Topic: saving a store from going out of business Remind us of your project by fi

Question

Topic: saving a store from going out of business

Remind us of your project by first providing a brief overview of the project scope.

Name which of the ten critical success factors emerged in this project.

Evaluate and explain how each of these factors affected the success of the project.

As the project manager, what steps would you take to control the "human" side of project management better?

How could you use milestones and/or Earned Value Management as a measure of success in this project?

With respect to project termination, what project closure steps did your team complete (or fail to complete)?

Explanation / Answer

The question seems a little abrupt and missing some background information. For example, your question says which of the 10 CSF emerged in this project. It seems that we are to refer to a set of 10 CSFs that are mentioned somewhere and the answer is to refer to the same.

Whilst every project/business is required to have its own set of customized CSFs, here are 10 which can probably be applied to most businesses.

The project that I will use in this example to answer your question is implementation of Business Intelligence tools in automating a loan processing system for a lending institution.

Project scope

A lending institution, ABC Financial Services (fictitious name) was traditionally in the business of giving auto loans through a centralized operations floor sitting in the headquarter of the company. Most of the functioning, right from assessing loan applications, making phone calls to prospective customers, disbursement process and conducting field investigations were primarily manual in nature. Since this required more manpower (a costly resource) and was more prone to errors, company decided to automate many processes by bringing in technology.

Critical Success Factors

All the 10 CSFs mentioned above had played a pivotal role in ensuring success of the project. Some of the important ones were as follows

Clear definition of goals: This was critical since transitioning into a digital scheme of things involved high costs and hence defining what this journey will bring to the company in terms of revenue was vital to analyzing the cost-benefit analysis. This project would involve multiple stakeholders both within the company and outside too (outsourced vendors) and hence role clarity was of utmost importance too.

Calendar for task completion: The company created a WBS (work breakdown structure) that ensured every task had a timeline attached to it along with the owners of the tasks.

Commitment: Post the project conceptualization stage, extensive meetings were held with vertical heads to explain the objective of the project and only after written commitments from each one of the vertical heads, the ground work was started.

Experienced Managers: Team heads for the various tasks entailed in this project were hand-picked, taking into consideration both the vintage of the employee and extent of knowledge they had in their respective domains.

Risk Assessments: For each product suite that was decided to incorporate, stress tests were done to test how resilient they were. Extensive UATs were conducted to test every possible scenario.

ABC Financial Services considered its employees as the greatest assets that it had and hence the human side of the project was absolutely critical to the success of the project.

Periodic meetings were done among team members and vertical heads to understand the issues that were being faced in the testing phase. In many instances teams were asked to stay in office after business hours, since most of the functionalities could only be tested once the actual working environment was closed. To ensure high motivation levels amongst employees, compensatory offs were given in return of extra hours in office.

Measure of Success

ABC Financial Services did not use the concept of EVM, however used the WBS as the standard for measuring success factors. As opposed to the planned time for each task, actual time taken was recorded and presented to senior management by project head in periodic intervals.

The financial success was based on budgetary allocations at the beginning of the project.

Project Closure Steps

At the conclusion of the project, a list of completed tasks as documented at the project initiation stage was presented by project head to all stakeholders and a formal acceptance of the same was received.

A confirmation was taken from all vendors that there was no outstanding payments

A final document was prepared by Project team which included all details of the project such as important timelines, how the team fared against the projected timelines, actual vs budgeted costs, and expected time for the project to payoff dividends.

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