1. Assess the four categories of a risk-management plan for the choice EDGE project. Given the information in the case, how risky is this project for Choice Hotels?
2. Go online to research “Agile” information systems development and the role of “scrum masters” in helping organizations manage successful IT projects. Why are leading organizations now turning to this approach for developing their systems projects?
3. Assume you are Denise Tower and have responsibility for the overall management of the choice EDGE IT project. Describe what you might need to do to monitor and control the project to assure scope, budget, and schedule are managed.

Choice Hotels International is the company behind well-known hotel brands that range from budget-friendly EconoLodge and Rodeway Inns to Quality, Comfort Inns and its luxury brands, Ascend and Cambria. Over 6,400 properties are part of the franchisor’s offerings in both domestically and abroad. This translates to over 500,000 rooms around the globe.
To help hotel guests find and book those rooms, Choice Hotels maintains a robust central reservation system, or CRS, that must connect travel agents, online reservation websites such as Trivago and Kayak, and mobile app users to the company’s daily available inventory. On the back end, the system also must connect to each property’s front check-in desk system and the organization’s revenue management systems. For Choice, the CRS is the heart of their hotel operations and it could not operate without it.
The company first developed its CRS back in the 1980s using the latest project management techniques and information technology (IT) available. But the company’s growth, coupled with dramatic changes in information technology and the cost of maintaining inflexible systems built for last century business that couldn’t scale with growth, have compelled the organization in 2014 to embark on a multi-million dollar, multi-year project, called choiceEDGE, to replace this mission-critical system by 2017.To replace such a vital system, Todd Davis, Choice’s Chief Information Officer (CIO), knew they couldn’t just remove the old software and hardware systems and then plug in brand-new ones. The risk was too high. Nor could they rely on a linear systems development approach that would require the company to deliver a finished solution that would be outdated at the end of several years of work. The world of business and technology were changing too rapidly to wait. The company has seen hospitality industry competitors spend hundreds of millions doing just that, with failed outcomes.
Instead, senior management at Choice Hotels committed to a new IT project management approach, called “Agile,” that allowed development to occur iteratively around “projects within projects” so as each requirement outlined in its work breakdown structure (WBS) was completed, it could be deployed without disruption to the entire enterprise. This approach both minimized risk of business disruption and allowed new features to be seamlessly rolled out without the need for major workforce training initiatives. It also allowed franchisees to start seeing the benefit of the new “heart” just months after helping to define the desired business outcomes instead of waiting years.