PLEASE MAKE ONLY THE BUDGET: Case Study: Newnham Marketing, Inc.

A marketing company's customer portfolios would include a history of previous advertising buys and planned future buys across various media. In addition, ad impressions data, costing, impact on sales, and other supporting data gauge marketing campaign effectiveness.

This company has 61 employees. The company is well established with many long-time customers who like the personal service they provide. Their customer base has grown steadily. The business has been run using Windows 7 desktops connected in a workgroup (Microsoft's peer-to-peer local area network) using MS*-Office products (Word, Excel, and Access DB) for record-keeping.

With growth over the years, those tools are no longer adequate to run the business. The Windows 7 OS was past its end-of-life support as of January 14, 2020, and now presents an increased security risk. The Microsoft peer-to-peer workgroup had acceptable performance when the company had only 12 employees in the past. Searches for customer records and files were then completed in seconds. With many more desktops now, searches can take minutes. The existing networking infrastructure was upgraded within the last year, but it did not sufficiently improve performance, effectiveness, or efficiency. Besides, data management and backup across all employee PCs have now become a time-consuming chore.

The ADempiere open source business application package will be used for Customer Management, Orders & Quotes, Approvals, and Purchasing Management to address these issues and support the company's future growth. In addition, this client-server software package includes APIs to support a website where customers can inquire into their own portfolios over the Internet. A contract, under its own budget, has been signed with IBM, which will make the website and provide customer-facing web hosting services (Platform-as-a-Service), cloud storage (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) as needed, and act as ISP (Internet Service Provider). Internet bandwidth is 1G bps down/upload).

Management has issued a request for proposal (RFP) to transform their internal IT infrastructure from the old peer-to-peer PCs to a local server that will host the business application, provide file serving for employee office files, and interface to IBM's services. The old PCs will be replaced with new PCs using a current operating system. (In preparation, their office environment has been renovated with a new server room along with equipment, cabling, and wiring to support the expanded networking and power needs.)

There is a hardware budget of $140,000 to purchase a local server and, for all employees, new Windows PCs. The cost of operating systems and MS Office for employees will be included within the hardware budget. In addition, there may be ongoing costs for Office subscriptions; those should be noted in the proposal or budget details, but your project is not responsible for future expenses.

The new local tower-type server (running either Windows Server or Linux Red Hat Enterprise Server) will

have a screen and keyboard/mouse for administration

be resistant to internal storage failures (with a RAID5 controller)

be resistant to intermittent power failures (UPS with a minimum one-hour capacity)

run the business application package o IBM's web hosting service will use the package's APIs for access to a customer's portfolio

be a central repository for all employees' Office files o a single shared folder system will contain all files previously shared in the old peer-to-peer workgroup

o maintains previous versions of Office files using OneDrive for Business (SharePoint) or as a by-product of a backup strategy.

o each employee will have a server account to store their own files not shared with others

have a backup strategy for all company data and employee files, which will o run automatically and satisfy the 3-2-1 backup checklist

local files on the server,

traditional full/differential/incremental backup to LTO tape, e.g. with Duplicity

cloud backup, e.g. with Restic, which uses deduplication,

o any data stored offsite must be encrypted and, optionally, compressed.

For each employee's old Windows-7 PC,

migrate all user data (e.g. MS Office files) to the local server o shared files are moved to the server's shared folder but must be reconciled to eliminate duplicates and old versions resulting from other users having copies. The peer-to-peer network became very slow, which encouraged users to keep their own copies to avoid time-consuming searches.

o files not shared with others are moved to the employee's account on the server

o each PC has an average of 30GB of user files with ~20% being duplicated or old file versions.

HDDs to be securely wiped of data (this is why) and disposed of responsibly some time after data migration and server backup.

Each employee's replacement PC will have

new PC hardware, keyboard, mouse, and a large screen to support the multiple applications employees use

OS - Windows 10 Pro version. Business PCs usually include a permanent license for it. (Windows Enterprise is not necessarily a requirement.)

the minimum MS Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook), either a one-time purchase of desktop versions or via Office 365 with desktop installations

client-side software for the business software package

a network drive mapped to the user's personal folder on the server

a network drive mapped to the company's shared folder on the server

There is a service budget of up to $40,000 for the server's configuration and deployment of the new PCs. Your time and that of others on the project are billed by the hour and applied against the service budget. Your consulting company's billing rate is $110 per person per hour for tasks that involve systems configuration, data migration, set up of automatic backups with historical file versions, and PowerShell scripting to aid in those tasks. You can hire Seneca co-op students at $23/hour for simple manual labour tasks requiring little or no IT skills, e.g. swap old for new PCs or simply run a PowerShell script.

Finally, note that ICT deployments affecting business operations always occur outside normal business hours, i.e., evenings and weekends. For example, the new server can be Final Assessment Computer Principles for Programmers (CPR 101)

installed during the day because it does not affect the company until it goes live. The replacement of employee PCs, on the other hand, must occur during evenings and weekends when employees are not at their desks.

3Assessment Structure: Assessment Tasks and Specifications (Artifacts Creation)

The case study for this assessment (Section: 2. Case Study: Newnham Marketing, Inc.) and its tasks represent many ICT projects. In addition, the project management artifacts - Proposal, Budget, and WBS - are standard practices. Therefore, you might very well have to write, review, and/or evaluate them in your future IT career. (what COM101 and EAC397 are good for)

Your team is bidding on - not doing - a potential client's internal IT infrastructure upgrade project as described in the case study section. Your boss (instructor) has assigned you the task of responding to the potential client's Request For Proposal (RFP).

Make a Project Proposal, WBS-Work Breakdown Structure, 10, and Two (2) Training Modules. As they are called in project management, these artifacts are your response to the client's RFP and will be submitted to the client for their evaluation. The client will decide if you will be selected to do their project based on how well your artifacts convince them that you understand the client's needs, know how to provide a solution for their needs, and have the project management skills to deliver it successfully.

Make an MS Word document to complete the assessment's tasks. Then, organize and display the content on separate pages for each task for easy navigation. The goal is to make a clear and easy-to-understand document containing all the artifacts.

Proposal

Your proposal to the case study company (your client) sets expectations for the project. The proposal addresses the client's problems. The business benefits the client is seeking, the work you will perform for the client that will enable those benefits, the estimated costs, and a demonstration that you understand the details of the work to be done along with the project management skills to do it. The proposal is a summary of the project with your estimate of the work to be done, costs, and phases or sub-projects.

The proposal's Background section assures the client that you understand their business problem. You do that by reflecting it back to them.

history and a problem statement. What circumstances caused the business to request this proposal from you? summarize the client's problems found in the case study.

The Objectives section lists the client's anticipated business benefits and project success criteria. After the Scope of your work is done, what benefits will accrue to the company? What will the client gain by the end of the project? How will their business operations be better?

The Statement of Scope (SOS) is a summary of the products and/or services you will deliver to satisfy the business objectives. It includes a high-level list of the features and functions the client's business will gain as a result. The scope is what you will do: what is included and how your work will be implemented and deployed. The SOS defines and controls what work is and is not included in this proposal for the project. Items essential to the project's success but not within the SOS are stated as necessary conditions, e.g. pre-existing infrastructure such as LAN/WAN or client-supplied/contracted IT services such as IBM's web hosting and cloud storage services.

Avoid TLAs in any communications with the client.

WBS

Make a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) of the client's project. Make a list or chart showing the project's detailed tasks in sequence, the estimated hours to complete, if the task is dependent upon another task being finished before this task can be started, and the skill level needed to complete each task.

The WBS is a centrally important artifact. It supports the contents of the Proposal and the Budget. The WBS provides:

* the detail to support the Statement of Scope in the Proposal. * the critical path to calculate calendar start/end dates of the Proposal's Project Stages and Milestones. * hours and skill levels used by the budget to calculate Services costs.

e.g. WBS = tasks and sub-tasks to do. "Install server" can be a big or little task. The WBS 'breaks down' the big chunks of work into small packages of work which can be assigned to a person. In this case study, there are many separate things to be done to make the server ready for use: initialize OS, install business app package, make and test API with IBM, make a 3-2-1 backup plan, configure file serving folders. ...and so on for all the work steps -- describe what needs to be done in enough detail for an experienced person who has the skill to do it. Then, estimate the hours needed for each what. Next, determine the required sequence, decide which tasks are independent and can be done in parallel, which tasks must be serially (dependent on the completion of other tasks); finally, which tasks are repeated. (Like programming, there are three kinds of logic: sequential,

decision/conditional, iterative/looping.) The longest series of serial tasks is your critical path which determines the start and end dates of each phase or stage of the project (assume an 8-hour workday).

Although you may have to hire people to complete the project, that hiring process is NOT part of the client's project. It is part of your consultancy's operations overhead. You can charge project management hours to the client's Services budget.

BUDGET:

Make a detailed cost estimate of the project to support the Project Proposal's summary of costs and budgets. Use the WBS hours and skill levels to support the labour and services costs shown in the budget.

For the hardware, do some research and use actual costs. Dell.ca offers information on Advanced Tower Servers. The server must include a RAID 5 storage controller (e.g. four identical drives: 3 drives for approx. 2TB of data storage + 1 drive for the RAID 5 parity). RAID-5 runs by itself if configured as a server "HWR" option; it needs no configuration. Note that RAID is for data integrity & reliability; it is not backup; it is still your #1 copy. An LTO tape drive would be a sensible thing to include for the #2 copy. IBM cloud would work for #3 copy. The server OS can be your choice of Microsoft or Red Hat Enterprise.

Obtain new desktops for users with large screens, keyboards, and mice.

Include configuration details of the server and PCs in the budget. ("Server $10,000" will raise a lot of questions.)

N.B. Business proposals & budgets almost always omit/ignore sales taxes. Value-added taxes like GST/HST make sales taxes paid on purchases an input tax credit to GST/HST collected on sales. Thus, it becomes an accounting exercise affecting only cash flow (not your problem).