Reference no: EM13831994

Team Project Management Plan

Objectives

This assessment task relates to the following course objectives:

• identify traditional and agile approaches and lifecycles for managing information technology projects;

• employ a systems thinking approach to identify critical roles and stakeholders in information technology projects;

• explain the basic components of a project management plan and its importance in improving the success of information technology projects;

• adopt a project management framework to write a project management plan, for a simulated real world contemporary information technology project;

• apply the process groups model to manage information technology projects of various complexities and scales;

• demonstrate decision-making processes to solve a range of information technology project issues;

• classify and discuss current issues in information technology project management;

• value the importance of effective communication to solve problems on information technology projects; and • value the significance of software quality in IT projects.

Overview

As stated by Schwalbe (2014) a project management plan (PMP) is a document used to coordinate all project planning documents and helps to guide a project's execution and control. She also states that a good PMP is vital to the coordination and integration of information across project management knowledge areas and across the organisation.

In this assignment, you will work in teams of four (4) people to produce a PMP, a description of updates to the PMP and related documents and a record of your experiences working in the team. The teams will be assigned by your lecturer and will be based on your tutorial/laboratory classes. There will be time allocated in the tutorial/laboratory to work on this assignment. One team member is to be elected the project manager for the duration of the project. Teams are expected to meet regularly - at least once a week - and prepare a PMP based on the IT project case study on page 6. They are then expected to provide descriptions of changes to that PMP and related deliverables based on the sequence of events described in the case study. Teams should use their own initiative regarding the scheduling of all deliverables. Teams will NOT be required to produce ‘product related deliverables' as part of this assignment. The focus is primarily on ‘project management related deliverables'. However if an event would trigger a change to the product deliverables, it may be of assistance to the reader if you include information about that change. Finally over the course of the assignment, individuals are expected to record information about team meetings, their work and contributions and the contributions of others as well as reflect on their learning about project management through the completion of the assignment.

Assignment

Project Management Techniques

Requirements

Deliverables for this assessment are divided into three areas, a). Team PMP Deliverables), Team Project Update Descriptions Report and c) Individual Report Deliverables. Following are detailed requirements of each.

Team PMP Deliverables:

It is recommended teams use the structure as suggested by Schwalbe (2014) as a guide for preparing and creating their PMP. PMP section headings include:

• Introduction

• Organisation

• Management and Technical approaches

• Work to Perform

• Schedule

• Budget

It is recommended that teams understand the inputs to the PMP and include reference to ancillary plans and deliverables from other knowledge areas (see Schwalbe (2014)).

You may use Microsoft Project or other tools to plan the project and include screen shots in your report.

A quality team PMP will demonstrate a synthesis of plan content, templates and ideas acquired from project management professionals and academic authors with details from the case study provided.

Team Project Update Descriptions Report

Each team needs to produce a report describing what needs to be done at each of the time points identified in the case study:

• Two weeks after project commencement;

• One month after project commencement;

• Four and a half months after project commencement; and

• Six months after project commencement

The report may be included as an Addendum to the baseline PMP and is to include for each time point:

• Description of the situation;

• Description of response to the situation;

• Summary of actions to be undertaken including:

o Processes followed/executed; o Activities completed;

o Deliverables altered/produced;

Individual Report Deliverables:

Each student should submit a separate, individual report of approximately 800-1000 words including the following sections:

• Statement of Contribution This statement should provide: o a clear description of all roles and responsibilities taken on by the student;

o a table describing all project and assignment team deliverables created/altered by the student. The table should include: o Deliverable Name; o Description; o Purpose; and o Estimate (elapsed and expended) of how long each took to complete.

• Weekly Assignment Status Reports

Individual weekly status reports should be completed by each student, and submitted to team project managers' in team meetings. Copies of each student's weekly status reports should also be included with their individual report. A Status Report -

Assignmentv report - accompanies this assignment document on Moodle.

• Peer Review of Assignment

A confidential statement estimating each team member's: o contribution percentage (all team member values should total to 100%); o justification of contribution percentage given;

o meetings attended; o weekly status reports submitted; o any issues and how they were dealt with.

• Project Management Lessons Learned in Assignment

A reflective statement documenting project management lessons learned whilst working on the assignment, including technical and non-technical lessons. These lessons should include those aspects which worked particularly well, and also those which were problematic. Lessons Learned template - ITECH2250_PM_lessons_learned_in_Assignment3_report.doc - accompanies this assignment document on Moodle.

Assignment 3

IT Project Management Techniques

Academic Presentation:

The Team PMP and the Team Project Update Descriptions Report should both be presented as business reports, in accordance with the suggested layouts (see pages 2 and 3 above), and adhere to academic writing presentation standards and be consistent with Federations University's referencing requirements, see General Guide for Referencing.

For help on report writing, see

Federation University's General Guide to Writing and Study Skills, in particular pp. 34 - 43 on Reports or Murdoch University's Guide to Business Report Writing

CASE STUDY

Automated Travel Agent Development

Travel Centre Ltd. (TCL) is a leading Australian tourism company. The company provides services of organizing global trips for customers. It is currently headquartered in Canberra and has more than 100 local offices across Australia to serve its customers. It also has a website to provide booking service for those customers who are computer and Internet savvy. The company has over 500 employees today, having added almost 100 people last year alone. They predict that they will continue to grow in the future. Part of the reason for the company's success has been their extensive experience on trip management. Recently, TCL has experienced a big surge of Internet booking due to the dramatic increase of young customers using their service.

The company's founders wanted to focus on using technology and innovation to improve current service and customer experience. After a consultation with a Sydney based IT company, the CIO, Phil Smart and VP, Bill Bright, have both made a new Automated Travel Agent Development Project their top priority. Basically the project is to develop an online app and a mobile app to automate current travel agent service. This is increasingly important for the company's market share as more and more customers are using online and mobile service. Currently there are almost no applications available in this field. The idea of the app is that once a customer enters his/her origin and destination places, the app would generate a complete and optimised itinerary including a travel plan, route, flights, accommodations, stops, total cost etc. The idea is feasible because TCL has a large network of affiliation with major airliners and hotel cartels around the world, and TCL is given access to their booking systems. If the customer is not satisfied with the itinerary, he/she can fine tune the parameters of the route, flights, accommodations, total cost, so that a revised itinerary is generated until the customer is happy with it. The customer can then either add the itinerary to his/her shopping cart or proceed to the checkout system to pay for the travel booking. The main goal of this project is to develop a set of two agent apps. One app will be aimed at an online travel agent targeting people who use computers to book their travels. Another app will be a mobile version of the auto agent targeting mobile users. The mobile app has different platform, interface and payment method.

TCL believes in hiring highly talented and motivated individuals who can work well on self-managed teams. Smart and Bright formed a search committee to find the best candidate for managing the Automated Travel Agent Development Project. After reviewing many strong candidates, they decided to hire you to manage this critical project. You have previously worked for a consulting firm and had successfully implemented several agent application development projects in large organisations. Since this was a high priority project that should be completed in 6 months, they felt it was appropriate to hire an external manager from outside the company in this case. They knew they were paying a premium for your contract at $140 p/hr for 2 d/wk, but a lot was at stake. Smart and Bright agreed to be joint project sponsors, and they hand-picked Lance Sweets to be the main internal IT liaison and Jack Hodgins to be the main travel liaison. They would let the new project manager, you, form the rest of the project team. You proposed that you would like to use some form of hybrid SCRUM project management methodology, particularly by incorporating SCRUM in the software development. However, after meeting with Camille Saroyan (CEO), Smart and Bright, you all agree that both the goal and solution are clear

(since they are leveraging their existing expertise). You also agree that you will be able to clearly establish the requirements and that TCL knows the technology well. For all these reasons you decide to use a more traditional predictive project management methodology including a traditional waterfall model for the SDLC. You predict that they will need to provide new hardware for the development team and upgrade the test bed for system and acceptance testing. You will also need to eventually hire two teams of three analyst programmers to work on each app. Two will be hired for the Requirements/Analysis and Design SLDC phases in the carrying out phase of the project and the remaining four will be hired for the remainder of the project. The programmers will spend the equivalent of half a day a week on project management related activities and the remaining four and a half days on development. They will be paid at a rate of $80 per hour. To use the existing knowledge of the organization, you hope to second some existing programmers to the project and use some of the hired programmers to backfill the vacated positions. The existing programmers may be charged at a higher rate than the $80 per hour. You also hope to use two existing employees in some capacity to help with Acceptance Testing of the apps - at this stage you budget for three days per week for seven weeks at $80 per hour. For all team members excluding the sponsors and externally hired consultants, an indirect cost rate of 25% is applied. You will also need to access a computer agent scientist and network security specialist consultant. Their pay rates are negotiable.

After looking at the Business Case and creating a Stakeholder Register, you complete the Project Charter and hold a Project Kick-Off Meeting. The estimated project budget on the Project Charter is listed at $700,000 (including reserves) and states that you will have the final versions released to market 6 months after commencing the project. From your knowledge of previous projects and PMBOK you think it best to understand the project in a traditional project management sense i.e. as a series of four sequential phases:

• starting;

• organizing and preparing; • carrying out; and

• finishing.

You realize you have completed the required processes for the starting phase and now must focus on the organizing and preparing phase of this project. A key process group in this phase is the planning process group. You must understand and produce the appropriate outputs from the core and facilitating knowledge areas relevant to the planning process of this phase and integrate these into the Project Management Plan (PMP). You must then perform progressive elaboration of the PMP over the life of the project and particularly with respect to the situations that follow.

Two weeks later

You are having several challenges on this project. TCL originally focused on developing agent apps to facilitate traditional travel booking but the CEO, Camille Saroyan, has emphasized the need to increase profits by tapping into other markets, like the cruising market. The types of people who work on the former market are often very different from people working on the latter markets, because cruising travel involves multiple countries, different custom and quarantine process are required. Most of the people hired in the past year have been hired to support this new market. Even though you and the Automated Agent Development Project team tried to do a good job managing key stakeholders, they are having difficulties with several employees who disagree with the company's new marketing strategies. Just a month into the project, several senior managers in the flight and accommodation departments have voiced their opposition to tap into the cruising market.

A few very vocal managers said that they would continue to work on the traditional flight and accommodation business.

One month after project commencement

A memo that the project sponsors and you sent had mixed reviews, but the monthly meeting was very effective in airing everyone's concerns and clearing up misconceptions. The project team realized that in addition to high-level monthly meetings, they would need to have more detailed meetings and reports to help keep the project on track. Each project team was assigned a user representative. It was critical that the team develop a good list of requirements for these new apps and work towards delivering these. A new requirement to create a testing function that will allow the users to benchmark their progress is proposed as a desirable requirement by the project sponsors and you need to evaluate the effect of this out of scope request but are quite positive about being able to include it.

Four and a half months after project commencement

You have reached a significant milestone on the project; all core requirements have been constructed and are ready for system testing. You think that you need to review the quality of the testing before a scheduled quality audit. You hope to be able to continue with final development integration of non-core features and final testing (system and acceptance) before final release of the apps. However your reviewing discovers some issues and you need to resolve them. At this point, you also know that final versions are planned for release on time at the completion of the project. You therefore also resolve to measure the project progress and decide if the final versions will be released on time and on budget.

Six months after project commencement

The project has been considered a success, coming in on budget, within agreed scope and key stakeholders have been pleased with the communications and reporting process. The final versions are released to the market with great success and you close the project.