Question

Case Study 12: Hong Kong Police’s Project Management B Chuah
Background
In the 1990’s, Hong Kong Police (HKP) was responsible for the public safety and internal security of Hong Kong. She came under the umbrella of the Security Bureau of the Government of Hong Kong. It had more than 34,000 employees, of these, over 26,000 were disciplinary staff. This was the largest department within the hierarchy of the Government of Hong Kong.
The organization structure of HKP was rather complicated. It consisted of functional units as well as regional hierarchical structure. Besides, matrix structure also existed in some units, especially within the regional front line offices.
In order to provide fast response, security and confidentiality to the front line operations, a group of Telecommunications Engineers and Technicians were recruited specifically to meet these requirements. These Telecommunications Engineers and Technicians were grouped under the Information Systems Wing of HKP, which was under the command of Assistant Police Commissioner.
All the communications equipment for the operations of HKP were the responsibility of the Telecommunications Engineers of the Information Systems Wing. These Telecommunications Engineers are divided into three Divisions; namely Systems Engineering and Research Division, Project Management Division and Maintenance Division. The acquisition of new communications facilities followed a project life cycle approach and project management process. Unlike in most other organizations, the project manager would often be changed from one project stage to another.
A Telecommunications Engineer of the Systems Engineering and Research Division would be the project manager during the project formation stage. He would liaise with user group(s) to define the operational and functional requirements, carry out product and system research in the market, seek project funding from government, and produce a design report including appropriate technical specifications and other essential documents, such as operational and functional requirements, for subsequent tendering to be managed by the Project Management Division.
After the completion of the design report, normally another Telecommunications Engineer of the Project Management Division would be appointed to take over the role of managing the project implementation. His duties were to first prepare the tender document which included appropriate contract documents and schedules together with the system’s technical specifications. He would then liaise with the Government Supplies Department about the tendering exercise. Following that, he would undertake the selection of appropriate contractor and supervise the subsequent project implementation. After the implementation work, the completed system would be under the care of the Telecommunications Engineers in the Maintenance Division for the rest of the system operational life.

The Radio Communication System Project
This project took place in the early 1990’s before the 1997 changeover of sovereignty. In order to fight against terrorist and organized crime, the Special Duties Unit (SDU) was established in the HKP. Though all the team members of the SDU were volunteers from HKP, they must undergo extensive physical tests before becoming its official member.
To meet the great challenges of the operation, these SDU members have to go through very demanding physical and technical training programmes. After several large scale exercises, it was decided that in order to improve and ensure effective operations of SDU, a reliable radio communication system was needed. This state-of-the-art radio communication system must be able to support regular voice communication and also short bursts of data transmission for critical front-line operations.

Project Design
For this radio communication system project, a Telecommunications Engineer of the Systems Engineering and Research Division, was made the Design Engineer. He had the project manager's role during the project formation stage and was responsible for the system’s functional requirement specification and design; product and market research; costing and funding application. With the strong support of the end user, i.e. the SDU, the government approved the required funding smoothly. The SDU wished to have the system ready for operations as soon as possible and pushed the design team very hard to finalize the system specifications.
To meet this tight schedule, the Design Engineer carried out a short market survey and product research and justified, based mainly on his own expertise and experience, decided that the needed radio communication system could be built from off-the-shelf equipment with some minor modifications by the contractor. The Design Engineer completed the design report, which contained the operational requirements, functional and the technical specifications, for the Project Management Division to follow up.

Project Implementation
The leading role for this phase of the project was handed over to a Telecommunications Engineer of the Project Management Division. He was the Project Engineer in charge of the project implementation, being responsible for preparing the tender document; evaluating the tender returns and recommending the selected contractor; supervising the radio communication system installation and commissioning work; and the overall contract management of the project.
After this Project Engineer had reviewed the design report received from the Design Engineer at the project hand-over, he felt that the design was very primitive and might not meet the full operational and functional requirements of SDU. He had also great concerns about many of the assumptions made in the system design and stipulated requirements which might lead to no tender return. After some discussion and exchange of ideas with the Design Engineer, the Project Engineer's concerns remained as they could not resolve many of their differences. The Project Engineer basically wished to have all the technical constraints explicitly detailed in the technical specifications, whilst the Design Engineer wanted to let the tenderers more room to consider. Moreover, the attitude of the Design Engineer was that his duties had been discharged and the Project Engineer who was now the project manager, should have the responsibility and power to make changes as he saw fit.
However, the Project Engineer decided not to change anything, simply added the necessary contractual conditions and schedules to the tender document. He made such decision because the project had a committed completion date and time was running out. Besides, he did not want to make any changes in the system design without the Design Engineer's agreement and endorsement. The tender process followed the Government’s procurement regulations. The tender was finally awarded to a lowest tenderer, who was not in the original list of potential contractors of the Design Engineer. Though the Project Engineer had some reservation about awarding the contract to this tenderer, he could not substantiate his objection because this tenderer’s submission had apparently complied with all the requirements stipulated in the tender.

Project Acceptance
The delivery of the equipment, installation and commissioning of the radio communication system went smoothly. The system was put into service on schedule and was in its warranty period. To protect the Government’s interest, it was a normal practice in the procurement of a system over five million dollars, ten per cent of the contract sum (termed the retention money), would only be released to the contractor after the satisfactory completion of the warranty period. This period was normally one year after the system was put into service.
During the system warranty period, many missed or false burst of data transmission problems surfaced intermittently. These problems were recorded and the contractor was asked to investigate and solve them. The SDU was very disappointed with the reliability as well as unavailability of the system because the system had to be taken to the contractor's factory for fault diagnosis and rectification much of the time. At the expiration of the warranty period, the SDU refused to accept the radio communications system.
Though the intermittent fault was not rectified during the system warranty period, the contractor still asked the Government to pay the retention money. The Project Engineer refused to endorse the payment request. Instead, the Project Engineer demanded the extension of the system warranty period for another year as it did not satisfy the contractual specifications. Shortly, the contractor sent in another bill claiming for an extra amount of money to cover the effort of rectifying the additional “unreasonable” faults. The contractor claimed that the equipment was deployed in an unfavourable environment and condition, which was not specified in the tender document.

Project Termination
The argument about the contract terms went on for almost a year among the contractor, the Government Supplies Department, the Department of Justice and the HKP. Meantime, there was still no proper solution to the system problem.
At about the same time, a special Anti-Smuggling Task Force was established to combat the increase in smuggling activities through the waters between Shenzhen and Hong Kong. In order to support the task force’s operations effectively, a radio communication system was required urgently. The task force’s requirement was mainly voice radio transmission system and the operational environment of this task force was more suited to the installed radio communication system than that of the SDU. With the senior management's approval, the SDU’s radio communication system was thus redeployed for this Anti-Smuggling Task Force.
An agreement was finally reached among the contractor, Government Supplies Department and HKP that the contractor had completed its system warranty obligation and retention money was released.

Post-project notes
Another project was subsequently initiated to re-design a radio communication system to meet the operational and functional requirements of the SDU. The follow-up study revealed that it was very difficult to use a single radio communication system to support both voice and short burst data transmission effectively. In view of the number of equipment that the front line officers needed to carry, the SDU agreed to amend its operational requirements to use encrypted voice transmission instead of short burst data transmission in their operations, so as to relax the technical constraints. Another radio communication system that met the SDU’s operational needs was later successfully installed.

Answer the following questions based on the given assumptions -
Assume that you are an experienced project engineer recently recruited into the HKP’s Project Management Division. The senior management of HKP is not happy about the way the radio communication system project has been handled and as part of the post-project appraisal, has asked you to review this case thoroughly.
You are asked to:
c. Identify the problems encountered in this radio communication project.
d. Explain the root causes of these problems.
c. Recommend ways of improvement.

Answer 1

Key problems identified in article :

• Excessive background screening and physical tests
• Multiple stakeholders for decisions making
• Multiple Hierarchical structure
• Lack of communication and followup

Root causes :

• Lack of coordination ajd delegation of tasks as major reason for mishap and lack of collaboration and immediate decisions making makes things worse

Recommended Solution :

• Using Agile framework for product development where multiple teams work together and collaboration is seamless as each day the root causes are identified and sooved immediately rather than saving for the last mile during commercialization.
• Teams need to be made using cross functional expertise
• Transformational Leadership is most important here to change existing practices