Superbowl Fiasco

Superbowl Fiasco

BUAD 831

Despite the outcome that is now known as the “2011 Super Bowl Fiasco”, I have no doubts that there were months or even years of planning involved. The problem with all of the planning was that due to its magnitude and long timeline, there were a lot of opportunities for errors. In the following paper I will speculate on many causes that could have potentially been the reason for the insufficient seating.

The first potential cause could have occurred in the very beginning of the project-planning phase, identifying the scope correctly. With a project this large it is safe to assume that there were thousands of tasks to identify, each containing their own subtasks. When management got together to list them all, it is possible they used a Gantt chart technique to list them all out with the duration, cost, resources, etc. While they may have listed most of the tasks required, it is improbably that each manager would have remembered to write down every small task and the chart itself would have been too complex for efficient review by peers. It wouldn’t be surprising that a small task leading up to the construction of the extra seating would have easily been left out of the plan.

Even if the management team identified the scope relatively well, it does not mean they scheduled it well. Considering the fact that they did not finish the project by the deadline, it is logical to believe that management may have inefficiently used the time given to them. This could have happened by not correctly identifying the dependencies between the tasks, which in turn causes incorrect milestones and the critical path. Correct milestones and a correct critical path is crucial to the project planning as milestones are necessary to track the progress of tasks and a correctly identified critical path helps to ensure no surprises and if the project will be complete on time. In this case, dependencies related to the seating in the stadium may not have...