Business Case and Project Charter

Qcart is a new online grocery shopping company that started business in Qatar after the pandemic to deliver groceries and home goods to customers within 1 day from placing an online order. Currently the online grocery industry in Qatar is less than 1% ( 100 Million) of the total grocery shopping which amounts to a total of 12 billion Qatari Riyal. QCart revenue is 35 Million and their net profit ratio is 2%. QCart has an IOS mobile App and an e-commerce website with 70% of their customers use the mobile App.

The company is faced with the problem of improving the shopping experience of customers when placing orders. The experience is worse when using a mobile phone than when using their website. On average, customers spend 21 minutes to complete their order on the website and 34 minutes on their mobile.

Two of the main problems that customers experience are:

1. the long catalogue of products they need to browse to choose goods from especially when using their mobile to place the order,
2. customers place multiple orders since they forgot items when placing their first order.

Customers usually order a regular set of products every week since the majority of items ordered are daily use items. It is common for many customers to forget items they regularly need. Having to place multiple orders within short periods of time has its financial toll on QCart as warehouse employees are wasting time making additional trips to the same storage locations increasing the supply chain cost. On average, each trip cost QCart an additional 13 Riyal.

In addition, customers may choose to buy the forgotten items from other stores missing an opportunity for QCart to increase its revenue.

Android users do not have a Qcart Mobile App although 65% of the population in Qatar have android OS on their mobiles.

The online grocery industry in Qatar is expected to grow rapidly to an estimated 6% by July 2021 due to the explosion in government digital service offerings after the pandemic with vehicle registration, delivery of medication, and sign up for COVID 19 vaccination all going online. The high internet and smartphone penetration within Qatar is also a strength that online grocery shopping can capitalize on.

As a technology company, the director of operations, Alreem Al Sulaiti, would like the IT department to come up with a solution to assist customers quickly locate the items that they regularly buy and to avoid placing multiple orders due to forgetfulness. Alreem would also like to explore ways to provide purchase recommendations to customers as a mean to increase sales, especially after reading that Amazon increased its revenue by 35% through product recommendations.

Alreem selected you to lead the project. As the project manager your first task is to research the online shopping industry and come up with a solution for the problems QCart is currently experiencing. One idea you have is to analyze customer behavior to be able to develop a smart cart that solves the two pressing problems. You have to develop a business case to convince Alreem (the project sponsor) and Fahd, the financial officer, that the solution you are suggesting will create measurable value for QCart in terms of increased revenues and reduction in the cost of logistics. A smart cart is also expected to increase your customer satisfaction as it will save them time placing orders and will help them remember items they need to order.

Create a business case and a project charter using the templates provided by the book to demonstrate the benefits of the project, the risks involved, and any assumptions you may have to guarantee the success of the project.

When estimating the cost of changes, consider the following: A small improvement to an existing feature costs 50,000 Riyal, medium sized improvement costs 75,000 and a big improvement costs 100,000. A total app rebuild will cost 1 million riyal.