ITECH2250 – IT Project Management Techniques
Assignment 3 – PMP Development and PM Responses
Overview
The aim of this assignment is to gain experience in the organizing/preparing and carrying out phases of a project. This will be done through the preparation of a Project Management Plan as well as a report on the PM actions required to address a number of situations encountered during the project life cycle.
Timelines and Expectations
Marks: Assignment will be assessed based on a mark out of 100
Percentage Value of Task: 20% of the course marks
Due: Week 11, Friday 5:00pm
Minimum time expectation: 16 hours per individual
This is an assignment with both group and individual components.
Learning Outcomes Assessed
The following course learning outcomes are assessed by completing this assessment:
• Identify traditional and agile approaches and lifecycles for managing information technology projects;
• Describe project management methodologies, such as the project management body of knowledge;
• Acquire a theoretical knowledge of the project management process groups model;
• Explain the basic components of a project management plan and its importance in improving the success of information technology projects;
• Apply the process groups model to manage information technology projects of various complexities and scales;
• Employ a systems thinking approach to identify critical roles and stakeholders in information technology projects;
CRICOS Provider No. 00103D
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• Employ a systems thinking approach to identify critical roles and stakeholders in information technology projects;
• Demonstrate decision-making processes to solve a range of information technology project issues;
• Utilise a range of organisational and self-management skills, emulating real world practice of information technology project managers;
• Adopt a project management framework to write a project management plan, for a simulated real world contemporary information technology project;
• Undertake project management approaches to solve unpredictable and complex information technology software development problems;
• Demonstrate competence in using appropriate project management software.
Assessment Details
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 plans/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 team 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 below. 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 information about that change is included. Finally over the course of the assignment, individuals are expected to record information about team meetings, their work and contributions and
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the contributions of others as well as reflect on their learning about project management through the completion of the assignment.
Case Study: Frontier Touring Company Ltd. – Electronic Client Booking and
Ticketing System (eCBaTS)
You work for Frontier Touring Company Ltd., an organization specializing in guided tours within Victoria, Australia. These tours may be in the form of half-day and day trips but can also include much more extensive formats of up to a week and include accommodation, transportation and entry fees. All trips include a guide who is often also the driver but the more extensive trips may include multiple guides and separate drivers. Frontier started in 1970 and now employs over 20 permanent staff and 20 casual staff. It has offices in Melbourne (CBD), Ballarat, Bendigo, Mildura and Sale and agencies in other provincial cities. The company’s annual turnover is in the vicinity of $10,000,000. The company takes pride in the uniqueness of its tours and believes this uniqueness has been responsible for much of its success. It has received a number of tourism awards and has received considerable positive customer feedback but also constant enquiries about operating tours in other states. It has also recently appointed a new CEO, Max Wandeering, a South African with extensive experience in the tour guide market in that country. One of Max’s first tasks was to conduct a review of the company’s business objectives, corporate and management structure and operational procedures. As a result of that review, the company has decided to embark on expansion into other states as it believes there is now great potential for growth within Australia and eventually overseas. In order to facilitate this growth a number of changes need to be implemented. These include the development and implementation of a social media strategy as well as changes to the current marketing strategy, front and back office information systems used to operate the business, human resource arrangements and contracts with suppliers. Max wants to meet his key performance indicators (KPIs) including growing revenues and profits by 5% year on year for the next five years, so has been able to persuade the board to support the prioritization of a number of projects to streamline existing operations and pursue the expansion into other markets.
One of these projects is the implementation of an electronic client booking and ticketing system (eCBaTS). Currently the company accepts bookings and issues tickets in one of two ways: email/mail or “on-board”. Individuals, groups or travel agents email or mail the company with a request to join a tour and tickets are issued based on available places and payment. An application form complete with bank deposit details is available on the company website. Travel agents have a separate group form they can access. Once the company has decided to accept the booking application as detailed in the application form, the receipt of funds is checked and if they have been deposited, the tickets are
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issued by return email/mail. The company realized some time ago that their booking and ticketing processes might mean the company missed out on spontaneous or more immediate purchases. In response it implemented an on-boarding process five years ago. On-boardings are only available for half-day or day tours and the facility closes 30 minutes before the start of the tour. This information is advertised on the company website. Whilst on-boarding has proven to be a success, it has led to some pressure on tour guides as they sometimes need to cope with an influx of bookings and ticket issues prior to the start of the tour and with dissatisfied customers who try to on-board right up to the commencement of the tour or on-board for tours not using this facility. It is hoped the eCBaTS project will develop functionality that will alleviate some of this stress/confusion and provide a powerful set of functions that will produce more customers.
The eCBaTS has two parts: a web-based ticketing application and a downloadable ticketing application (for iPhone and Android). Both applications must follow the same business rules and show descriptions of tours, an indication of dates and times of scheduled tours, tour guides and drivers scheduled, available places, prices, allow for secure payment options via bank transfers, paypal or credit cards and allow for clients to advise special dietary or other requirements. The business rules are encapsulated in the back end booking and ticketing system. Information about available places and bookings made will come from and be made in that system. When a ticket is issued it will be issued by the back end booking and ticketing system i.e. both applications are interface applications to the company booking and ticketing system. A corresponding project to upgrade the front (PC based thin clients) and back end booking and ticketing system will be run in parallel with the development of the eCBaTS. In order for the eCBaTS to be a success, it needs support from all sections of the corporation, from tourist agents, from industry associations and from new and repeat customers. There is some concern within the company that it needs to be careful about alienating existing tour companies and upsetting the tourism industry. The company hopes that it will be able to offer different experiences rather than competing with or taking market share from existing operators. It also hopes that staff will embrace the new opportunities but there has been some disquiet amongst more experienced staff that the applications will “hide” customers and disrupt the unique and personalized nature of the company’s tours.
The business case for eCBaTS identified the budget at $500,000 with potential payback within 2 years of completion. This includes project manager costs (part time), developer costs – six developers are expected to be hired – charges for a content consultant and an electronic payments consultant, advertising, licencing and equipment (hardware and software for developers). There are no planned upgrades to existing hardware as part of this project since there is expected to be spare capacity in the company’s existing infrastructure. The estimated time frame for completion of the project is four
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months. Frontier realizes there are major risks associated with this project including lack of customer interest and it hopes that the project manager will be able to identify the appropriate stakeholders and address the risks involved. If the project can meet the above objectives and more importantly do this with a payback within two years of completion it will be deemed to have been a success.
You have been appointed as Project Manager to manage this project. A project steering committee has been formed consisting of Max, who is the main promoter and supporter, as well as Maurice Oney, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Iris Therese Shoppe, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and yourself. Maurice Oney has pointed out that the budgeted cost of the project is equivalent to 50% of the company’s most recent after tax reported profit and he is quite uncomfortable about pursuing what he sees as an extremely high-risk project. Iris Shoppe is quite worried about simultaneously running projects to produce the eCBaTS and upgrade the system that it will rely on for recording booking and ticketing.
After examining the Business Case, creating a Stakeholder Register and completing a draft Project Charter you determine to finalise the Project Charter and hold a Project Kick-Off Meeting. You are quite concerned about the issues raised by Maurice Oney and Iris Shoppe though. You also wonder if the Project Management Methodology (PMM) to be used is appropriate and you suspect that the original Business Case has not accurately measured the time or budget to be allocated for the project. You determine to seek clarification on these and other matters so you call a Steering Committee meeting. At that meeting you first clarify a number of procedural and management issues.
Given the concerns of Maurice Oney and Iris Shoppe you express your strong unease about the costs to the company of this project and the resource stresses involved in running a concurrent project to upgrade the front (PC based thin clients) and back end booking and ticketing system. After much deliberation the steering committee agree that the back end project will be postponed and will action that decision through a Steering Committee meeting held for that project. However you realise there may need to be changes to the back-end database that would have been part of that project that you now need to complete as part of your project. You believe you will need to examine the requirements specification already completed on that project and may need to hire a DBA to facilitate those changes.
At the meeting you also discuss the suitability of using Agile SCRUM as the PMM and based on a number of factors including that the goal and solution are clear and that you should be able to clearly establish the requirements, you all agree to use a more predictive PMM including a traditional Waterfall model for the SDLC. You are asked to explain the model. Before that you explain your understanding of the sequential phases of a project as described by PMBOK:
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• Starting;
• Organizing and preparing;
• Carrying out; and
• Finishing.
You emphasize that you are only at the end of the starting phase and are about to enter the Organising and Preparing phase and that there is a lot of work still to do. You explain that for this phase an important process group 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 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 changes to the baselined PMP. You give an indication that the waterfall model consists of sequential phases of Analysis, Design, Programming/Construction, Testing and Implementation. You offer that as a rough rule of thumb you might devote a third of your time to the first two, a third to the
Programming/Construction and a third to the final phases. You emphasize though that some of the initial analysis and design may take place in the Organising and Preparing project phase as you work out Project Requirements but that the bulk of the model phases occur in the Carrying Out phase of the project. You also point out that it may be better to release the system progressively i.e. website, then Android, then IOS and this is what you plan to do.
You next try to clarify a number of issues relating to costs and resourcing of the project. You are told that you are only able to spend two days per week on project manager duties and must continue with your normal duties on the other three days. You are also told that you may use two existing staff members, Percy Power and Gordon Tours as the main internal IT liaison and internal Frontier product expert respectively but that they will be charged at $90/hour and that they can be used for a maximum of one day/week for eight weeks. You suggest that you will probably need new hardware for development and acceptance testing and would hope that you can allocate some existing analyst programmers to help with development (to enable leveraging of existing expertise) and allow the backfilling of their positions with new project hires. You are given permission to hire both a content consultant and advertising consultant at rates and number of days that do not exceed your chargeable rate per week – $150/hour for two days per week – for up to 4 weeks. You are also told that the maximum rate that you may pay an analyst/programmer is $80/hour.
In light of discussions at the meeting, you are also given an extra month (i.e. it is now expected to take 22 weeks elapsed time to full implementation) to complete the project but there is no update to
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the budget originally calculated. You express the notion that this may need changing once you have conducted further analysis of the project. Everyone agrees, the meeting minutes are recorded, your draft Project Charter is finalised to reflect the new situation and the Project Kick-off Meeting is held.
Immediately after the project kick-off meeting you gather all available information and start understanding in detail the scope, costs, time, quality, risks, human resource, communication and procurement requirements of the project and discover a number of things that were not allocated for or understood at the time of the Business Case or are a response to the matters agreed at the most recent Steering Committee meeting. Fortunately, the likely costs of new hardware for development and acceptance testing are in agreement with the Business Case estimates – eight units at $2000 each and two android and two IOS devices at $500 each. Similarly the expectations of hiring a team of six analyst programmers to work on the website and Android and IOS applications seems to be accurate with two hired for the Requirements/Analysis and Design SDLC phases and the remainder being hired for the remainder of the SDLC phases. You calculate that, because of the postponement of the parallel project, you will need to hire a DBA for a short consultancy period of 2 days per week for four weeks to help with the redesign of the company’s booking and ticketing database. You allocate the DBA resource at $200/hr. Also missing from the original budget was any notion of user acceptance testing and you determine that two in-house resources will be needed for two days per week for a period of six weeks to perform acceptance testing. You budget for these resources at $90/hour based on discussions with the CFO. In that discussion you are also told that a 20% indirect cost charge is allocated to projects for all team members excluding the project sponsor, CFO, CIO and externally hired consultants. You also identify an original marketing budget of $20,000 and a contingency reserve of $56,000 and realise that no licencing is required. You include all of the above and other relevant information and arrive at a cost baseline of $600,000. You complete the PMP and its components and take the draft PMP baseline to the Steering Committee meeting. After much deliberation and consternation, the PMP schedule is modified to more explicitly identify the project kill points (Steering Committee meetings where decisions are made about continuing or closing the project) and the PMP is then authorized and you are then ready to continue with the Carrying Out and Finishing phases of the project…
One month after project commencement (after PMP has been baselined) …
You are having several stakeholder and communication challenges on this project. Even though you and the project team have tried to do a good job initially identifying and then managing key stakeholders, an external stakeholder – tourism industry association – and internal staff stakeholders are complaining about the development, suggesting that they have been left out of the requirements
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gathering and that the product will change the reputation and culture of the company. The CEO, whilst acknowledging the situation, believes things will settle down, but you and the other members of the
Steering Committee are worrying about Frontier’s reputation and staff morale and believe something should be done.
…Two months after project commencement…
A new requirement to create a facility to allow the tourism industry association to obtain statistics on uptake of bookings and comparison with existing system bookings needs to be evaluated. Max
Wandeering is quite positive about providing this functionality, the CIO is ambivalent and the CFO is opposed as he believes it will mean more costs for the project without any perceivable benefits. You need to define the requirement clearly and evaluate the impact of this out of scope request and work out how to respond.
…Fourteen weeks after project commencement…
You have reached a significant milestone on the project; the website component of the system has been delivered and you are now ready for system testing of the Android component. 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 acceptance testing before final release of the Android component of the system. However your review 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.
…Five 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.
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ITECH2250 – IT Project Management Techniques – Assignment 3 – 201607
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Assessable Tasks/Requirements
Assessment for this assignment is divided into three areas, a) Team PMP, b) Team Project Update Descriptions Report and c) Individual Report. Following are detailed requirements of each.
Team PMP
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
• Appendices
It is recommended that teams understand the inputs to the PMP and include reference to and content from ancillary plans and deliverables from other knowledge areas (see Project Management Institute (2013) and Schwalbe (2014)).
You may use Microsoft Project or other tools as a scheduling tool 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.
It is expected that as a minimum, the PMP will contain those components identified in the PMBOK table (excluding Process Improvement Plan, Configuration Management Plan and WBS Dictionary). The PMBOK table comes from p. 78 of A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) Project Management Institute (2013) and a copy of the table is included with this assignment specification in Moodle. It is up to you how you present all components of the PMP however it is customary to present summarised information in the body of the PMP and the detailed plan in an appendix.
There is also a requirement to include project documents (detailing contents at the point of baselining the
PMP) from that table also. These are not normally part of the PMP but for this assignment will form part of
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the assessment. As a minimum you should include: templates for change requests, change logs and issues log and copies of the milestone list, project schedule and project network diagrams (if not presented as part of schedule baseline), project requirements traceability matrix, resource breakdown structure, risk register and stakeholder register for the project. These should be included as appendices in the PMP.
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:
• One month after project commencement;
• Two months after project commencement;
• Fourteen weeks after project commencement; and
• Five months after project commencement
The report may be included as an Addendum to the baseline PMP but it is preferred that a separate report is produced. It should include for each time point:
• Description of the situation;
• Description of response to the situation;
• Summary of actions to be undertaken including:
o PMBOK Processes followed/executed; o Activities completed; o Deliverables altered/produced;
Individual Report:
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:
? Deliverable Name;
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? Description;
? Purpose; and
? 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 managers in team meetings. Copies of each student’s weekly status reports should also be included with their individual report. A Status Report template – ITECH2250_Weekly_Assignment3_status_report.doc – accompanies this assignment document on Moodle.
• Peer Review of Assignment
A confidential statement estimating each team member’s:
• contribution percentage (all team member values added to your own should total to 100%);
• justification of contribution percentage given;
• meetings attended;
• weekly status reports submitted;
• description of 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.
Submission:
Team PMP’s should be submitted in electronic format by the team manager via Moodle (one per team). Individual reports should be submitted by each student in electronic format via Moodle (a separate link will be provided for the individual report). Partner students please refer to your course lecturer for further submission instructions. Please also refer to the “Course Description” for information regarding late assignments, extensions, special consideration, and plagiarism. For further clarification you may consult the academic regulations which can be accessed via the university’s website, see:
http://federation.edu.au/staff/governance/legal/feduni-legislation/feduni-statutes-and-regulations
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ITECH2250 – IT Project Management Techniques – Assignment 3 – 201607
______________________________________________________________________________ Marking Criteria/Rubric
Work will be assessed according to the following:
• You must submit your reports according to the content of the Assessable Tasks/Requirements of this document.
• Your team and individual reports should be presented as business or management style reports which adhere to academic writing presentation standards. They must contain high quality academic presentation, expression and features as outlined in:
o The University’s Assignment Layout and Appearance Guidelines; o the University style guide – https://federation.edu.au/current-students/learning-andstudy/online-help-with/study-skills-and-writing-guides – which covers Federation University’s General Guide to Writing and Study Skills, General Guide to Referencing; and
o Features of Academic Writing (from UEfAP.com)
School of Engineering and Information Technology
ITECH2250 – IT Project Management Techniques – Assignment 3 – 201607
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ITECH2250 – IT Project Management Techniques – Assignment 3 – 201607
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Total Overall Mark [100 marks] 0.0
Total Worth [20%] 0.0
Comments
Marked by
Date
Feedback
Feedback will occur through Moodle within two weeks of the submission date.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the presentation of the expressed thought or work of another person as though it is one’s own without properly acknowledging that person. You must not allow other students to copy your work and you must take care to safeguard against this happening. More information about the plagiarism policy and procedure for the university can be found at http://federation.edu.au/students/learning-and-study/online-helpwith/plagiarism.
References
Project Management Institute (2013). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (5th ed.). Penn., USA: PMI.
Schwalbe, K. (2014). Information technology project management (7th ed.). Boston, MA : Cengage Learning.
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