Reasons of Failure
DMI was a comprehensive and highly technical project initiated for the digitizing the whole BBC broadcasting activities. The main purpose of the project was to start online streaming for the news channel, both on the website and with a desktop application. It had partnered with Siemens for achieving this end but, the project eventually failed. Various can be ascribed to the failure of this project. However, the major pitfalls included, lack of collaborative leadership, BBC’s lack of technological exposure and the wrong employment decisions by the Human Resource Management.
Collaborative Leadership
The person who was made the Manager of the project lacked exposure to the technological world. He had been serving at renowned Television channels and this was the only expertise he had with him. He had been leading in a digital media environment since years and had good hands on leading traditional media houses, but lacked the exposure to the IT leadership and team leadership. All of the major IT organizations across the globe have special leadership styles aimed at leading the teams of ‘service-cum-product’ organizations. After the plan was started, either BBC would have managed some leadership workshops for the Manager, with the leading personnel of high profile organizations like, Google, Microsoft etc. If this was not feasible, BBC would have asked Research and Development department to look for the best leadership style and provide in-house training to the DMI Manager. For instance, Adobe has won 59Th position in Leadership among the 100 British Best Companies to Work, ranking of Sunday Times.
The leaders at Adobe were interviewed for the leadership style they had been practicing. One of the key official in the Ireland office told that he had been practicing Collaborative Leadership for helping his juniors and teams in achieving their organizational goals. While highlighting the salient feature, he said that hiring the best talent available, conveying the project purpose and outcomes in great detail and creating a sense of accountability in the employees are the major constructs of collaborative leadership theory. However, he said the key to success lies in giving real time experiences to employees of all of the trainings and giving them opportunities of personal growth along with project completion(Collaborativeleadership.org, 2014).
Since the DMI Manager was not of the IT background, especially of the live streaming and web programming, he lacked total understanding of the project at the first hand. Secondly, he was not able share the outcomes and objectives of the projects with the local and the Siemens employees. Moreover, he was not able to create a sense of accountability and show the horrible picture to the local and the Siemens employees. Above all, no experience based training sessions were held, both before and during the project. So, the project ended in smoke, causing loss of billions of pounds and giving a more competitive edge to the rivals in the market.
Lack of Technological Vicinity
This can be regarded as a project feasibility and the project plan blunder. Those who formulated the feasibility report and those who reviewed and approved it, all are equally responsible for this mishap. BBC had not employed anybody in the remote offices and service centers of Siemens in Germany and at places from where they had been controlling the project. They had been relying completely on the reports from Siemens. This lack of monitoring was the major issue that caused the ruin of this project. Even, when the Siemens had been changing their statement one after the other that the servers had collapsed, no one from BBC was there to confirm their statements.
Moreover, while describing the reason of failure of the project, the review committee said that Manager had been observing alleged silence on the delay of deliverables from the Siemens. For continuously 3 years, Siemens had failed to deliver the deliverables on time and nobody was there to check the main reason of the recurrent failure to meet the deadlines.
HR Faults in Employment
As said earlier, HR failed to define the scope of the project completely. It was actually a union of the two major digital media. However, the HR department just took the project from the TV point of view. The reason can be that fact that when BBC had been operating the IT department, in its own vicinities and authority. Moreover, there had been other issues like Operations Management.
Conclusion
DMI project of BBC failed just because of the fact that the Human Resource Management Department had failed to understand the requirements of the projects and hire the workforce in accordance with the needs of project. The Human Resource Department separated Internet Media and Television Media solely. They separated the departments instead of ensuring full union and real time cooperation between both of the departments. Moreover, the wrong leadership style of the manager, the wrong operations management by Siemens and the poor monitoring of the project on the behalf of BBC resulte din complete collapse of the project.
References
Collaborativeleadership.org, (2014). Collaborative Leadership Training Tools. [online] Collaborativeleadership.org. Available at: http://www.collaborativeleadership.org/pages/tools.html [Accessed 7 Dec. 2014].
