Week 12- Project Management

Project Management

1. Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management.

The triple constraint involves making tradeoffs between scope, time and cost for a project.  It is inevitable in a project life cycle that there will be changes to the scope, time or cost of the project. A successful project is typically on time, within budget, meets the business’ requirements, and fulfills the customer’s needs

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There is a high failure rate in IT projects between 30 to 70 per cent due to late delivery, exceeding budget, or not delivering what was agreed upon

Increased Scope  = increased time +  increased cost

Tight Time = increased costs + reduced scope

Tight Budget = increased time + reduced scope.

Organisations routinely over-schedule their resources (human and otherwise), develop redundant projects and damage profitability by investing non-strategic effort that do not contribute to the organisations bottom line. Therefore, the triple constraints are important in project management as it offers a strategic framework for co-ordinating the numerous activities associated with organisational projects.

2. Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planningPERT chart (program evaluation and review technique) is a graphical model that depicts a projects task and the relationship between those tasks. A dependency is a logical relationship that exists between the project tasks, or between a project task and a milestone. PERT charts define dependency between projects tasks before those task are scheduled. The critical path is a path from the start to finish that passes through all the tasks that are critical to completing the project in the shortest amount of time.

Example of PERT chart:

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Gantt chart is a simple bar chart that depicts the projects task against a calendar. In a Gantt chart, tasks are listed vertically and the projects time frame is listed horizontally. A Gantt chart works well for representing the project schedule. It also shows actually progress of tasks against the planned duration.

 Example of gantt chart:

3. Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success

Managing People - managing people is one of the hardest and most critical tasks a project manager undertakes. Resolving conflicts within the team and balancing the needs of the project with the personal and professional needs of the team are two of the challenges facing project managers.  Project managers not only need to ‘manage’ the stakeholders and the project, they need to manage the development team.

Managing Communication-while many companies develop unique project management frameworks based in familiar project management standards, or adopt specific methodologies such as PRINCE, all of them agree that communication is the key to excellent project management. It is extremely helpful is a project manager plans what and how he or she will communicate as a formal part of the project management plan. A project manager distributes timely, accurate and meaningful information regarding project objectives that involve time, scope , cost and quality, and the status of each.

Managing Change –

 Change management – a set of techniques that aid in evolution, composition, and policy management of the design and implementation of a system

Change management system – a collection of procedures to document a change request and define the steps necessary to consider the change based on the expected impact of the change

Change control board (CCB) – responsible for approving or rejecting all change requests

4. Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed.

Reasons why projects fail:

- Unrealistic expectations – expectations are too high therefore it is hard to aim project tasks at a hard level when

- Lack of project management – have no time, scope or costs

Reasons why projects succeed:

- Good project charter – organised, and knows where the project is heading

- Good communication- can communicate well between project team, to get the task done efficiently and effectively within the time scope and cost.

Week 10 - Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Intelligence (BI)

1. What is your understanding of CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) – involves managing all aspects of a customer’s relationship with an organisation to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organisation's profitability. CRM helps companies make their interactions with customers seem friendlier through individualization.

2. Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational CRM supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers.

Analytical CRM supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers

The primary difference between operational CRM and analytical CRM is the direct interaction between organisations and its customers.

3. Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments

Marketing department CRM technologies-

- List generators: compiles customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns

- Campaign management system: guides users through marketing campaigns

- Cross-selling and up-selling:

      Cross-selling – selling additional products or services
      Up-selling – increasing the value of the sale

Sales department CRM technologies-

- Sales management- automomate each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales representatives co-ordinate and organise all of their accounts

- Contact management- maintains customer contact information and identifies prospective customers for future sales. E.g. - maintaining organisational charts.

- Opportunity management-target sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales

4. How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?

By implementing Sales management CRM systems, contact management CRM systems eg increase managements visibility of the sales process, and opportunity management CRM systems by gaining prospective customers.

5. Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

Business intelligence (BI) – applications and technologies used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information to support decision-making efforts. BI includes simple MS Excel Pivot tables to highly sophisticated software that fetches data from the different front-and back-office systems.

Many Businesses are finding that they must identify and meet the fast-changing needs and wants of different customer segments in order to stay competitive in today’s consumer-centric market. BI can tell companies things like;

- Determine who is the best and worst customer’s thereby gaining insight into where it needs to concentrate more for its future sales

- Identify exceptional sales people

- Determine whether or not campaigns have been successful

- Determine in which activity they are making or losing money

6. Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem

Companies can have a lot of data, however they are not able to benefit from levering this information and turning it into useful data for analytical and strategic decision making.

The issue most organisations are facing today is that it is next to impossible to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, let alone their enemies, because the enormous amount of organisational data is inaccessible to all but the IT department. The problem: data rich, information poor

The solution: to improve the quality of business decisions, managers can provide existing staff with BI systems and tools that can assist them in making better, more informed decisions. The result creates an agile intelligent enterprise, a few examples of using BI to make informed business decisions include:

- Retail and sales – predicting sales; determining correct inventory levels and distributions schedules among outlets; and loss prevention

- Banking- forecasting levels of bad loans and fraudulent credit card use, credit card spending by new customers and which kind of customers will best respond to (and quality for) new loan offers

- Operation management- predicting machinery failures; finding key factors that control optimisation of manufacturing capacity.

7. What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?

Single point of access to information for all users- organizations can unlock information held within their databases by giving authorised users a single point of access to data.

BI across organizational departments-all departments across an organization from sales to operations to customer services can benefit from the value of BI

Week 9 - Operations Management & Supply Chain Management

1. Define the term operations management

Operations management (OM) - the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources into goods and services

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2. Explain operations management’s role in business

Operations management is an area of management concerned with overseeing, designing, and redesigning business operations in the production of goods and/or services. It involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient in terms of using as little resources as needed, and effective in terms of meeting customer requirements. It is concerned with managing the process that converts inputs (in the forms of materials, labor, and energy) into outputs (in the form of goods and/or services).

3. Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology

An integrated system is the only way to have a consistent view of the data and provide up to the minute results—on a company-wide basis. By automating the most important business practices, business will be able to work more efficiently, reduce overhead, increase agility, and improve insight into business processes

4. Explain supply chain management and its role in a business

Supply Chain Management (SCM) involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximize total supply chain effectiveness and profitability. Its role in business is that customers order from retailers, who in turn order from distributors, who in turn order from manufacturers, who in turn order from suppliers. The supply chain also includes transportation companies, warehouses, and inventories and some means for transmitting messages and information among the organizations involved.

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5. List and describe the five components of a typical supply chain

Plan- this is the strategic portion of the supply chain management.  Company must have a plan for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for products or services. A big piece of planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain that is efficient, costs less, and delivers high quality and value to customers.

Source- companies must carefully choose reliable suppliers that will deliver goods and services required for making products.  Companies must also develop a set of prices, delivery, and payment processes with suppliers and create metrics for monitoring and improving relationships

Make- this is the step where companies manufacture their products or services. This can include scheduling and the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging, and preparing for delivery. This is by far the most metrics- intensive portion of the supply chain, measuring quality levels, production output and worker productivity.

Deliver- this step is commonly referred to as logistics. Logistics is the set of processed that plans for and controls the efficient and effective transportation and storage of supplies from suppliers to customers. During this step, companies must be able to receive orders from customers, fulfill the orders via a network of warehouses, pick transportation companies to deliver the products, and implement a billing and invoicing system to facilitate payments.

Return- this is typically the most problematic step in the supply chain. Companies must create a network for receiving defective and excess products and support customers who have problems with delivered products.

6. Define the relationship between information technology and the supply chain.

Information technology is becoming increasingly important to allow the valuable sharing of info o that all stake holders can become aware of those tasks that are allocated to particular share holders to achieve the delivery of the goods or services.

An example of I.T is ERP.  SAP is an example of ERP which allows documentation recording and visualization to stake holders across the value chain.