Website over budget

An agency had an opportunity to build a high-end e-commerce website for a world-class arts organization. This opportunity would add a marquee client to the portfolio and hopefully gain referrals to similar organizations in the future. The agency accepted that margins would be lower than usual, but they started the project anticipating a profit. However, a series of events occurred which caused the agency to lose money and deliver the project late.

Many of the causes in this analysis relate to a lack of resources within the agency. Although there are certainly other causes contributing to the project's budget problem, when resources assigned to a project are unavailable it triggers a snowball effect of causes which increase the hours required to complete the work. This includes additional training time, additional meetings, and many instances of re-coding due to the lower experience levels of contract developers when they are assigned to the project. One example is the cause 'Software development team understaffed'. This caused the agency to hire contract developers who were unfamiliar with the API or CMS. It also led to problems with fixing bugs in feature that had already been implemented, such as 3D Secure. Another resource-related cause is 'Multiple SD's not in original dev plan'. If the team could have better anticipated the software resource shortage and planned for multiple developers from the beginning, a lot of time spent on additional planning and duplicate training efforts could have been avoided.
 

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