Topic: The VASA Ship - Destiny of a Project

Abstract: In 1628 the Swedish suffered a huge loss, when one of the country's most prestigious projects, the Royal Ship Vasa, sank in the Stockholm Harbor on its maiden tour August 10.

This project, to be analyzed within the webinar, has everything one can ask for in a project. In this case the customer really was the King, A person never to be challenged. The Architect and Project Manager, Shipbuilder Henrik Hybertson, who had no experience with ships at the time, won the outsourcing contract before his employer, who got ill and died before the ship was ready. His successor, who never had built a ship this large either tried his best, but did not understand the task. Last but not least, Sweden was in the 30 year war and the ship was very much needed, so the difficult questions were not asked until afterwards in the Hearing in the Kings High Court, which needed to find the one guilty of this catastrophe.

Within the Webinar, We will analyze this project by the means of Scope Driven Management (trademark Ambitiongroup), a graphical methodology which will help us understand what impact the King's goal had on his fleet and what a change of mind can do to a project. Today we call it Change Requests, in the seventeenth century it was called "The King's wish".

For more information regarding the Vasa Ship, including pictures, please click here.

Presenter: Ulf Lidman

Presenter Bio: Mr. Lidman has over 22 years of experience working in the IT and energy industry. During his career as Project Manager and Senior Manager, Mr. Lidman has taken on many challenges and has always been a pioneer and entrepreneur in his heart and his mind. After obtaining his Master in Engineering Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology in 1986, Mr. Lidman started his professional life at Digital Equipment Corporation in Sweden. At Digital Equipment Corp. he was part of the company's global success through delivered many leading IT projects to customers in the Swedish Defense Material Administration and other governmental and public organizations.

In 1994 Mr. Lidman was recruited to Cap Gemini to help form the just started Utilities Industry Practice and took on the challenge to help utilities in Europe and North America to adjust to the deregulated business environment of electricity and natural gas.

From 2002 to 2005 Mr. Lidman was the head of Energy Exchanges and Energy Exchange software at OMX technology, the Swedish Exchange Operator and Technology Company. In this role, he was responsible for multiply large and difficult projects, among others to set up a new clearing environment for the most successful electricity exchange in the world, Nord Pool.

In most recent years Mr. Lidman has worked as an entrepreneur and partner for multiple new start ups. One of which is the launch of the first independent electricity retailer in Denmark, known as Modstroem (trademark of Aktant). During this period he has also been a partner in Ambitiongroup, a Project Management Company based in Norway, which is taking the novel idea of using the scope as the key managerial tool directing projects. Scope Driven Management (trademark of Ambitiongroup) is a graphical method that helps Project Managers and the Project Stakeholders to better understand and manage the project at hand. Back To Top