Discuss on Project Management

For the Macondo Well Project (and associated Deepwater Horizon Incident), submit a Managerial Report in the specified format, indicating 2 to 4 issues, pros and cons of solutions you propose for each of those issues, and a final recommendation, taking a PROJECT view (not a technical view) of the issues which led up to the incident, possibly preventing it from happening or mitigating the resulting loss and damage from the incident.

Macondo Well Case Report

How this will be graded:

Structure, Organization, Ease of reading, Grammar: 2.5 Points

• This Assignment had a very, very specific structure.  Identify 2-4 issues.  Come up with solutions for those issues and summarize them briefly. Provide a table with Pros and Cons for each, and wrap it all up with an overall (but brief) recommendation – what could have been done to help prevent this disaster from a PM perspective.  DID YOU FOLLOW THIS STRUCTURE?
• Did you follow the advice given in the lectures and From Your Instructor about the format?
• Did you follow rules of English grammar, spelling, and syntax?  Did you fix errors pointed out via Word’s editing capabilities (e.g. squiggly blue or red underlined text)?

Content: 8 Points

• Is it clear from reading your assignment that you read the case and understood what happened that led up to the Deepwater Horizon explosion?
• Did you ‘dig deeper’?  Some people identify very technical issues – did you find the underlying reasoning that may have driven decisions to go a certain way technically?
• Did you keep your writing concise and to the point?  Part of the intent of this assignment is an exercise in expressing important ideas in as efficient a way as possible.
• Was there a logical flow from your Issue Identification to your Proposed Solutions, to your Pros and Cons and to your conclusion?
• If you did have ‘extra’ information to exhibit, did you put it in an Appendix rather than in the body of the text?  Again, the focus is on a concise, crisp presentation of your arguments.

References and resources: 1.5 Points

• Did you provide several relevant references that helped make your points?  Of course you can use the main MIT/Sloan case as a reference, but did you reach out and find out more about the Deepwater Horizon from other sources?

Other things to consider:

• Did you add value from your own professional and/or personal experience?
• Did you make appropriate use of figures and tables in an appendix?  Don’t substitute quantity for quality here – one good, relevant, and meaningful small table is worth 100 randomly inserted graphs and charts.
• Did you really take on the viewpoint of a project leader here, and consider the way the team was motivated, the way the different stakeholders communicated (or didn’t), the culture of the different companies?