READ THE CASE STUDY AND ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS Leading tech company improves productivity and introduces scalability to match its growing project portfolio management needs Leading chip developer ARM had an aging on-premises Microsoft Project Server solution that reduced productivity and couldnt scale to meet the companys rapid growth. Adopting Microsoft Project Online, the company increased its project portfolio insights and met the needs of a workforce that recently doubled in size. ARM can now deliver more precise data to governmental bodies, resulting in larger research and development tax credits. And with Power BI, it can deliver more actionable insights to company leadership in real time. In 2010, ARM implemented a heavily customized instance of Microsoft Project Server. At the time, the solution fit the companys needs perfectly. But even before the recent surge in growth, the high level of customization struggled to keep up with changing business needs. With more and more data to manage, the server slowed, negatively affecting productivity. Two years ago, ARM employed half the professionals it does today. After being procured by SoftBank, ARM reinvested its profits into its business and established a foothold in numerous new markets, including the automotive industry, the cloud, networking devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT). This rapid expansion brought with it new ways of working, but as ARM forged ahead, some of its infrastructure lagged behind. Upgrading the system could have helped alleviate the strain, but the complexity of these upgrades reduced their impact enough that employees began to look for different ways of working, including solutions not monitored or controlled directly by ARM. Outlining the companys needs, Simon Scott-Priestley, Senior Director of the Project Management Office at ARM, decided that Microsoft Project Online was the best solution for the companys growing needs. With Project Online, ARM could address each of the performance, scalability, resilience, supportability, adaptability, and usability limitations that had been impediments in the past. After migrating to Project Online, ARMs performance woes were quickly alleviated. Previously, larger project plans that were thousands of lines long effectively locked hardware as they were uploaded to the companys customized servers. This process took hours to complete and drastically reduced productivity among project managers and any employees who attempted to extract information from related servers at the same time. With Project Online, ARM regained all this lost productivity. ARM completes over 700 complex projects every year, some of which runs over multiple years. Nearly 450 of these are in some stage of simultaneous development, and its highly important for the company to be able to report on the status of these projectsboth internally to its numerous lines of business and externally to governmental entitiesat any given time. We can now better determine the cost of researching and developing our products, and we can better report these costs, says Scott-Priestley. This improved reporting doesnt simply function to refine the companys ongoing project portfolio management practicesit also directly affects the companys finances. Governments around the world, including those in the United Kingdom and the United States, allow companies that are undertaking substantial research and development work to claim tax credits for the hours spent focusing on these areas. Because employee time sheets are now incorporated into Project Online, ARM has highly detailed, real-time data concerning project progress, hours worked, and completion percentages to share with governmental entities, which validates the companys assessments and helps assure accurate claims during tax season

Question 3 (25 Marks)

ARM completes over seven hundred (700) complex projects every year, some of which runs over multiple years. This means that there would invariably be changes that would necessitate effective management and tracking. Analyse how the capability of baselines in Microsoft Project 2016 can be of assistance in this regard and detail the steps to set baselines.