Find an example of a real project with a real project manager. The project can b
ID: 3797730 • Letter: F
Question
Find an example of a real project with a real project manager. The project can be from corporate, business, construction etc. Interview the project manager or one of the project leads. Write a two-page paper describing the project in terms of its scope, time and cost goals. Discuss what went right and wrong on the project. Also, discuss the role of the project manager and project sponsor. You will also discuss if the project was successful or unsuccessful. Search the internet for two interesting articles about software development life cycles or project management life cycle, including agile software development. Also, review the website ww w.aailealliance.ong. What do these sources say about project management? Summarize your findings in a one to two-page paper citing any references.Explanation / Answer
For this assignment, would like to discuss 1 project in details.
This project we are going to discuss is from a corporate. Whenever the new partners in a particular geographical region signed up, the welcome kit was to be shipped. Partners signed up with the the multinational and the relevant details were passed to this third organization for preparing and shipping out the relevant welcome kits in that region.
Multinational M <---------------->Regional Partners P
M-------Backend Processing at Regional Company R----------------P
The regional company R performed the backend fulfillment at a regional level to prepare & send out the welcome kit - some Software CDs for development, manuals, etc.
Let us call this Organization R where the project was done.
Scope: Scope of the project involved reading weekly files from M and creating new orders in the ERP system of R.
Time: Time of the project implementation was 2 months.
Cost: Cost of the project was 50K USD
As the project was for a prestigious organization, it was important for regional company R, however its budget was low and it involved multiple stakeholders that played important role in the success/failure of the project.
Time: Out of the 2 months, the user requirement and testing needed more time in this case, as this project could mean different things to the various stakeholders. As a project manager it was important to meet up with customer R and also to connect with customer's customer. Multinational M had certain assumptions about the project that were missed initially.
There was a limited time to successfully launch the project. It helped getting approvals for the requirements in detail which involved data formats, expected delivery schedules, etc.
The testing was key in this project as the input files were received from outside company R. The security protocols for file transfers need to be defined and tested. So there was administration team that had a role in this project. Even though there job was for half a day only, certain approvals were needed from the highest level and for the success of the project it was needed to initiate it well in advance.
The 2 weeks were needed for requirements gathering/analysis, 3 weeks were needed for development, 2 weeks were for testing and 1 week for final implementation.
Cost: The cost was a constraint in this project, so it was checked whether any tools/packages are readily available. The ERP partner came up with a huge customization cost and that was not acceptable. So it was decided to get the development work done offshore and only 2 week time was assigned to the developer organization to keep the buffer.
The project plan for the testing was shared with all the stakeholders, and certain dates were identified when offshore developers, PM, testing engineer, Customer representatives from R, Multinational M representatives and 2 new partners P, System Administrators were all available to check with the test data. After fixing some bugs identified during testing which involved like changing some labels, adding extra description fields, changing date formats, the complete testing was repeated for the same and the new data sets.
As this development was a third party, complete documentation was prepared for end users as well as for the design/development.
The project was completed 2 days before the due date.
Role of Project Manager:
Role of project manager here was to get requirements right in the first place. This involved going in the details of the access rights, flow of data files, schedules for the tasks, integrating entries into ERP system.
The project schedule and discussion with all the members on a weekly basis was important.
Evaluating options and discussing with the customer was important.
Test cases planning needed to get the inputs from Customer's customer.
Quality of documentation was crucial as well as the maintenance in the future may be done internally.
Role of Project Sponsor: Project sponsor had to keep the budget limited for this task, as the need for the project was identified only after it was clear that ERP system of M and ERP system of R could not exchange the data directly. The complete backend handling project involved actual manpower & material costs for preparing and shipping the welcome kits. So within a limited budget, the sponsor needed to get a good quality solution to avoid any manual work in preparing the list of partners and shipping out the kits and manually keying the info in ERP.
As the project was completed successfully, a new order was given by the customer to implement the same project for another region where the multi-lingual support was needed as well!
For question 2 some guidelines are
SDLC:In SDLC, there are below phases that can be described and from any of the Project management sites or books the reference sites can be noted.
-Requirements Gathering
-Requirement Analysis
-Design
-Development
-Testing
-Deployment & User Training
-Maintenance
Project Management Life Cycle: This has below phases:
INITIATION
The business problem or opportunity is identified. The formal survey may be done to identify the problem. The solutions implemented elsewhere may be studies. A project manager is assigned to take it further.
PLANNING
Scope of the project, risks involved, project team, costs, schedules are planned by the project manager.
IMPLEMENTATION
The vendors are evaluated, the deliverables are decided, the actual costs are computed. The daily updated and weekly tracking of project is important. The quality must be maintained and risks must be identified and mitigated.
Status must be sent to the management who are actually going to sponsor the costs.
CLOSING
The final documentation, user training, identifying the maintenance plan are the closing actions of the project.
Agile Software Development
Out of various techniques of the project management like waterfall model, V model, the one that is getting very popular in successful project implementation is Agile Software Development.
In agile software development, the releases are incremental. Each release is completely tested and released. This is generally based on functionality and customer keeps getting functionality delivered as the project moves forward.
This also has scope for late incoming requirements.
Related Questions
drjack9650@gmail.com
Navigate
Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.