The Camel is a Horse Designed by Committee

The French shipbuilders produced a curious quartet of battleships over the course of twelve years in the late nineteenth century - the Hoche and her sisters Marceau, Magenta and Neptune. It has been argued by some naval historians that because of the accumulation of various features, bits and pieces demanded by multiple departments, they eventually lost any resemblance to battleships.

A foreign critic described one of the ships as "a half-submerged whale with a number of laborer's cottages built on its back." A domestic columnist, while being understandably more sympathetic, referred to her as "Le Grand Hotel."

Any study on project failure will list poor stakeholder communication as one of the top three reasons for a project's demise. This brief case study discusses the steps I took to revive project stakeholder communications and move a group of stakeholders from intense distrust to frequent (and pleasant) collaboration.

Background: This web application redesign project for the military had petered to a low level grind, characterized by tersely worded emails, accusations and entrenched opinions. Project status meetings were held monthly, and sometimes skipped. There were no other recurring communications.Following please find key steps I used to shift this group to collaboration.

The idea for building a colossal dam in the southern part of Egypt had been considered by the country's president Gamal Abdel Nasser since the mid-fifties. There was a number of reasons why he and the rest of the Egyptian government thought it would be a great benefit to their country: the desire to come up with an impressive deed after defeats in the war with Israel and the Suez crisis, the need to maintain steady levels of the Nile throughout the year and the aspiration to produce more electricity to support the increase in production of cane sugar, cottons, maize, fertilizer, steel and textiles.