Alignment at the Top:

his case study was undertaken to investigate one critical factor in project management – the impact that top management has on project success (Hacker & Doolen, 2007). The organization studied was a federal agency whose technical expertise was in managing large, multi-year technical projects to better understand barriers to project implementation success (Hacker & Doolen, 2007).

This federal agency had invested a great amount of time and money in project management training, and the learned project management tools and techniques were in place (Hacker & Doolen, 2007). There was a multitude of project management being utilized – highly experienced project managers, the projects were using scope documents that had been signed off by upper management, and quarterly progress meetings were in place (Hacker & Doolen, 2007). Even though all these measures were I place, the projects were still struggling. There seemed to be an issue with project scopes at the top of the organization, thus this study was commissioned to look at the situation and present findings to the program manager (Hacker & Doolen, 2007).

The most critical finding in this study was the lack of alignment of top management in regards to the projects (Hacker & Doolen, 2007). It was noted that the project managers sought alignment during the definition stage of the projects; detailed scopes were reviewed, discussed, agreed upon, and signatures signifying the agreement were obtained. It was never actually determined if actual cognitive alignment was in place from the beginning or whether alignment deteriorated as the project went forward (Hacker & Doolen, 2007).

This study was interesting in that it revealed that even though there was due diligence during the project definition stage and scopes were agreed upon and signed off, it did not guarantee the success of the projects (Hacker & Doolen, 2007). Without the attention of the project managers during a project, the project can fail. The...