Contents

• Introduction
• Project Background
• Stakeholder analysis
• Project issues
• Cultural barriers
• Language barriers
• Difference in Corporate Cultures
• Technological Differences
• Recession of the 1970s
• Other issues
• Conclusion
• References

Description

When the last flight of the iconic Anglo Frech Concorde flew in 2003, it signaled the end of the most adventurous and colorful era in the Civil Aviation history. The Aerospatiale-BAC Concorde aircraft was a turbojet-powered supersonic passenger airliner, a supersonic transport (SST). It was a product of an Anglo-French government treaty, combining the manufacturing efforts of Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation (Kenneth Owen, 2001). First flown in 1969, Concorde entered service in 1976 and continued for 27 years. The Concorde SST project was a joint collaboration between the UK and the French governments. The project was executed by a consortium with members such as the British Aircraft Corp. and Aerospatiale. These were the companies that had designed the conceptualized the aircraft. But the respective governments had to intervene since they ran short of funds to execute the project. Although, Concorde SST was the most successful and colorful chapter of Aviation, which ended in 2003, the project days were not satisfactory as far as the performance of the project consortium was concerned. The project was marred by delays and spiraling costs. The budget escalated many times the initial estimate. The project duration was extended to fourteen year from the initially planned four years. Although, there were a couple of external influences that caused the delay or spiraling budget, most of the reasons to the delay and increased costs could be attributed to inefficient management practices. The paper analyses as to what went wrong the caused enormous delay and huge increase in costs and finds out reasons that caused them. The paper also does a stakeholder analysis to find out the extent of influence of each of the stakeholder involved in the project. The paper makes recommendations as to how the problems could have been fixed and the delays and spiraling budget could have been avoided.