AT & T Essay

Back in 2001, AT&T wireless was a strong market leader. However, the company’s competition was expanding its technology and moving ahead of AT&T. This led AT&T to perform integration projects and implement new technology in order to gain competitive advantage.

The CRM upgrade project at AT&T Wireless was an integration project. The project was intended to allow for “number porting”—switching cell phone carriers without losing your phone number—thanks to a Federal Communications Commission ruling. Upgrading the CRM affects several parts of an organization. The upgrade would impact business process and any critical infrastructures that support the business processes. As a result of how integrated the project was with business processes, any

Upper management was intended to manage and have oversight of the project in order to enforce the necessary steps needed to prevent failure. In actuality, there was insufficient management and resulted in poor mitigation strategies for business and technical risks. AT&T should have taken preventative action to remove the flaws in their project. These preventative actions include scope management, risk management, communication management, quality management, and HR management. Spending more time developing the scope to be accurate would have helped AT&T accurately identify an estimate for completion. Risk management could have identified all the major risks and created plans to mitigate these problems. Communication management would have been needed to properly convey what was needed for the project to be successful. Quality management would ensure that all systems and updates were functioning as intended before deploying them. Finally, HR management would have hired the staff needed to complete this project and prevented employee morale from dropping which was a result of rumors spread when the project was beginning to fail. All of these areas are crucial to a project’s success and AT&T’s lack of such management is the reason for