Select a project topic that you will need to submit via discussion for approval. The Course Project Approval discussion provides more information about the project’s requirement for approval.
Business Case
This week, you will select a project topic that you will need to submit via discussion for approval. The Course Project Approval discussion provides more information about the project’s requirement for approval. Once you receive approval from your instructor, create a business case to justify the need for your project topic.
The business case must contain the following.
Executive Summary
Reasons (Create Problem Statements)
Business Options
Expected Benefits
Expected Dis-Benefits
Costs (Budget estimate)
Timescale (Schedule estimate)
Investment Appraisal
Major Risks
PROJ586 Project Management Systems
Week 2 Project
Communications Management Plan, and Meeting Agenda
Project Charter
Congratulations! Your project business case has been approved. The next step is to create a project charter. The project charter is important as it provides stakeholders with an understanding of what the project entails and other relevant information so that all parties have a good understanding of the purpose of the project. Remember, the project charter is a living document that stakeholders, especially ones that join the project in the later phases, understand and can help better define stakeholders’ roles. The following are important sections to be included in your project charter.
Project Title/Name: What will the project be known as? What shall we call it? Each project is normally given a unique name.
Business Need: Why should we do this project? What will be gained, changed, or modified? Is there a financial or business reason to do this project? This area should contain any feasibility studies used to advance the project.
Measurable/Business Objectives: What objectives, if any, of the company is this project designed to meet?
Requirements
Approval Requirements
Product Scope Description
Milestones and Deliverables: What are the key milestone dates associated with the project?
Schedule and Benefit
Establish Project Manager and Project Sponsor: Who will lead this project? Who is the Sponsor?
Your project is moving along nicely. Now let’s look at communications and meetings for your project. Your communications management plan, which must include a meeting agenda, is due this week.
Create a communications management plan and discuss the types of meetings that would be needed. You must also include a progress meeting agenda that you would use with your team.
You may use the Communications Management Plan Sample located in the Project Document Samples section.
Communications Management Plan
The goal of a communications management plan is to ensure that communication, which is important for all projects, is established so that the lines of communication are defined so that project managers, project team members, the client/customer, and all relevant stakeholders understand how to properly ensure communication is directed and recorded so there is no confusion regarding proper communication. Remember, your responsibility as a project manager is to control the flow of communication. Not having an effective communications management plan can reduce the influence a project manager has. Also, keep in mind communication and types of communication are different for every organization. Your focus for your communication plan will focus specifically on items/events. Therefore, create a communication management template by item/event. You can use Excel or Word. The columns will be (Review video for more details about each column):
Item/event
Purpose
Audience
Date/frequency
Who is responsible?
Authority to release?
Make sure you adapt the plan to the organization and the stakeholders of your term project that was approved via the business case and that you consider the different types of communication items/events that exists.
Meeting Agenda
All meetings during the life of a project are required. Rather than conducting meetings without any planning, create the meeting agenda that has what you feel needs to be discussed on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis. Understand that the agenda can be updated for each meeting, but having a structured template gives a you a strong base to ensure meeting will be productive. Please review the following meeting agenda video to help provide more perspective.
PROJ586 Project Management Systems
Week 3 Project
Scope Statement and WBS
Congratulations, you are enjoying a considerable amount of success now that your business case and project charter are approved. It is now time to write the project scope statement and create a work breakdown structure (WBS).
There are two Course Project deliverables due this week.
Project scope statement: Using the information established in the project charter and additional research, create the project scope statement in Microsoft Word. Review the Scope Statement Sample in the Project Document Samples Section. The scope statement should have the following components (see video for explanations):
Product scope description
Deliverables
Project exclusions
Acceptance criteria
(WBS). The WBS helps to break down the project into smaller more manageable pieces (work package or individual activities). After you complete the WBS, you can begin planning your scheduling the activities. Therefore, it is important that you work to complete the WBS activity. Review the WBS Sample in the Project Document Samples Section and create the WBS in Excel or Word as noted below.WBS: Following the sample from the Project Document Samples section, create a WBS in Excel or Word using graphical format in the sample. Review the following video to understand more about the WBS:
PROJ586 Project Management Systems
Week 4 Project
Schedule and Resources
Now that you completed the project charter and scope statement, we can begin creating the project schedule. The project schedule helps us understand when the activities will happen and allows more insight on how long the project will take. In addition to having the schedule, we can begin to assign resources to the different tasks. Resource allocation is crucial as it helps set expectations of the needs a project manager requires. Because you want needs to be completed, as the project manager, assigning resources is necessary.
There is one Course Project deliverable this week (Microsoft Project schedule with resources)
Create a project schedule using Microsoft Project (See the 2 videos in the Introduction and Lesson section for help) and the WBS you created in Week 3. As you create your schedule, make sure you consider possible new information you may have discovered since last week.
Once you create your Microsoft Project schedule, create a column for resources and add the resources associated with the activities in your schedule. Make sure that you not only consider human resources but also other resources (i.e., meeting space, construction equipment, etc.). This exercise will help you more accurately assign costs later in this course.
PROJ586 Project Management Systems
Week 5 Project
Project Budget Development and Earned Value Management Feasibility
The project you created for this session is at a point where you have to determine how you will determine the health of your project. After doing your reading for this week, it is clear the budget of your project is important to understand. Once you understand your budget you need to explain if earned value analysis is a viable method for you to use for your project. Of course, earned value analysis isn’t for every project.
First, create a high level budget and write a two- to three-page paper explaining why you believe earned value analysis is or isn’t an acceptable alternative for your project to adopt based on projects like yours. Make sure that you explain your points with details and use supporting evidence to help you make your arguments. Your paper needs to be in APA format as well as your references. There should be at least three references. Your submission will be based on the strength of your arguments and the supporting evidence you provided.
PROJ586 Project Management Systems
Week 6 Project
Risk Management and Quality Management Case Study
Case Study Questions and Instructions
There was a company (XYZ Cruise Lines) in the vacation industry that had a reservations system for their cruise operations that was designed for agents to book cruise passengers for individual bookings within 5 to 7 minutes. This system created a competitive advantage among travel agents as they could book their clients fast from the start of the process to the payment screen. Their largest competitor had a reservation system that took approximately 15 minutes, which was a clear competitive advantage for XYZ Cruise Lines. However, the competitor had an automated process to check in customers at the pier and provided an electronic boarding pass where the passengers would carry an identification card with a magnetic strip to allow for faster embarkation of the ship at the pier and at the ports of call. XYZ Cruise Lines was still utilizing a manual system for embarkation and utilized paper boarding passes. Because customers tend to remember any bad experiences with the beginning (embarkation process) and the end (disembarkation process) of the trip more than during the trip, the embarkation process caused a lot of dissatisfaction, especially among those passengers who sailed with the competitor in the past. In an effort to improve the process, a state-of-the art ship embarkation system was being developed. This new planned system would allow the passengers to be processed faster for the embarkation process and a plastic card with a magnetic strip would be activated and utilized as the electronic boarding pass. Additionally, this same card would also be utilized as the point of sale purchase card, creating a cashless process for the passengers to buy drinks and other extras on board the ship during the voyage. This would further XYZ as the competitive leader in the industry.
When it came time for the integration testing, the upgrade for the reservations system could not be made for the test environment because the upgrade was not moved to the quality control environment and the software changes were still in the programmer’s work file. No other developer or anyone in IT management had access to these files. The programmer that worked on these changes had a heart attack and was in the hospital. As a result, the project manager informed everyone that they were going to miss the deadline and now had to wait 6 more months before this project could be implemented and the business sponsor was furious.
The quality assurance manager asked the reason for the missed deadline, and when she heard the story, she asked the IT project manager for the risk management plan. He said that they do not believe in planning for risk events because this was a negative process and they support a positive approach towards the systems development process. Because there was not a risk matrix created and the risk for the developer to have a heart attack was not considered, the project was delayed and the company lost an opportunity to improve their competitive advantage, which equated to millions of dollars in potential future bookings.
After reading the quality assurance manager’s report, senior management asked the following questions.
What are the project risk management processes as described in the PMBOK® Guide?
Explain why a project manager, or any stakeholder, should not view risk planning for projects as only a negative activity?
Did the organization follow due diligence regarding the creation of a risk management plan, assess all major risks, and develop appropriate risk responses and a plan for monitoring risks? Explain your rationale.
Should the risk event have been identified in the beginning by practicing sound quality control? Why or why not with details?
What are some contingency plans or actions that could have been taken to limit the impact of this possible risk event and other such related events, such as a key team member leaving for any reason? Is there a quality management component that should be considered (If so, discuss what it entails)?
What would be your quality assurance recommendations for such projects in the future based on this case?
Management is upset that there is an occurrence of a major risk that could affect the project. Your job is to prepare a 5- to 8-minute narrated PowerPoint presentation that addresses the six questions posed by senior management and reflects your research and thorough analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of the case.
You must have a title slide where you introduce yourself and present all resources at the end of your presentation. Your references should be in APA format. Also, your presentation must be professional; therefore, bullets should be brief; you should not have big paragraphs or long sentences; you should utilize the notes section; if images are used, they should be relevant to your presentation; font size and style should be consistent; and grammar must have high priority.
PROJ586 Project Management Systems
Week 7 Project
Your project has been successfully planned, and you are ready to move into the performing stage. Before you do, take a closer look at how this project is fitting into the broader organizational structure and how you see this project being structured within the organization.
There is one Course Project deliverable this week. Create a Word document that contains the following elements.
Describe the type of the organizational structure of the company within your project.
Include the advantages and disadvantages of this organizational structure, compared to the other structures.
Research a responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) or a responsible, accountable, consulted and informed (RACI) matrix.
Create a RAM or a RACI matrix for the key stakeholders in your project within the same document.
PROJ586 Project Management Systems
Week 8 Project
Congratulations on the work you have done with your Course Project. You will now prepare a status report for the project sponsor. Assume you have completed the project and the project deliverable has been completed.
You will incorporate the project assignments from previous weeks into a comprehensive project status report. In addition to the sections you have already completed, you will add a lessons learned section to describe the strengths and areas of improvement within your project. You will also expand on the discussion of sociocultural factors, and you will describe your leadership style related to the project.
Section A: Summary
Part 1: Overview: Describe the project, including the project deliverables, overall time frame and estimated budget.
Part 2: Business Strategy Alignment: Provide a discussion of the needs of the organization and show how the project is aligned to the business strategic objectives. (Use your business case to help you.)
Part 3: Project Charter: Include your project charter with all the relevant information, such as project purpose, objectives, milestones, budget, user acceptance, assumptions, constraints, and key stakeholders.
Section B: Scope, WBS, Schedule, and Budget
Part 1: Project Scope: Provide the project scope statement with the statement of work, deliverables, constraints, limitations, assumptions, exclusions, and technical requirements.
Part 2: WBS and Schedule: Include the WBS and schedule in Microsoft Project with dates and resources. You may have to take a screenshot of the file or convert the project file to one you can insert in the project status report.
Part 3: Project Budget: Include the summarized project budget you completed for the Week 5 Project Budget Development and Earned Value Management Feasibility assignment and an explanation for why the summarized budget will require more review to ensure it is up to date at all times.
Section C: Communications
Part 1: Communications: Include the communications management plan with the five required elements of what, when, delivery format or location, the sender, and the audience.
Section D: Leadership, Sociocultural Factors, and Lessons Learned
Part 1: Leadership and Management: Research and describe a leadership style you would use in your project. Include how you motivate team members to deliver a competitive advantage with the completed project. Make sure you take into account the organizational structure and RAM/RACI efforts you conducted in Week 7. Cite at least two scholarly articles.
Part 2: Sociocultural Factors: Provide more details related to sociocultural factors in your project. Describe the benefits and challenges working with those from different backgrounds (educational level, language, nationality, religion, ethnicity, culture, ethics, etc.).
Part 3: Lessons Learned: Describe the lessons learned in the project to include strengths and areas to improve. Explain what you would do differently in the next project and what you would continue to do.
Please review the rubric for this report to ensure all requirements are accomplished with your report. This report will be submitted by the end of Week 8.
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