The Flint Switch: A Water Supply Cutover Project Disaster That Never Should Have

The Flint Switch: A Water Supply Cutover Project Disaster That Never Should Have Been
Introduction
Located nearly at the geographic center of the world’s largest supply of fresh water – the Great Lakes (see red diamond in the map within the attached document), Flint, Michigan suffered (and continues to suffer) from a series of project decisions that led effectively to the poisoning of their public water supply, and in turn, death, poor health, and lasting effects for the citizens of the city. It happened when the city of Flint initiated a project to switch their water supply from the Detroit River (fed by Lake Huron) to the Flint River. You will learn more about the rationale for doing this switch this in your research, but at its heart, this was a project rationalized by cost reduction.
Although much has been written, broadcast, published, and debated about the project failure, its causes, its outcomes, and most of that has been about blame, politics, equity, and ethics. This case is about the issues driving project decisions that in turn, led to the problems. Although you should be aware of the surrounding context, and they are of paramount importance, we request that you do keep them in mind but for the purposes of this assignment, instead focus solely and intensely on the project management issues that led to these terrible outcomes.
How this will be graded:
Structure, Organization, Ease of reading, Grammar: 3 Points
This Assignment had a very, very specific structure. Identify 3-4 issues. Come up with solutions for those issues and summarize them briefly. Provide a table with Pros and Cons for each, use a weighted table to rank the solutions and select the best to implment, and wrap it all up with an overall (but brief) recommendation – what could have been done to help prevent this disaster from a PM perspective. DID YOU FOLLOW THIS STRUCTURE?
Did you follow the advice given in the lectures and From Your Instructor about the format?
Did you follow rules of English grammar, spelling, and syntax? Did you fix errors pointed out via Word’s editing capabilities (e.g. squiggly blue or red underlined text)?
Content: 10 Points
Is it clear from reading your assignment that you read the case and understood what happened that led up to the mistakes that were made and that yielded the fires and explosions?
Did you ‘dig deeper’? Some people identify very technical issues – did you find the underlying reasoning – the project-level thinking that may have driven decisions to go a certain way technically?
Did you keep your writing concise and to the point? Part of the intent of this assignment is an exercise in expressing important ideas in as efficient a way as possible.
Was there a logical flow from your Issue Identification to your Proposed Solutions, to your Pros and Cons and to your conclusion?
Did you create a weighted table (see example) to compare the proposed the solutions in terms of ease of implmentation and effectiveness?
If you did have ‘extra’ information to exhibit, did you put it in an Appendix rather than in the body of the text? Again, the focus is on a concise, crisp presentation of your arguments.
References and resources: 2 Points
Did you provide several relevant references that helped make your points? Of course you can use the main Case as a reference, but did you reach out and find out more about the Flint Water incident from other sources?
You really should at least investigate the references pointed to at the bottom of this Case at a minimum. We expect at least 5 references other than the case itself, with APA7 referencing.
Other things to consider:
Did you add value from your own professional and/or personal experience?
Did you make appropriate use of figures and tables in an appendix? Don’t substitute quantity for quality here – one good, relevant, and meaningful small table is worth 100 randomly inserted graphs and charts.
Did you really take on the viewpoint of a project leader here, and consider the way the team was motivated, the way the different stakeholders communicated (or didn’t), the culture of the different companies?
Did you consider the different stakeholder interests?
The Flint Switch – Project Management Case (Maltzman)v1.1.pdf