Austin’s Energy’s Billing System Can’t Light Up

Is the Austin Energy project a failure? Explain your answer.

Yes, the Austin Business Project is failure because:

Modernization billing project delays - Austin and IBM project late completion, delay schedule, software bugs. Complexity new billing system with 73 different interface

Software bugs - Error of thousands of bills, 65000 never received bills35000 in accurate bills, overcharging

Instability issues - Seriously impact business and customer, Persistent system error from billing department and Revenue loses

Customer services employee - Employee response one to one assistant for account accessing and correcting error.

Customer - Unable to access system online portal and System causes a lot of problem, not friendly and hard time for customer.

IBM failure - Billing software system failure

Describe the business impact of the faltering Austin Energy project.

Operation are mostly affected is billing department.Difficulties of issuing bills because of billing software failure, Common error of customer not received bills, customer receive in accurate bills, account automatically cancelled, Incurred more cots in utilities and operation. Since business function is interconnected, one function failure give impact of another function such as production, Business service is inaccurate, it give impact in revenue and profit even though they don’t have pressure of competitor.

Customer servicedepartment mostly affected.Employee work in high level of stress, Extra effort need to solve customer problem. They still need to serve customer better even though customer angry to show their disappointment towards the company, Employee also treated in the same way as usual, do not receive any appreciation from the company and Give impact of public relationship disaster.

Sales and marketing such as company also faced difficulties in determining the actual sales since the system leads more error, Sales and profit decreasing, Company might face law suit for this issues. If it is happening, more cost to handle legal costs. It is bad for company since give negative impact in their legacy and Company also incurred more cost in advertising to give explanation to the public about what happen.

Finance and accounting such as Inaccurate financial report since the actual value of revenue and profit inaccurate recorded, give impact of financial planning and investment and the project is delayed, suppose fully operational in early 2011 but it still not fully operational and incurred more cost.

Management will do a wrong decision making of having IBM to develop the software as the bad experience IBM performance in inventory management, the service given by IBM is bad and disappointment and need to train all employees with new technology.

Customer will mostly affected. Whereby System also not user friendly, Austin portal also always have problem, customer can’t access account information and company also doesn't think of their preference such as ability to choose time of the month that customer prefers to pay bills.

To what degree was IBM responsible for the problems countered by the Austin Energy billing project? Was Austin Energy at fault for the problems? Explain your answer.

IBM not really responsive to the problems and it made Austin Energy appealed so many times to IBM officials ranging from the managers of billing system project up to IBM CEO. IBM responsible in find the roof of problem, make system correction, test the latest system version and implement the system.

Yes, Austin Energy is at fault for the problem. It is because Austin Energy as a user had to be committed to the system. Probably, Austin Energy did not plan very properly in the project to develop the billing system. They must have clear and proper project management objective which should deal with five major variables: scope, time, cost, quality and risk. The agreement should clearly define the roles and responsibilities of both party.

What were the specific organizational or technical factors as well as management factors involved in this projects failure?

Organizational:Employee could not be committed enough and described as if they are alpha tester when they encountered bugs and issues that never have made it to a live version, unable to meet customer satisfaction, no realignment internally and externally, caused vastly on costs that exceed budgets, fail to meet customer expectation and lost trust draws customer away.

Technical:No specific infrastructure, unreliable system caused money loss, did not work closely with third party vendors like oracle, customers unable to access the system’s online portal.

Management:No strategy which cause time slippage, no business solutions, interrelated with manpower, repeating mistakes and delays and improper project management objective.

Describe the steps Austin Energy and IBM should have taken be better manage this project.

Austin Energy and IBM need to develop an information system plan which indicates:

Austin Energy and IBM need to develop an information system plan which indicates  such as the direction of system development, the rational, the current system/situation, new development to consider, the management strategy, the implementation plan and Budget requirement