MIS 363: Course Project

The course project is a semester-long team-based project. In this project, your team will construct the typical work products expected of real-world managers for a problem case, described below. When you work on the problem case, do not concentrate on the technology or process solutions, instead, think about what you, as a project manager, should do, using the skills that you learned in class.

Problem Case

You are a senior project manager at Delphi Printers & Peripherals, a small electronics and computer peripheral manufacturer based in Santa Clara, California. You have been tasked with assembling and directing a product design team to develop a new and innovative consumer printer. Delphi has intelligence suggesting that a competitor is launching a printer with similar features and capabilities in 6 months, putting pressure on you and your team to develop a new printer that can compete effectively against the competitor's offering.

Senior management expects you to release a new printer retaining rough parity with the competitor's new printer. The projected schedule allows you to ramp up manufacturing and marketing quickly enough to match the competitor's new printer profile with your own printer. The target budget supports a cost structure that will permit profit margins at a level roughly equivalent to those of the current printer. Market intelligence gathered on your competitors plans is considered reliable, so the target specifications for your new printer, required to retain parity with their new printer, are clearly defined, well understood, and expected to remain stable throughout the project. Management has indicated that scope, schedule and cost are of equal importance in a successful launch, and they have committed to providing stable access to resources during the project.

Plan the Project You, as the project manager, will make a plan on this project and hand in the following four Project

Management Documents, during the time frame specified below.

A Project Charter using the provided template during 2/19-3/19.

A Stakeholder Register using the provided template during 2/19-3/19.

WBS during 2/19-3/19.

Risk Register using the provided template during 3/26-4/23.

Several document templates for project management will be posted on Moodle and be discussed in class when we discuss related chapters. Your team will fill in the details in templates for the problem case.

The case only provides limited information. Try to image as much details as you can, as long as the details are consistent with the provided information. There is no single, correct answer to this assignment. You need to think hard and develop project plan with your best efforts. When you plan the project, try to think about details as much as possible, with all possibilities considered. Real life projects are complicated! If you dont seriously consider various possibilities, unlikely the project can succeed.

Execute the Project Using HBR Project Management Simulation Game

Then, you will execute the project (kind of) using the Project Management Simulation Game provided by Harvard Business Review, purchased by the Martin Tuchman School of Management just for you (Yeah!!). You will be the project manager who will monitor and control project execution during the period of 3/5-4/23.

After you log in the web site (available on 3/5), please review the video of How to Play. Also, check out all the items in the menu on the left panel: Simulation Summary, Managing Your Project, Team Process, Tasks, Scoring and Project Objectives to get yourself familiar about the goal and mechanism of the game. Then on the right panel, click the green button Play Now to start the game.

During the game, every time after you click Submit Decision, you should use the left panel to analyze the outcomes of your decisions. Also, you can leverage the items in the menu on the left panel for statistics and report of the project so far.

After you finish a game, you will be presented with a final rating of your project management on this game, with all statistics available. You may click the button Play Same Scenario Again to try different strategies on the same game, and analyze the impact of different strategies to outcomes. Or, you may click the button Start New Scenario for a different game.

There are three scenarios of the Project Management Simulation Game that you need to play, Scenario A, C, and F, each with an increasing level of challenges. You are required to play at least three game in each of the three scenarios. In fact, you are encouraged to play many runs of each scenarios, trying different strategies, observing their different effects, and analyzing which strategies are better, and documenting your analysis in Document E. The scenario setting is shown in the right panel of the beginning screen above the button Play Now.

The Project Management Simulation Game can be played either individually, or as a team. You can also play it as many times as you want, learning from the previous games to improve your score!

E. Thoughts on How to Successfully Manage a Project. After you and your team have played these games, you will need to write a report entitled Thoughts on How to Successfully Manage a Project that include the following sections:

1) A table that shows the best score that is achieved by any member of your team on each of the three scenarios, with the screenshot of the Final ratings.

2) Analysis about how to achieve a high score based on the games that you have played in these three scenarios. Instead of giving general guidelines of successful project management, you need to give detailed evidence to support your opinion. For example, you may recommend to outsource major tasks under a particular situation (describe the situation) instead outsourcing support tasks, because the former achieved better performance as shown in the final ratings of two runs of the game, where you made different choices for outsourcing.

Your analysis should cover all three scenarios. That is, you should have at least one suggestion based on your runs of Scenario A, at least one suggestion based on your runs of Scenario C, and at least one suggestion based on your runs of Scenario F.

The grading will be based on the depth of the analysis and details on the evidence.

A team with 3-person members should list at least 8 detailed evidence-based suggestions, and a team with 2-person members should provide at least 5 suggestions.

In particular, you should think and demonstrate an understanding of the following items in your document E:

- How three classic project management levers - scope, resource and schedule - interact and can be used to improve project outcomes.

- The effect of project managers decisions on team morale and work quality. E.g. how much time to spend on coaching or meetings, how much to rely on overtime or outsourcing, what skill level to set for a project team, when to add or reduce the number of project team members, as well as the effect of project deadlines on team morale and work quality

- The effect of poor-quality work on project outcomes

- How unanticipated events influence project outcomes

- What are the strategies to moderate project uncertainty (risks)?

- The importance of committing to realistic project objectives, and how to make tradeoffs between desired project outcomes in situations in which not all project objectives can be met.

Your project report should include document A, B, C, D, and E. The team should also submit item F, G, and H

F. PPT slides that include the highlights of the project report documents for in-class presentation.

The presentation is in class April 23th. We will determine the team order in the class on April 16th. Each team has up to 18 minutes, consisting of a presentation (including the setup time) up to 12 minutes, followed by 6-minute Q&A. The questions will be given by classmates and the instructor.

The slides should discuss the key elements from Document A to Document E in order. However, you should not simply copy and paste your project report documents into PPT slides, but should (i) make the PPT slides readable and visually appealing (e.g. use visuals and short-captive sentences, and use font size no smaller than 20pts, and better to at 22pts or above), (2) if you cannot discuss all the elements in the report documents to fit in a 12-minute presentation, then please extract the key point of each document (A-E), which best reflect the most important and thoughtful decisions that your team has made. For instance, you may select two most important, or interesting, or tricky stakeholders

to discuss in the presentation to illustrate how well thought your team is about the project, while having several stakeholders analyzed in the report document B. The analysis shall be in-depth and comprehensive. The presentation shall be clear, so that the audience can understand and appreciate your project. Please practice the timing, the presentation will be cut at the 12th minutes even if it is not finished, in order to fair to all the teams. In that case, if you have some items. e.g. item E, not discussed yet, you will not be able to obtain points on item E.

G. Meeting agenda and meeting records of all the meetings that your team have hold, using the meeting templates that your team made in Team contract.

H. Team peer evaluation for each team member. Each team shall provide an integrated team evaluation score out of 10 points in total for each individual team member. Also please attach peer evaluation form (made in Team Contract) which is filled by each member for evaluating every other member with itemized score. This will be used to compute individual score from the team score.

Grading Criteria

Project report: The depth and originality of the analysis of document A to E: o document A

o document B o document C o document D o document E

60pts 10pts 10pts 10pts 10pts 20pts

including 7pts for the number of games played and scores of the games (you should include this information in your report), and 13pts for the depth and originality of analysis. Its not necessarily the more games you played the higher points that you can earn. The key is to learn from the games (so you cant play too few games either).

Project presentation (with breakdown of points below): 30pts o The presentation of the slides: 7pts o The manner of in-class presentation: 6pts o Question answering: 7pts o Student peer evaluation: 10pts

Team coordination (based on meeting records, coherence/integrity of slides, report and the presentation) 10pts

Total team score 100pts Individual score adjustment are based on peer evaluation.

The project is team-based. All submissions are based on team. Each team only makes one submission for grading.

Due Date/Time March 19, 1PM, Project Check Point: Each team should submit documents A, B and C.

These documents will not be graded, but submission is required to ensure every team progress properly. Teams that do not make the submission on time is subject to at 20pt deduction on the total score.

April 23, 1PM: All the documents (A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H) are due

Project Charter (PMBoK: P72P124) Project Name: Prepared By: Date Prepared: 1. Project description (provide a high-level description of the project) Project purpose or justification (How does the project benefit business? What business needs are being supported by the project? Why it's worth doing? You need to make a business case for the project based on the organizational context and project description) 2. Measurable project objectives (Describe the deliverables, including products, services and results, that the project is to achieve. Write SMART goals.) 3. 4. Detailed constraints (time, cost, scope) and scope/out-of-scope boundaries(A constraint is a limiting factor that affects the execution of a project, such as time, cost, scope, dependencies on other factors. Boundaries identify what is included/excluded from the project, which helps to managc stakeholders cxpcctation S. High-level Milestones (Important tasks and due dates) High-level Risks (Describe the high-level risks to the project. Include both the risks of doing the project and the risks of not doing the project) 6. Assigned Project Manager, responsibility, and authority level (making it official who will be running the project and empowering them) 7. 8. The name of the sponsor and signature (This is the person who authorizes the project) Project Charter (PMBoK: P72P124) Project Name: Prepared By: Date Prepared: 1. Project description (provide a high-level description of the project) Project purpose or justification (How does the project benefit business? What business needs are being supported by the project? Why it's worth doing? You need to make a business case for the project based on the organizational context and project description) 2. Measurable project objectives (Describe the deliverables, including products, services and results, that the project is to achieve. Write SMART goals.) 3. 4. Detailed constraints (time, cost, scope) and scope/out-of-scope boundaries(A constraint is a limiting factor that affects the execution of a project, such as time, cost, scope, dependencies on other factors. Boundaries identify what is included/excluded from the project, which helps to managc stakeholders cxpcctation S. High-level Milestones (Important tasks and due dates) High-level Risks (Describe the high-level risks to the project. Include both the risks of doing the project and the risks of not doing the project) 6. Assigned Project Manager, responsibility, and authority level (making it official who will be running the project and empowering them) 7. 8. The name of the sponsor and signature (This is the person who authorizes the project)