Is 378 – Hewlett Packard
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IS 378 Kittyhawk Project Final Report (Part 1)
Contents
Executive Summary
Company Overview
Project Overview
Scope
Objectives
Requirements
Assumptions
Constraints
Schedule
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
Gantt Chart
PERT/CPM Analysis
Financial Analysis
Project Cost Estimates
Payback Analysis
Project Organization
Responsibility Assignment
Stakeholder Analysis
Risk Analysis
Conclusion and Closing Remarks
References
Executive Summary
The Hewlett Packard (HP) Kittyhawk (KH) hard drive project is a peculiar example of a failed project. It was well funded, executively supported, and well-staffed with motivated individuals. All were chosen as the best in their respective functional departments, and Rick Seymour (the project manager) had essentially full authority to get who he thought he needed for the job. While there are minor areas of improvement in the overall project execution, our team can say for certain that it was a well-executed project in terms of the developing and implementation stages of the project life cycle process. Where our critique focuses is on the initiation and scope analysis phase of the project, where certain individuals should have proceeded with a better focus of the future.
In an creative and dynamic industry such as this one, innovation has its fair share of risks and the KH Team were essentially trying to break ground into a new and completely untapped market. The payoffs for seizing a competitive market share of a product which no one has thought of yet were substantial and there were many positive indications on the direction of the project. Favorable market research, optimistic customer outlook, product awards, and even positive public news coverage all pointed to the KH drive going in a positive direction. The list of possibilities, in terms of contractual partnerships with other vendors, were huge as Nintendo, Microsoft, and even Apple all showed interest. However, none could figure out a place for the KH drive. The possibilities seemed huge, but as the hype died down, the reality of what these outside customers wanted became clearer. In the end, the current state of the Kittyhawk as it was currently designed did not meet any of the prospective long term partner’s expectations. It was as if the Kittyhawk was trying to be affordable, durable, and totally versatile all at the same time. The issue is that not all of these long term partners desired those features, and Rick Seymour needed to decide on a new course of action to take in a redesign of the Kittyhawk.
Seymour and his team decided on redesigning the Kittyhawk to make an affordable hard drive which fit the 50.00 price point. Our team agreed with this course of action due to the interest from partners such as Nintendo, and the affordable simplicity of switching to that plan. It would be the most conservative avenue of approach in a project that was not favoring well in terms of sales. In the end, HP could not support an additional year long product redesign, especially as two variants of the Kittyhawk (1 & 2) had all failed in meeting sales marks. The project was ultimately cancelled. While the members of the now dismissed team had technically procured a failed product, all left feeling optimistic and some even saw promotions. In the end, we believe additional market testing, further cooperation with all ranges of customers, and delaying of the production phase of the project would have allowed for the Kittyhawk to undergone several prototypes in order to find the market niche it needed.
Company Overview
Hewlett- Packard was founded in 1939 by William Redington Hewlett and Dave Packard. Hewlett and Packard, both engineers, attended Stanford University where they met while taking classes (Making it Matter, n.d.). They sold their first product, an audio oscillator, to Walt Disney, which was used in the animated film, Fantasia. Hewlett and Packard built their company around producing innovations for the future, which became the motto for “The HP Way.” With such desire to be the leading force with innovations, Hewlett-Packard went on to produce some of todays most sought out products, including, storage devices, notebooks, personal computers (PC), calculators, printers, fax machines, servers and imaging devices (Making it Matter, n.d.).
Hewlett-Packard (HP) consisted of four business organizations: Test and Measurements, Computer Systems, Measurement Systems, and Computer Products. The MBO process employed by HP allowed the company to focus on achieving financial goals, while allowing its employees to have a certain amount of freedom to create innovations. This was done by allowing them to have more input in the decision-making process of the technologies being produced at HP (Christensen, 2006).
The Computer System department handled all the company’s printer, computer and storage products. Within this section was The Disk Memory Division (DMD), which developed the Kittyhawk project and other disk drives within The Mass Storage Group. Bruce Spenner was the