This unit discusses major project failures like Healthcare.gov and the Denver Airport baggage system. Healthcare.gov failed due to an over aggressive schedule that did not meet customer needs or properly test the site's capacity. The Denver Airport project's automated baggage system was plagued by underestimating complexity, leadership issues, and a lack of fault tolerance that caused the system to never function properly despite 10 years of work. Both projects suffered from issues like poor requirements, unrealistic schedules, lack of testing, and inexperienced leadership. This unit aims to teach how to manage projects effectively to avoid common reasons for failure.

1. BBA 3626, Project Management Overview 1
Course Learning Outcomes for Unit I
Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:
1. Identify project management concepts.
Reading Assignment
Chapter 1: Introduction to Project Management, pp. 2-19, and
23
Unit Lesson
Unit I covers basic project management concepts. This summary
is going to emphasize some major project
failures. Let’s start out with a quote that relates to this subject
by Albert Einstein, “Insanity: doing the same
thing over again and expecting different results” (Nelson, 2007,
p. 1).
One of the project failures of 2014 was the healthcare.gov
failure which caused a major crisis for this
mandated program. This failure was due to an over aggressive

2. schedule and not meeting the customer
needs. Too many people trying to get access to a site that could
not handle the capacity helped the failure of
heathcare.gov. It appears that possibly the site was not tested to
see if the capacity was correct or could
handle the load. The healthcare.gov site was not ready to go
when it went into implementation. According to
Matthew Heusser (2013), this was “the most public software
project failure of the decade” (para. 2).
Healthcare.gov used the agile approach to software development
in the terms of a sprint. A sprint is a session
every two weeks where the team goes over their progress and
shows what works or does not work. Then the
team plans what they will do next. It is a storyboard type of
development that is the new buzz word for
software development. Basically, each sprint is an iteration or a
completed chunk of software development to
be designed. The theory is that the software code is designed,
coded, and fully tested from end-to-end before
moving on to the next chunk. The development may have been
going along fine but the system was not ready
to be fully implemented as a finished product. The system was
not tested to its capacity if at all. The project’s
failure was monumental and systemic. Multiple failures
occurred on multiple levels, but no one really knows
exactly what happened. Healthcare.gov was only in the beta
testing phase which means it was not ready for
production (Heusser, 2013).
Media sites such as the New Yorker, Washington Post, and
MedCity News claimed healthcare.gov failed
because agile development was not utilized. Unfortunately, that
was false because healthcare.gov’s front-end
GUI and back-end data services hub were utilizing agile
processes. Evidence clearly showed that sprints,

3. user stories, and incremental testing were occurring during the
development process. Possibly in this case,
requirements decomposition should have been used instead of
user stories. A good design document may
have helped this project be successful. There is one thing for
certain, bad project management skills were
alive and well in this project (Daconta, 2013).
Now, let’s go back in time to the 1990s and discuss another
huge project failure. The Denver Airport Baggage
System project in the 1990s was a disaster. Dysfunctional
decision making aided in the demise of this project.
The world’s largest automated airport baggage handling system
was a project gone wrong. The goal of the
project was to have a turnaround time of about 30 minutes once
the plane landed. Denver needed a larger
airport so this plan was within the larger airport plan. The plan
became too complex and the opening of the
airport added an additional 16 months. The delay cost the city
of Denver $1.1 million per day throughout the
delay. Even when the airport finally did open, the baggage
system was not at full capacity. Only a single
concourse, with a single airline, and for outbound traffic only
worked on the first day of opening. All three
UNIT I STUDY GUIDE
An Introduction to Project Management
BBA 3626, Project Management Overview 2

4. UNIT x STUDY GUIDE
Title
concourses should have been an integrated system. This project
was worked on another 10 years and it
never worked well. The project was terminated in 2005
(Calleam Consulting, 2008).
Some of the failures of this Denver project included an
underestimate of the complexity involved, changes in
strategy, decision to proceed, schedule, scope, budget
constraints, acceptance of change requests, design of
the physical building structure, and the decision to seek a
different path. This project was compounded by so
many project failure issues that it never recovered. Other failure
points included risk management failures
when an electrical system suffered from a power surge that
crashed the system before the required filters to
prevent this were installed. If the team had focused on risk
management procedures, this failure would have
been avoided. Also, one of the key leaders passed away and a
new sponsor took over who lacked the
knowledge to understand the system. The system was plagued
with architectural and design issues because
the system had over 100 individual PCs networked together.
Failure of one PC could result in an outage since
no automatic backups for failed components were considered.
The PCs were distributed all over the airport
causing even more problems when a problem arose. The system
was unable to detect jams when they
occurred and suitcases just kept piling up. Schedule pressure
may have been a factor for the design
problems. The system was not fault tolerant in any aspect and
was a total failure. Knowledge and expertise

5. played a key role in the failure of this project. The leaders did
not have the expertise to deal with such a
sophisticated automated baggage system which was new at the
time (Calleam Consulting, 2008).
Projects fail for many reasons such as: little or no support from
senior management, absence of user
participation throughout the project, poorly or ill-defined scope,
inadequate project leadership, lack of good
requirements, no definitive methodology, unrealistic marketing
deadlines versus technology implementation
requirements, no communication, no formal change or
configuration control management, inadequate quality
assurance verification and validation, lack of good testing
techniques or none at all, lack of knowledge
transfer, inexperienced IT professionals, and employee and
experienced IT professionals burn out. Both of
these projects discussed suffered from multiple reasons listed
above. Throughout this course, you will learn
how to manage a project effectively in order to avoid becoming
a statistic as listed in the failed projects of this
unit summary.
References
Calleam Consulting. (2008). Case study- Denver International
Airport baggage handling system: An
illustration of ineffectual decision making. Retrieved from
http://calleam.com/WTPF/wp-
content/uploads/articles/DIABaggage.pdf
Daconta, M. C. (2013). Media got it wrong: Healthcare.gov

6. failed despite agile practice. GCN. Retrieved from
http://gcn.com/blogs/reality-check/2013/11/healthcare-
agile.aspx
Heusser, M. (2013). 6 software development lessons learned
from Healthcare.gov’s failed launch. Retrieved
from http://www.cio.com/article/2380827/developer/6-software-
development-lessons-from-healthcare-
gov-s-failed-launch.html
Nelson, R. (2007). IT project management: Infamous failures,
classic mistakes, and best practices. MIS
Quarterly Executive, 6(2).
Suggested Reading
Nelson, R. (2007). IT project management: Infamous failures,
classic mistakes, and best practices. MIS
Quarterly Executive, 6(2).