Introduction
In April 2017, the now-infamous Fyre Festival was supposed to provide a luxury music festival experience. However, arriving at the private island in the Bahamas, the guests discovered that none of their expectations would be fulfilled. In fact, the festival was canceled the same day it was scheduled to start, and all visitors hurried to return to Miami, overflowing the local airport (Huddleston, 2019). Fyre Media was the company responsible for the event, and its CEO, Billy McFarland, was later found guilty of several accounts of wire fraud (Stanwick and Stanwick, 2019). Thus, one can observe that the festival encountered problems at all stages of the project.
Audit
The first major issue was McFarland’s underestimation of the budget necessary to hold such a festival as well as his fraudulent behavior, as he moved the funds from the project to his personal spending needs. McFarland presented false documentation to the potential investors, trying to state that his company was able to hold the event. Nevertheless, several investors either passed the opportunity or pulled out during the project’s execution (Stanwick and Stanwick, 2019). According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) knowledge areas, this reason for failure can be classified as a cost, risk, and stakeholder error (Gonçalves et al., 2017). The triple constraint describes such actions as a problem of cost – the CEO did not consider the limitations of the project budget (Westland, 2018). Finally, this is an error in the planning step of the project life cycle.
The next main reason for failure is the short time frame that McFarland and his business partner, Ja Rule, have chosen. According to reports, many stakeholders and vendors warned Fyre Media that festival preparations require at least a year. Still, McFarland pushed to hold the event after a few months of planning and production (Huddleston, 2019). As an outcome, many participating firms did not deliver services and goods, including bedding and housing, catering, and private planes. The PMBOK guide suggests that this was a mistake in integration, resource, procurement, and, most importantly, procurement (Gonçalves et al., 2017). The constraint of time is the most visible here; finally, both planning and execution phases were mismanaged by McFarland, who did not control the process of procurement.
Finally, McFarland was not transparent with all parties involved in the project, which led to the festival being a mystery to both investors and guests until the end. Apart from presenting fraudulent reports, the CEO also failed to communicate with hired service providers, visitors, investors, and other stakeholders about any activities. Thus, the unaware participants continued to support the project with labor and money. This is the problem of communications and quality by the PMBOK’s classification, a constraint of scope according to the triple constraint, and a failure in the execution and delivery stages of the project life cycle (Gonçalves et al., 2017; Westland, 2018; Wu and Cormican, 2016).
Conclusion
Overall, Fyre Festival had many problems that were intertwined with McFarland’s fraud. The CEO’s criminal activity meant that the festival’s budget could not be sufficient for the luxury event to take place. However, McFarland’s lack of knowledge about project management and festival organization contributed to its failure. To sum up, the most detrimental mistakes occurred in the early phases of planning and execution. They related to such areas of knowledge as cost, schedule, resource, and stakeholder management, and the CEO failed to consider constraints of cost, scope, and time.
Reference List
Gonçalves, R. Q. et al. (2017) ‘An instructional feedback technique for teaching project management tools aligned with PMBOK’, Informatics in Education, 16(2), pp. 197-224.
Huddleston, T., Jr. (2019) ‘Fyre Festival: how a 25-year-old scammed investors out of $26 million’, CNBC, Web.
Stanwick, P.A. and Stanwick, S.D. (2019) ‘Fyre Festival: the party that never got started’, American Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Research, 3(12), pp. 138-142.
Westland, J. (2018) ‘The triple constraint in project management: time, scope & cost’. Project Manager, Web.
Wu, Q. and Cormican, K. (2016) ‘Shared leadership: an analysis of the evolvement process across the project life cycle’, International Journal of Innovation, Management and Technology, 7(6), pp. 299-303.