ITM 5200 Assignment 1 – Project Management of Information Technology

Project Management of Information Technology

ITM 5200

Assignment- 1

Part 1: Think of a recent change that occurred at your college, in your community, or in the news. Use the three-sphere model for systems management and brainstorm issues related to the change based on the business, technology, and organization spheres. Write a summary of your reasons for selecting these issues.

Answer : The three-sphere model of systems management deals with the business, organizational and technological aspects and/or issues related to the project that should be defined and considered in order to select and manage projects effectively and successfully. As for the organizational aspect, matters involving the stakeholders should be taken into full consideration.

The college has decided to introduce unique identification number to each student depending on the location, course, and level of the degree. To implement the project the PM of this has to think about three sphere Business, Organization and technology. The three spheres must address the below issues.

Business:

· What will the ID Number project cost the university?

· What will it cost the students?

· What will the support cost be?

· Will there be additional maintenance costs?

Organization:

· How will the ID Number project affect the students and faculty?

· How will it affect the past students and current students?

· Who will manage the implementation?

· How would you transition all the students to the new system?

Technology

· How would the numbers be generated?

· How will changing the ID from social security to random numbers affect the identity of the student or faculty?

· Will there need to be a program change for the ID number project?

· Will it affect the ID card system?

Part 2: List five to ten specific things that project managers can do to help manage stakeholders. Provide some examples of successful and unsuccessful relationships with project stakeholders. This will require you to perform some outside research on the subject.

Define project success criteria and Identify Stakeholders.

At the beginning of the project, make sure the stakeholders share a common understanding of how they will determine whether this project is successful. Too often, meeting a predetermined schedule is the only apparent success factor, but there are certainly others. A stakeholder is anyone who has a stake in the project someone who wants it to succeed. You can’t start managing stakeholders until you know who they are.  Stakeholders can also be external to your organization like the government and third party providers as well.

2. Observe and Manage

Having established where your key stakeholders sit in relation to the project you can start to influence their attitudes. The aim is to watch people over time, and help them move towards a positive way of thinking away that will help you achieve your aims. Keep a close eye on people, as their opinions will swing between positive and negative over the life of a project. A one-off analysis exercise is never enough: you have to monitor how people are reacting and manage accordingly. Next step is to monitor and manage your stakeholders and their expectations as the project progresses. Put a note in your diary to give your key stakeholder representatives a quick call every now and then just to keep them up to date. This will help promote the project and ensure the stakeholder concerned is mindful of the work being done.

Firstly, understand the project objectives. Deciding the real objectives will help you plan the project. Scope defines the boundary of the project. Deciding what is in or out of scope will determine the amount of work, which needs performing. Understand who the stakeholders are, what they expect to be delivered and enlist their support. Once you have defined the scope and objectives, get the stakeholders to review and agree to them.

  • 4. Define the Scope and Objectives

5. Define the Deliverables

You must define what will be delivered by the project. Decide what tangible things will be delivered and document them in enough detail to enable someone else to produce them correctly and effectively. Key stakeholders must review the definition of deliverables and must agree they accurately reflect what must be delivered.

7. Project Planning

Planning requires that the project manager decide which people, resources, and budget are required to complete the project. You must define what activities are required to produce the deliverables using techniques such as Work Breakdown Structures. You must estimate the time and efforts required for each activity, dependencies between activities and decide a realistic schedule to complete them. Involve the project team in estimating how long activities will take. Set milestones, which indicate critical dates during the project. Write this into the project plan. Get the key stakeholders to review and agree to the plan.

8. Communication

Project plans are useless unless they have been communicated effectively to the project team. Every team member needs to know his or her responsibilities. I once worked on a project where the project manager sat in his office surrounded by huge paper schedules. The problem was, nobody on his team knew what the tasks and milestones were because he had not shared the plan with them. The project hit all kinds of problems with people doing activities, which they deemed important, rather than doing the activities assigned by the project manager.

9. Tracking and Reporting Project Progress

Once your project is underway, you must monitor and compare the actual progress with the planned progress. You will need progress reports from project team members. You should record variations between the actual and planned cost, schedule, and scope. You should report variations to your manager and key stakeholders and take corrective actions if variations get too large. You can adjust the plan in many ways to get the project back on track but you will always end up juggling cost, scope, and schedule. If the project manager changes one of these, then one or both of the other elements will inevitably need changing. It is juggling these three elements – known as the project triangle – that typically causes a project manager the most headaches!

10. Change, Risk and Time Management

Stakeholders often change their mind about what must be delivered. Sometimes the business environment changes after the project starts, so assumptions made at the beginning of the project may no longer are valid. This often means the scope or deliverables of the project need changing. If a project manager accepted all changes into the project, the project would inevitably go over budget, be late and might never be completed. Risks are events, which can adversely affect the successful outcome of the project. Projects where risks have included: staff lacking the technical skills to perform the work, hardware not being delivered on time, the control room at risk of flooding, and many others. Risks will vary for each project but the main risks to a project must be identified as soon s possible. Plans must be made to avoid the risk, or, if the risk cannot be avoided, to mitigate the risk to lessen its impact if it occurs.

11. Decision-making and looking for warning signs:

Decision-making is an integral part of project management. Yes, it is important to get the right people involved and get their opinions; however, you should always make the decision that is best for the project and the organization overall even if it is not the most popular one. It is very unrealistic for any project manager to expect one-hundred percent consensus. Learn to thrive on the tensions between your own voice and the voice of the people and you will be better off. Look for signs that the project may be in trouble. A small variance in schedule or budget starts to get bigger, especially early in the project. You discover that activities you think have already been completed are still being worked on.

Examples of successful and unsuccessful relationships with project stakeholders

Unsuccessful Relationships with project stakeholders:

California’s Department of Social Security’s implementation of the California Automated Child Support System (CACSS)

Firstly, CACSS was planned and started in 1992; the tender went to Lockheed Martin for $75m with a go-live in December 1995. The whole project was cancelled in 1997 after direct expenses of $100m were incurred. A new version of the system started development in 2000 and finally went live in June 2008 (see this news snippet) and it is online here.

Denver International Airport

Second case is the Denver International Baggage Handling system. This case is infamous to the extent that it made it on Wikipedia, the full GAO report can be found here. BAE won the tender for $193m.The system development had so many problems that in order to open the airport an alternative manual handling system was installed, which came at a price ticket of only $51m; at the time of opening the airport (Feb 1995, 2 years behind schedule anyway) the delays caused by the baggage handling system were estimated to be $360m. Before United axed the system, it cost about $1m per month in maintenance.

Successful relationships with Stakeholders:

The British Computer Society:

BCS -The Ecourier project and the Instant Energy project – to study their critical success factors and to generate recommendations for other IT projects. Handling complexity leads to high success rates. Projects have different success measures and target markets. Based on the secondary research, it is concluded that critical success factors for general IT projects include project plan, technical issues, change management, stakeholder management, risk management, and communications.

References:

http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/21-project-management-success-tips.php

http://www.projectsmart.co.uk/project-management-success-with-the-top-7-best-practices.php

http://pmtips.net/Blog/managing-stakeholders-6-steps-success

http://blog.budzier.com/category/failed-projects/

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