The Puerto Rico Education Project: Case Prep & Reflection

Problem/Issue Statement:

The Puerto Rico Education Project (PREP) is a three year information technology project worth fifteen million dollars that involves designing, implementing and installing a mainframe computer, systems and application that would allow the Puerto Rico Department of Education to evaluate the effectiveness of their current education programs. This project is required to be performed on-site in Puerto Rico (PR) and it will be performed by a large US company funded by the US Government. The PREP would also require that the staff and their families move to PR stay for the entire duration of the project.

The main objective of the PREP is for the USCO to design and implement effective data collection as well as develop mathematical models to continually assess and evaluate the educational programs in PR. Since planning is such a crucial aspect to this project we can see from this case study that the USCO failed to complete proper research and preparations.

Situation Assessment:

The USCO has procedures in place to help classify projects as either domestic or international. USCO upper management misclassified the PREP as a domestic project and even though  PR is part of the US it has a vastly different culture/environment than the rest of the country, therefore it should have been classified as an international project.  But since it was classified domestic none of the staff or families were given any cultural training or background information. When they got to PR they were completely shocked at the living conditions and they were not prepared to conquer the language barrier or prepared for the vastly different lifestyle. It got so bad that the USCO employees had to ask the USCO to give them a temporary increase in salary so they could afford private schooling for their children because the public school system in PR was so inadequate.

List of Plausible Alternatives:

The USCO has two alternatives:

1) They can send their employees who are not willing to stay in PR back to the US.

2) They could tell their employees that they have to stay in PR until the project is finished since they are on contract.

Evaluation of the Alternatives: 

When examining both alternatives there are pros and cons to both. Looking at option #1 - to send back the employees who are not willing to stay - it would allow the company to keep their employees happy by sending them back to the US and it would allow the USCO to hire other employees who can speak the language and are more comfortable living in PR. On the reverse side of this is finding new jobs for all the employees they send back to the US and the financial burden of sending all of those employees back to the US after they spent time and money sending them to PR in the first place. There is also the potential burden of a legal issue with breaking the contract or the backlash from employees they can not find replacement work for.
The second option - forcing their employees to stay in PR  due to their contract - would have a pro of keeping their investment in their employees and the sunk costs of the project working for them rather than giving that all up. On the reverse side this decision would continue to lead to low moral and very unhappy employees, which would incur low productivity and poor work performance rates.

Reflection:

As per the consultants presentation they brought to us three solutions. 

1) Keep the employees that are already contracted for the project and find ways to boost moral and productivity through incentives such a cars, vacations, bonuses, overtime etc.

2) Keep the seven "happy" employees and hire Puerto Rican programmers to replace the unhappy workers being sent back to the US.

3) Cancel the project all together.

After weighing all of the options and details outlined I have come to the following conclusions. I think our first step should be to should keep the current employees. We need to set up a meeting with all of the team members and attempt to find out what would make them happy and discuss some potential incentives for them and their families. An example would be providing a shuttle bus to work, which would allow the remanning family members to have access to a car. We could also look into and discuss some productivity driven bonuses. I think as a company we need to accept some failure in setting up this project (classifying it as domestic instead of international) and in not properly preparing our employees and their families for what they were being thrown into. I think trying to see if we can properly motivate them and finding some middle ground between making them happy(and motivated) and keeping costs at a minimum should be our first step. I would personally set a time limit to this aspect - say 2-3 months.  If this step doesn’t correct the behavior and improve the timeline of the project then I think we need to look into letting the unhappy employees out of their current contract - contingent on them signing a new agreement that will state that they will be let out of this contract with a promise of not facing any legal action from USCO, but that we will attempt to find them jobs for an "x" amount of time. If within that given time we have not been able to place them then they are on their own to find work because we will not be guaranteeing them a position in this new contract.  We would also have to bite the bullet and eat the cost of transporting them and their families home again since we were the ones who brought them here ill prepared.  Once all of the unhappy employees have left then we would replace them with Puerto Rican programmers at entry level pay (provided we can find the talent necessary for the job) and continue to work on bridging the language barrier by providing a language teach for "x" amount of hours/week for all employees to learn/improve their non native tongue. We could also institute in-house team building exercises and many a project wide employee lunch once a month to help foster the relationships between all of the employees. I believe that this would help circumvent any potential rift between the US and new PR employees. 

 Since I think there is a 0% chance of canceling the project without incurring severe repercussions and backlash to our reputation That leaves option three completely off the table. Besides we wouldn't want to run the risk of making the PR education commission unhappy, which is not the case currently.  I think the customer/client’s satisfaction is the most important for us  - high customer approval is key to our reputation.  Cancelling the project also runs a very high legal risk, which I think (even though it is only potential at this point) steering clear of is a very high priority.

I think a combination of option one and two gives us the best chance for success overall. We have the potential to get this project back on track in both time and employee productivity/moral. I think working with the current employees is an important first step in bridging the widening gap. If that doesn't yield any solutions then replacing the unhappy workers with new native programmers is the next best option.