Describe some key events in the history of project management. What role doe the
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Describe some key events in the history of project management. What role doe the Project Management Institute (PMI) play in helping the profession? What does it mean to take a systems view of a project? How does taking a systems view of a project apply to project management? What makes information technology projects different from other type of projects? How should project mangers adjust to these differences? What is the role of the project manager? What are suggested skills for all project managers and for information technology project managers? Why is leadership so import for project managers? How is the job market for information technology project mangers? Explain the differences between functional, matrix and project organizations. Describe how each structure affects the management of the project. Search the Internet arid information technology industry articles to find an example of an informal ion technology project that had problems due to organizational issues. Write at least one page summarizing who the key stakeholders were for the project and how they influenced the outcome.Explanation / Answer
Q1)Describe some key events in the history of project management. What role does Project Management Institution(PMI) play in helping the profession?
Answer 1 : Some key events in the history of project management are as follows:
Timeline of project management - there is a general understanding that the history of modern project management started around 1950. Until 1900, projects were generally managed by creative architects and engineers themselves, among those, for example, Christopher Wren, Thomas Telford and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Early civilizations
· 2570 BC Great pyramid of Giza completed. Some records remain of how the work was managed: e.g. there were managers of each of the four faces of the pyramid, responsible for their completion (subproject managers).
· 208 BC The first major construction of the Great Wall of China.
15th - 19th century
· Christopher Wren (1632–1723) was a 17th-century English designer, astronomer, geometer, mathematician-physicist and architect. Wren designed 55 of 87 London churches after the Great fire of London in 1666, such as St Paul's Cathedral in 1710, as well as many secular buildings.
· Thomas Telford (1757-1834) was a Scottish stonemason, architect and civil engineer and a road, bridge and canal builder, who managed the Ellesmere Canal and Pontcysyllte Aqueduct.
· Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859) was a British engineer who created the Great Western Railway, a series of steamships, such as the first with a propeller, and numerous bridges and tunnels.
20th century
· 1910s The Gantt chart developed by Henry Laurence Gantt (1861–1919)
1950s
· 1950s The Critical path method (CPM) invented
· 1950s The US DoD used modern project management techniques in their Polaris project.[2]
· 1956 The American Association of Cost Engineers (now AACE International) formed
· 1958 The Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) method invented
1960s
· 1965 International Project Management Association (IPMA) established as International Management Systems Association (IMSA)
· 1969 Project Management Institute (PMI) launched to promote project management profession
1970s
· 1975 PROMPT methodology (acronym for Project Resource Organisation Management Planning Technique) created by Simpact Systems Ltd (source: PRINCE2 manual)
· 1975 The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Fred Brooks published
1980s
· 1984 The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt published
· 1986 Scrum was named as a project management style in the article The New New Product Development Game by Takeuchi and Nonaka
· 1987 First Project Management Body of Knowledge Guide published as a white paper by PMI
· 1989 PRINCE method derived from PROMPTII is published by the UK Government agency CCTA and becomes the UK standard for all government information projects
1990s
· 1996 PRINCE2 published by CCTA (now Office of Government Commerce OGC) as a generic product management methodology for all UK government projects.
· 1997 Critical Chain by Eliyahu M. Goldratt published
21st century
· 2001 AgileAlliance formed to promote "lightweight" software development projects
· 2006 Total Cost Management Framework release by AACE
· 2009 PRINCE2 2009 edition, compatible with other methods and more flexible in approach
PMI does many things to promote the profession of Project Management.
Q2) what does it mean to take a systems view of a project? How does taking a systems view of a project apply to project management?
Answer 2: To take a systems view at a project is to view the whole system. It means to do complete analysis of how the system will interact with the organization. This includes the internal and the external operation where the project will function.
Taking a systems view of a project apply to project management because great care must be taken to include the overall goals and views of the organization to ensure the project displays goal equality and the end result adds value to the whole organization.
Q3) What makes information technology projects different from other types of projects? How should project managers adjust to these differences?
Answer3: IT project are different from others type of project because they can be very diverse in terms of size and complexity, they often include team members with very diverse background and skills, and the technologies involved are diverse so project manager should adjust to the differences by paying careful attention to the goals of the project and the needs of various stakeholders.
Q4)What is the role of the project manager? What are suggested skills for all project managers and for information technology project managers? Why is leadership so important for Project Mangers? How is the job market for Information Technology Project Managers?
Answer4: The project manager manages a project in the following roles :
Managerial role : Focus on planning, organizing and controlling the project.
Leadership role: Focus on nurturing relationships among stakeholdersand motivating the project team to achieve projectgoals.
Suggested skills for all project managers
The project management body of knowledge : 9 knowledge areas of project management and the tools and techniques in each area
Application knowledge, standards and regulations : Domain knowledge – CRM, ERP, banking, logistics,hospitality, health-care, travel, education, government, etc
Project environment knowledge : Understanding for organization in which they are working in – how does the organization work within its social, political and physical environments – the attitude of the organization towards change.
General management knowledge and skills : Knowledge of financial management, accounting, procurement, sales, marketing, contracts,manufacturing, distribution, logistics, supply chain, etc in order to make and/or take responsibility for all key project decisions.
Soft skills or human relation skills : It is very important as the project manager deals with many groups of people – effective communication, influencing the organization to get things done,leadership, motivation, negotiation, conflict management and problem solving.
Leadership is very important because project manager take on the role of both leader and manager. Good project manager know what people make or break projects, so they must set a good example to lead their team to success. Companies that excel in project management grow project leader. Leading by example is the most important trait to effective project manager. Job market for information technology project manager continues to remain strong especially for those with strong business and leadership skills.
Q5) Explain the differences between functional, matrix, and project organizations.Describe how each structure affects the management of the project.
Answer 5) Functional organizational have manager or vice president in specialties such as engineering,manufacturing, information technology and so on. Their stuff have specialized skill in their respective disciplines. Project organization has project manager instead of functional manager reporting to the CEO. Matrix organization represent the middle ground between functional and project structure. Personnel often report to both a functional manager and one or more project managers. Project manager have the most authority in project organization structures followed by matrix and then functional.
Answer 6)
www.HealthCare.gov Overview
The affordable care act (increasing healthcare access to all Americans), signed by President Obama on 23 March 2010, required that the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launch HealthCare.gov on 1 October 2013. This website going to be the official health care exchange that would allow residents to compare prices of health care plans, identify if they qualify for federal subsidies, and enroll in a chosen plan. The Affordable Care Act gave states the right to create their own healthcare exchange or opt-in to the federal exchange (healthcare.gov).
Website Rollout
Steven Brill’s stunning expose in Time Magazine presents us with a remarkable view of the issues leading up to and following the initial roll-out of HealthCare.gov. Seventeen days after the roll-out of the web site, on October 1, 2013, President Obama and his Chief of Staff Denis McDonough's pulled together a team to attempt to address the website and the management of the web site team. They included individuals from private industry who were familiar with planning, testing, deploying technology for firms like Google, and Civis Analytics, and who have intervened to assist Twitter and Palm when technical problems plagued those firms. By the end of 2013, the site was stabilized. In the initial ObamaCare roll-out, the technology and technology management issues are simple to see, and were remarkable from the perspective of the disregard for the basic rules of enterprise system architecture, such as hardware resiliency and redundancy, software performance design and testing, and conventional maintenance practices. A primary issue with the initial roll-out of HealthCare.gov was the long response times experienced by clients. For performance purposes, it is common practice to utilize cache, both on servers and workstation, to store recently accessed information, so that every request for information does not have to access the databases of a system. This dramatically improves performance for clients. On the other hand, frequent, unnecessary requests to a database creates contention, traffic, and unnecessary delays. HealthCare.gov was implemented without the use of cache. Five days into the roll-out of the web site, the site “crashed” with 50,000 simultaneous users. The team that was assembled to redesign the web site indicated that the site could never have handled more than 2,000 users. No serious stress testing of the system could have taken place. Another major design flaw was the fact that the subscriber ID generator for the database did not contain enough digits to meet insurance company needs, so this needed to be redesigned. The lack of hardware resiliency was realized when a data storage unit and a switch, which failed during routine maintenance, stopped work for a total of nearly five days. In most production environments that cannot afford “down time”, high availability options, such as duplication of critical hardware components, are built into the design to serve as a “back up” when critical elements fail or are interrupted . The information systems dashboard is a management tool that provides a real time snapshot of metrics for senior management in an organization, so they can get a current status of the critical measures of a system or organization. In the case of the ObamaCare website there were no dashboards to give the people implementing and managing any quick idea of how the system was performing, what people were doing on the website, and where the “bottlenecks were”. On the first day that the new team was working on the site, they implemented dashboards. Through hardware and software improvements the site was able to improve from 43% “uptime” to 95% by the end of November 2012, 400 errors were addressed, and the site had stabilized to be able to handle 50,000 or more simultaneous users.
Key Stakeholders:
While the technology was ultimately managed by making the right choices and scaling the environment to meet the demand, the leadership or lack of it, as reflected by the social and business issues of collaboration, communication, and people management were less obvious, but more insidious, to the demise of the initial roll-out.
As Mike Abbot, one of the chief architects and managers of the intervention, indicated, a staged roll-out, testing, observation, and remediation could have reduced the initial technical problems.
In fact, the technical teams were cooperative in retrofitting their methodology to this approach. What was lacking in this project was leadership, accountability, and a sense of urgency.
The fact is that the lack of stakeholder involvement created the foundation for this “national joke”.
Project stakeholders are members of an organization or business partners who have a vested interest in the success of an information systems project. This includes the technology and business unit sponsors of a project, such as technical team member, project managers, and customers.
Stakeholders often can play a key role in the success or failure of a project. A great deal of research indicates that having business stakeholders in information systems projects is a key to success; or failure, if the business leaders are not involved.
The myriad of problems experienced during the websites rollout were due to several factors, primarily:
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