed the situation and have come to the conclusion that there are issues stemming from both companies. From the beginning of the contract, Span Systems has faced numerous change requests to the user and system requirements. These are not commonplace requests, but rather requests that are outside of the project scope and have affected the costs and timeline of the project. In addition, contractually C-S is to approve of each module within a certain amount of time and this requirement has not been met due to a change in the project team. On our end, Span’s project and development teams have hurriedly completed the original and changed specifications as requested, but have encountered several bugs in the system and are...