1- What was the reason for the loss of the contract?

Reason for the loss of contract from the foregoing, it is obvious that the Department of Energy (DoE) failed to award the contract to Kombs Engineering for the simple fact they lacked faith in Komb’s project management system.

This response is based on the sense that DoE gave questions to Kombs regarding their project management systems. However, the results underlined the failure of the company to implement an effective project management system

In this case, Kombs had interacted with the DoE for a period of five years and it never took time to develop a proper system of managing projects during the time it was contracted. In fact, Kombs hired a contractor who effectively trained the entire company on the subject of project management for a period of one month only. Thus, Kombs never realized that the dynamics involved in project management had changed since it was contracted first by DoE in 1988.

In order to sense and react quickly and to insure rapid decision-making in a project, lines of communication should be the shortest possible between all levels of the organization. In this case, once all line managers, like in the case of Kombs project management system, managing a project decision makes decision making a long process and effectively compromises the efficiency of the project. People with the most knowledge must be available at the source of the problem, and they must have decision-making authority and responsibility.

As it should be, project managers should focus more on managing the project’s deliverables rather than providing technical direction to the project team. On the other hand, management of the assigned resources is more often than not a line function. Clearly, these two are factors that Kombs Engineering never considers. Kombs Engineering lacked a proper project management