The Puerto Rico Education Project System Development in an Island Paradise - Case Preparation

The Puerto Rico Education Project

 System Development in an Island Paradise

The Puerto Rico Education Project (PREP) resulted from a contract negotiated by a division of a large U.S. company (hereafter called “USCO”) with the Puerto Rico Department of Education. The purpose of this project was to benefit the school system and the pupils in Puerto Rico. Gary Johnson was the project manager, who had just completed another major project at Pentagon. Tom Ballard was hired to reorganize the project and get it back on track.

Issue:

Because of the poor assessment and evaluation of the situation in Puerto Rico, various problems surfaced such as difficulty in meeting the deadlines, higher expenditures than the budget, and low morale of some of the employees. A few employees even wanted to return to US due to the problems they were facing in Puerto Rico. The project began just a year ago and now became a near-disaster.

Situation Assessment:

The USCO executives classified it as an offsite, domestic project rather than an international project and deadlines and budget was prepared accordingly.

The volume of data collection was quite large. The project involved more than 2,000 schools with 25,000 teachers and 800,000 pupils. The data entry requirement for the 800,000 records with 40 characters per record required 300 persons’ weeks of effort. The contract estimates had not taken the enormous data entry effort into account. This resulted in reducing the scope of the project to only 200,000 pupils and to postponing the rest until second year.

Dr. Carlos Hamill, who had spent thirty years with Puerto Rico school system, was responsible of this project. He had never involved with a project of such magnitude, and his supporting staff was extremely small and overworked.

None of the system analysts spoke Spanish. Although most of the teachers could understand basic English, but it was difficult to make them understand some fairly complex technical concepts. There was also no system to deliver the printed data collection forms to the schools.

This was a poor assessment of the situation in Puerto Rico. The housing was expensive and the cost of living was 15% higher than US.  The language in Public school was Spanish and majority of the people in general did not speak English. The schooling condition of the area was very poor with inadequate building structure. Some the schools did not have electricity. Another problem was lack of phone service and slower pace of life compared to US. Teachers’ and principles’ salaries were very low and facilities were old.

Because of the above mentioned problem, all of the employees were facing significant difficulties. The families who have kids with them had to send their kids to private school at an average cost of $2,500 per semester. Being a domestic assignment there was no schooling allowance sanctioned so for each employee with school age children, salaries were raised just to cover the schooling cost. It was a source of bitterness among employees.

Houses were expensive and small. It was difficult for the families to adjust in small houses as compared to the ones they moved from. Language barrier had made it more difficult for families to reside there.

Due to these problems, employees were frustrated and wanted to go back to US. In order to resolve the issues following measures are suggested.

Recommendations:

Considering the conditions in Puerto Rico, it is evident that this project should be classified as an international project rather than an offsite domestic project. The policies should be established governing compensation, taxation, housing, schooling costs, career tracking and many other factors. Intensive language and cultural orientation should be provided prior to departure, not only for the employees only but for their accompanying families as well.

Tom Ballard should take few measures in order to deal with the current issue. He should hire local Spanish speaking analysts who are also proficient in English. They should also be familiar with the educational system in Puerto Rico.

Significant costs were involved in moving the employees to Puerto Rico. Rather than moving the dissatisfied employees requesting to return to US, he should resolve their issues. He should make suggestions to USCO for authorizing revised budget and new deadlines as the conditions in Puerto Rico are quite different from US.

Each school should download Google Drive so that data entry forms can be accessed by schools and teachers can fill them without any hassle. It is going to add the cost due to involvement of large data but it will be offset by cost savings for printing and distributing and collecting the data entry forms.  Also, extensive language training should be provided to employees and their families.

All these changes will improve the productivity and morale of the employees. It will eventually enable the management to bring the project back on track.