Third Index Card

http://www.lessons-from-history.com/Level%202/Titanic_page.html

• Some theories of the sinking of the Titanic are poor project management which allowed major compromises to be made in every project stage - from design to construction to testing, and right into implementation and operation.
• Some compromises were more significant like those in the design and the shortened height of the bulkheads, or the reduced number of lifeboats.
• Through Titanic's construction project the elevation of expectations that this was "the greatest ship ever built" instilled a sense of supreme confidence. This led to further compromises in the implementation stage and allowed for catastrophic mistakes to be made like pushing the ship to its operational limits in a bid to beat Olympic's best crossing time.
• A calamitous failure in key feedback mechanism (ice bucket test, wireless operators overloaded with commercial traffic, confusion by the lookouts) resulted in grounding the ship onto an ice shelf.
• Failing to adequately analyze the situation and succumbing to business pressures to save face the crippled ship was restarted and limped off the ice shelf in the belief it could be returned to Halifax.
• This forward motion further ruptured Titanic's double hull and the design flaws compromised the ship as it could not handle the increased rate of flooding.
• Too truly understand the disaster we need to examine the construction project.
• (the bullet above makes me happy, cause I thought the same thing, while brainstorming what my question should be about the Titanic :))