Reference no: EM13839583
Company Background
Tan Hui Hui is a newly appointed Director of IT in one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Singapore. The company provides a comprehensive pharmaceutical care services to a large number of Singapore's residents. Some of the services include Hypertension-Diabetes-Lipidemia clinic, Smoking Cessation clinics and consultancy services for treatment of minor ailments, travel or nutritional advice. The company also provides an online shopping portal where their customers can order their medications and have them delivered to their home via the company's home delivery service.
The company relies heavily on IT to achieve the company's mission to improve the health and well-being of their customers through a high-quality patient-centric healthcare approach that emphasize on accessible, effort-free and cost-effective services. One month into her job, she realized there were some challenges in the way how IT projects were being selected and managed in her company.
First, she noticed that there were a large number of IT projects that were on-going across her department. Many of her staff constantly complained to her that the resources in the department were simply insufficient to cope with the demands from managing such large numbers of IT projects implementing concurrently.
Second, staff in her department was often involved in multiple projects at any one time. They frequently complained about how inefficient and political their project meetings had become. People often fought over the best way to implement a project. As a result of the talent crunches, project managers in the department were also found competing fiercely for the best to be involved in their own projects.
Third, senior management often did not provide a clear strategic priority on many of the IT projects in her company. This has resulted in some of her department's project managers deciding to make their own choices on which projects that they should prioritize to work on. The consequences are severe as some of the projects are left to their demise over time. Finally, the constant infighting among project managers has led to a low morale and mistrusting environment across her department that consists of around 200 staff.
Together, these factors have led to many of the IT projects not being able to meet its project's schedule and budget. The Chief Operating Officer fired the previous Director of IT exactly because of these factors and hired Hui Hui specially to resolve these challenges in the company.
As Hui Hui takes stock of the current situation in her company, she knows that a project portfolio management system will be one of the solutions that she should consider.
Hui Hui compiled all the recommendations provided by your team into a presentation for the management.
While doing so, she realized that she would need to estimate the amount of resources (e.g. manpower and finances) that she would need for her project portfolio management project.
She worked closely with your team to come up with the following task responsibility matrix and the type of expertise that she would need for each task.
Activity
1
2
3
4
5
6
Table 1: Project's tasks information
DescriptionDurationPredecessor
(Man-days)
Project Portfolio Management Project
Assemble project team10 days
Develop project priority scheme5 days2
Develop project screening process10 days2,3
Develop project schedule5 days2
Compile project system requirements18 days5,3,4
Resource
7
8
9
Compute project costing
Seek senior management approval
Purchase system
5 days
2 days
15 days
3,4,6
7
8
Project Manager
Project Manager
Project Manager
Project Manager
Senior System
Analyst, Senior
System
Administrator,
Project Manager
Project Manager
Project Manager
Senior System
Analyst, Senior
System
Administrator,
Software: One-
time investment
S$25,000/=
Hardware: One-
time investment,
S$100,000.
Senior System
Administrator
System Analyst
A, System
Analyst B, Senior
System Analyst,
Senior System
Administrator
Project Manager,
Senior System
Administrator,
Senior System
Analyst, System
Analyst A,
System Analyst B
Project Manager
Senior System
Administrator,
Senior System
Analyst, System
Analyst A,
System Analyst B
Page 7 of 10
10
11
Install system
Develop & configure system
18 days
12 days
8,9
8,9,10
12
Perform system test
10 days
10
13
14
Communicate to key stakeholders
Prepare system for go live
8 days
18 days
8,12
12
Activity
15
Go live
Description
Duration
(Man-days)
20 days
Predecessor
13,14
Resource
Project Manager,
Senior System
Administrator,
Senior System
Analyst, Business
Analyst A,
Business Analyst
B, Business
Analyst C,
Business Analyst
D
Project Manager,
Senior System
Administrator,
Senior System
Analyst
16
Document project for closure
4 days
15
The unit cost for each of the resources is shown in the table below. Assume each working day
starts at 8 am and ends at 5 pm and includes lunch time of 1 hour (12 pm to 1 pm).
Title
Project Manager
Senior System Analyst
Senior System Administrator
System Analyst
Business Analyst
Software Cost
Hardware Cost
Cost
S$50/hr
S$30/hr
S$30/hr
S$20/hr
S$20/hr
S$25,000
S$100,000
Overtime Cost
S$80/hr
S$50/hr
S$50/hr
S$30/hr
S$30/hr
N.A.
N.A.
Question 1
Using the information above, demonstrate your understanding on project management by the estimated total cost for the project and the corresponding costs of each task in MS project. You must arrange the appropriate tools in MS Projects to answer the question.
Present your answer using screen captured from MS Project. Answer not using MS project will get zero mark.
Question 2
After allocating the resources into each of the task, Hui Hui realized that there were some resource allocation issues in the project.
(a) Using MS Project, identify and analyse all the tasks that have resource overallocation issues. Present your answer using a screen capture of the MS Project information.
(b) For each of identified resource overallocation issue, examine and appraise what would be your strategy to address each one of them.
ECA - January Semester 2015
(c) For each of your strategy, analyse and discuss what would be the impact, in terms of cost, quality, scope or risk, of your strategies to the project.
Hui Hui subsequently realized that she had made a mistake in the configuration of the dependencies of task 12. Task 12 is dependent upon task 11 but is not being set so. She had also decided to perform resource levelling on all the remaining tasks to address the identified
resource overallocation issues.
Question 3
Update your MS Project schedule accordingly and present the screen shots of the Gantt Chart and the project costs. In addition, evaluate the information in MS project, and answer the following questions.
(a) What is the new project end date?
(b) What is the new project duration?
(c) What is the new estimated project cost?
(d) What is the critical path of the project?
Question 4
Identify & critique the project schedule and cost estimation technique that Hui Hui has employed in question 1, 2 and 3 (Taking into consideration information presented in this You may briefly propose an alternative.