Pinto – Case Study 5.4 (193-194) – The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle

This assignment involves that the student read the case study and answer all questions at the end of the case study in a 4-5 page paper. Your answers must include substantial support from at least two (2) scholarly journal articles on project management. See below for advice on how to find these journal articles. Refer to the course schedule matrix for due dates for all case assignments. All case study assignments are due at 11:59 p.m. EST (Sunday) on the assigned week.

This course requires that the student is able to conduct weekly online library research by utilizing UC’s Library (online) in order to locate scholarly journals such that the student can successfully complete weekly papers regarding cases and/or articles in project management, and such that the student can engage in the weekly assignments.  The following is one example of how to navigate iLearn and the online Library in order to conduct research:

Log onto your course on iLearn

Go to the home page for this course

Click on the “Library Resources” icon in the left-hand column of this webpage, This will open the Library webpage.

Under the search boxes for the UC Mega Search click the box to the left of the phrase Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Articles. Then click the Search box.

This will give you a Basic Search page. Under the Search boxes click Advanced Search.

The Advanced Search will appear with three (3) search boxes.

In the first box type “project management”

Change the “Select a Field (optional)” selection to “SO Journal Source/Title”.

In the second box type any of your search terms (“scope”, monitoring”, etc.)

Change the “Select a Field (optional)” to “TX All Text”.

You can either add an additional search term in the third box or hit the blue Search button.

This will bring up a large selection of potential articles based upon your search parameters. You can narrow down your search by using additional search terms.

 Every paper typed in this course should be in APA formatting (title page, reference page, NO abstract page, in-text citations, running head, page numbers, Times New Roman 12 font, 1 inch margins, double-spacing, etc…).  Points will be deducted for papers that are not typed in APA formatting.  Also, every paper in this course needs to be based on research from a scholarly source that is retrieved from UC’s Library.  Your weekly research papers should include two sources, the textbook and the scholarly case/article that you found.  Papers that are not based on a scholarly source(s) will receive a grade of “0.” 

Questions 

1) What does the story of the EFV suggest about the importance of considering what a project’s key mission is supposed to be prior to authorizing it? 

2) The EFV has been labeled, “The wrong weapon for the wrong war at the wrong time.” Do you agree or disagree with this characterization? Why

3)  Why does the EFV failure illustrate the dangers of long lead-times for weapon systems? In other words, when a project’s development cycle takes 20 years from start to finish, what dangers do the project developers face when the project is finally operational?