Question: Very good work on the assignment. You seem to have good grasp on the majority of factors in the project charter. Review the three criteria
Very good work on the assignment. You seem to have good grasp on the majority of factors in the project charter.
Review the three criteria of the project charter below. I provide an all-inclusive list of factors to make the charter complete. The score reflects the overall work and the areas that can benefit from additional improvement (if any). Make sure to add the missing components (and expand upon them further) in your final deliverable in Module 9.
Project Objectives
- Identify specific objectives:
- Create modular software package to handle wellness vendor data to ensure appropriate preventative care is being tracked for members
- Asses the status of the project planning process so that it can be completed
- Determine current work progress and budget status so that the project can be tracked
- Determine baseline variance of project
- Establish selection criteria to asses if project should proceed
- Manage conflict at team level to create a productive work environment
- Set target goals to:
- Complete the last module
- Prevent cost and schedule overruns
- Streamline project performance by X%
- State what will be accomplished in the remaining module (e.g. wellness DB tables, promote tables and wellness vendor reporting)
- Set a launch date goal
- Set a goal to improve communication practice
- Set a goal to centralize the project management processes and practices under a project management office (PMO)
- Set a goal to establish improve team morale
Project Strategy
- 1) The existing problem should identify a host of factors such as:
- Lack of a defined project scope
- Unclear responsibilities
- Project is behind schedule
- Project is over budget
- The WBS lacks task dependencies and accurate resource allocations
- Lack of a comprehensive communication plan
- There is conflict throughout the project team
- Lack of change management process
- Lack of communication and direction to team members
- Lack of team vision and team rewards system
- 2) The strength and weaknesses of the internal environment:
- Strengths:
- Project team has worked together on similar projects
- Extensive knowledge of systems and applications
- Usage of project management software
- Progress reports were created every two weeks
- Weaknesses:
- No current project manager
- Programmers are new to MS Visual Studio and SQL
- Lack of detailed as well as overlapping responsibility
- Lack of effective communication
- Lack of detailed accountability
- Reliance on vendor support for new development environment
- Lack of coordination across departments (e.g. legal department doesn't have policy document; the UAT has not be completed)
- Existing matrix environment has been inefficient
- Strengths:
- 3) The opportunities and threats of the external environment:
- Opportunities:
- The company is a leading health service provider and has good reputation in the market
- Time to market is critical - so launching the software before competitors is essential
- Gaining dominant market share
- Threats:
- Competitors working on similar software that will lead to loss of market share
- Customer dissatisfaction
- Opportunities:
- 4) The best solution to the problem
- Develop comprehensive WBS and estimate remaining work
- Establish project tracking mechanism to determine progress
- Develop a solid communications plan
- Develop and deploy a training plan to update the programming skills of the resources
- Set limits on user change requests
- Assign specific task responsibilities and resources
- Adjust project scope statement and objective to maintain launch date
- Establish a testing strategy and adhere to an effective quality assurance program since quality is key to market dominance
- 5) The project payback period
- Apply your current understanding of project management selection criteria (based on the material covered to date) to determine whether you recommend to continue with the project or not. While there isn't enough data related to cash flows to determine the payback period, you know the infrastructure (see the Full Description document).
- Estimate the costs of the servers and development tools.
- Determine how much was spent to date on the project in terms of resources.
- Assume how much you expect to spend to complete the final module (based on the activity estimation techniques).
- Research potential cloud-based solution or an alternative product to see their total cost of ownership
- Compare the two solutions and recommend either continuing the project based on these comparison, or abandoning it
- 6) The selection model
- The selection can be based on an argument either for specific financial or nonfinancial criteria:
- If financial, provide argument for Total Cost of Ownership of in-house vs. cloud based solution
- If nonfinancial, argue for capturing and retaining market share and maintaining quality image
- The selection can be based on an argument either for specific financial or nonfinancial criteria:
Project Communications Planning
- 1) Who needs project information to make decisions and/or contribute to project progress (stakeholder analysis):
- Develop a stakeholder register
- Develop a RACI chart and identify who is responsible, accountable, consulted, informed for the collected information;
- Project Sponsor
- Senior Management
- Project Team Members
- Customers
- 2) When the information will be provided:
- Identify whether the communication will be provided weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc.
- 3) The information that is pertinent to stakeholders who contribute to the project's progress (scope changes, action items, deliverables issues):
- Identify the source of information, such as:
- Progress report related to:
- Scope changes
- Schedule changes
- Budget changes
- Milestone changes
- Change requests
- Announcements
- Issue notifications
- Progress report related to:
- Identify the source of information, such as:
- 4) Where the information resides:
- Identify data storage location (e.g. project management system, intranet website, hardcopies in central storage, etc.)
- 5) How the information will be collected:
- Identify the communication channel, via:
- Meetings
- Emails
- Electronic and hardcopy documents
- Identify the communication channel, via:
Project Objectives
The main goal of this project is to create and implement a modular reporting solution that can ingest external wellness data into the CDW and generate dynamic, user-friendly reports for employer groups. According to Maureen Thom, Project Objective is a complete success of identifying and defining the way the project is being perform from using clear, measurable outcomes, and planning the new objective into the remaining project can help all stakeholders to fully understand the process of which deliverables and tasks to use in the new created project objective(Thom, 2025). These reports should support formats like Microsoft Project for mpp file format to create the WBS for the project reporting system, or using PDF, and CSV for using Excel spreadsheets, with clear headers and customizable options. Import scripts must reliably extract data from vendors such as Chip Rewards and Spire weekly, and from MDLive for using video or phone conference meetings monthly. The system must also enable smooth integration with SQL Server, SSRS, and Teradata.
Despite significant setbacks, the organization remains committed to this initiative. A revised timeline of up to three months beyond the original launch will be allowed, along with a budget extension not to exceed 50% over initial estimates. Final deliverables must meet pre-established quality benchmarks, regulatory standards, and stakeholder usability requirements. Time-to-market and product quality remain the most important success indicators.
From the above objective, the project also should include new vendor wellness member tracking and management, because the project management has left the project assignment, and no leadership is now present. A new way of providing the availability of formatting date and time for the wellness vendor to track the progress of when the project will be completed on time. Using data analytics and reporting capabilities to report on the process of the project creation and the new software being created. Also, inputting a data file daily for reporting the analytics. Evaluating and providing a new weekly vendor for output analytics for identifying correct and completed project data. This can be done using a new reporting tool called I/S, which can help to summarize and analyze the financial cost of a business project over a specific time.
Project Strategy
To bring the project back on track, Medical Informatics will implement a formal recovery strategy grounded in structured execution and reestablished leadership. A new project manager must be appointed immediately to replace the former leader, who departed due to personal reasons. This role will be responsible for realigning teams, streamlining communication, overseeing testing protocols, and enforcing scope discipline. According to an article from the Cascade website, using Project Strategy involves using a template for identifying a new plan and ways to improve project tasks. This template is used by team members and leadership to include a brief description of the new objectives of the project being developed(cascade, 2025).
Existing Problem
The absence of a central leader fractured project coordination, leaving development teams without clear oversight and business stakeholders without timely updates. Developers, still acclimating to Microsoft Visual Studio and SQL Server, produced unstable code that slowed system performance and triggered bugs. No formal change control or testing plans were in place, and user-requested scope changes compounded delays. The vendor responsible for the final module refused delivery without pre-payment, while legal and testing teams faced availability issues due to the holiday season. The result: misalignment, incomplete deliverables, and growing budget concerns.
Internal Environment: Strengths and Weaknesses
Medical Informatics has strong internal talent and deep institutional knowledge. Its infrastructure, SQL Server, Teradata, SSRS, is already configured and capable of supporting the solution. However, these strengths are undermined by informal resource management, overlapping roles, and a lack of established documentation practices. The development team lacks proficiency in the new toolset, and task ownership remains unclear across departments. Rebuilding leadership and introducing formal planning artifacts are key to converting internal capacity into execution efficiency.
Strengths
- Strong internal talent
- Deep institutional knowledge
- Established infrastructure (SQL Server, Teradata, SSRS)
- Team members have long tenure with Medical Informatics
- Well-experienced in past collaborative projects
- Clear awareness of roles and responsibilities
- Willingness to work extended hours to complete the project
Weaknesses
- Informal resource management
- Overlapping roles
- Lack of established documentation practices
- Limited proficiency with the new toolset
- Unclear task ownership across departments
- Developers are inexperienced with the new software, leading to coding errors
- Lack of proper communication
- Absence of a project manager
External Environment: Opportunities and Threats
The rising demand for wellness analytics presents a compelling business opportunity. Employer clients are actively seeking improved visibility into member engagement, and early delivery of the solution could establish Medical Informatics as a market leader. However, the external landscape poses several threats. Competitors are preparing similar launches, intensifying market pressure. In addition, vendor disputes, regulatory uncertainty, and seasonal staffing limitations present significant risks. Without swift course correction, the company may miss its strategic window and damage stakeholder confidence. Rising project costs could delay delivery timelines, potentially affecting long-term revenue and market positioning. A further concern is the potential loss of vendor support due to delayed payments from Medical Informatics.
Best Solution (Feasibility and Alternatives)
The best course of action is to proceed with the current platform under a reinforced management model designed to recover stability, clarify accountability, and optimize delivery outcomes. Restarting from scratch or transitioning to a third-party solution would trigger major disruptions: costly data migrations, staff re-training, vendor onboarding delays, and the forfeiture of customization flexibility that Medical Informatics currently maintains. These alternatives, while potentially faster in some contexts, would compromise control over proprietary reporting logic, introduce new integration risks, and significantly slow the company's ability to meet client expectations.
The feasibility of continuing is supported by multiple factors. A large portion of infrastructure is already built and aligned with the solution's requirementsnamely SQL Server, Teradata, and SSRS. Core modules are partially developed, and existing staff possess deep familiarity with the legacy data architecture and business logic. From an economic standpoint, the estimated remaining investment of $75,000 to $100,000 keeps the project well within the financial boundaries established by leadership, adhering to the approved increase of up to 50% over the initial budget. This disciplined cost trajectory reflects both resourceful planning and the tangible momentum already achieved. On a strategic level, successful delivery will solidify Medical Informatics' position as a wellness analytics innovator, creating new value propositions for employer groups while reinforcing trust in the company's internal capabilities. More importantly, the system's modular structure is designed to support future scalability, allowing for seamless integration of additional data vendors, reporting formats, or analytics layers without reengineering the core platform. A disciplined recovery will require the immediate appointment of a capable project manager who can coordinate deliverables, mediate cross-functional friction, and establish authority across departments. Structured milestones must be coupled with centralized QA oversight to ensure that each module is validated, functional, and integrated appropriately. Scope must be tightly monitored through a formal change control process, and vendor engagement must be governed by transparent timelines and contract compliance. Most importantly, communication must be reestablished across executive stakeholders, legal teams, developers, and business users to ensure continued alignment and rapid issue resolution.
In summary, continuing under a revised internal model is not simply the best optionit is the only realistic path that balances cost, speed, strategic alignment, and long-term sustainability. Abandoning the effort at this stage would sacrifice momentum, sunk investments, and the company's leadership positioning in a fast-evolving healthcare analytics market.
Project Payback Period
Although full financial data is unavailable to calculate a precise payback period, Medical Informatics can rely on historical performance and client behavior to estimate return on investment. Prior product releases with similar reporting functions were adopted quickly by employer clients seeking wellness insights. With $230,892 of the initial $441,650 already spent, and final module delivery projected to cost an additional $75,000 to $100,000, total spending is expected to remain within the company's approved budget increase limit of 50% over initial estimates. According to Julia Kagan stated, project payback period is when a project becomes more disable with a shorter approach of returning to its new formatted objectives with its team and corporation department on how they spent their money and realizing a positive return of intention from getting it back on track with a shorter period of creating a simple launch date without having it to be providing a long waited time to release the new project and software to the public (Kagan, et, al, 2025). This will help the team and the management to determine how to make the project work without any new issues or concerns, and how to work with developers on using the new software to be used for creating the code of the project.
Assuming the product is completed within the revised three-month timeline and launched successfully, employer usage of the wellness reporting features could begin immediately, driving retention, upsell opportunities, and expanded service utilization. As such, the financial recovery period is estimated to fall within three months from which was decrease from six months launching date after launch, meaning Medical Informatics can expect a positive return well within the first operational year.
Selection Model
Medical Informatics should not rely solely on a financial or non-financial selection model. Instead, adopting a multi-criteria approachspecifically, a weighted scoring modelwill enable more balanced and informed decision-making. This model assigns weightings to critical evaluation criteria, allowing project proposals to be assessed methodically and equitably.
To support scope definition, resource prioritization, and change management, the scoring framework will prioritize three key dimensions:
- Time to Market (40%)
- Product Quality (30%)
- Cost Control (30%)
Each project proposal or change request will be scored against these weighted metrics to determine alignment with strategic objectives. This helps leadership evaluate trade-offs more transparently and prioritize initiatives that deliver the greatest overall impact.
All proposed changes, vendor negotiations, and feature enhancements will be evaluated using these weighted criteria. High-impact requests will be subject to executive review to ensure strategic alignment, minimize scope creep, and maintain delivery discipline.
By institutionalizing this model:
- Cross-functional teams gain a unified decision-making framework.
- Stakeholders can better visualize how decisions align with long-term goals.
- The risk of misalignment, delays, or cost overruns is reduced.
In a dynamic healthcare IT environmentwhere regulatory constraints and market competition evolve rapidlythis approach fosters agility without compromising strategic focus. Ultimately, the weighted scoring model promotes disciplined execution, drives value-based prioritization, and reinforces stakeholder confidence in project governance.
Project Communications Planning and Strategic Recommendation
Stakeholder Analysis
Effective communication is crucial for rebuilding stakeholder confidence and ensuring informed participation throughout the project lifecycle. Executive stakeholders need timely updates on budget performance, development risks, and milestone achievements. Development teams require ongoing technical guidance and quick feedback on issues and code reviews. Business users play a vital role in validating functionality and must receive clear updates on user testing and feature development. Legal and compliance teams need advanced notice of policy deadlines to prevent documentation delays. Vendor partners must be kept informed about integration specifications and contractual delivery expectations. Customizing communication for each group with targeted methods and schedules will promote alignment and reduce the risk of future conflicts.
Information Delivery Schedule
Communication frequency and methods will be standardized across all groups. Executives will receive bi-weekly summaries that include risks, budget variances, and milestone statuses via email and status presentations. Developers will provide daily updates focused on task execution, technical challenges, and coding progress. These updates will be shared through scheduled stand-up meetings and collaboration tools. Business users will participate in scheduled reviews and demonstrations to validate outcomes and gather feedback. Communication with legal and compliance teams will be scheduled in advance to align policy documentation milestones with development timelines. Centralized documentation will be stored in a dedicated project repository, ensuring that all reports, testing results, meeting notes, and development artifacts are securely stored and easily accessible.
Pertinent Information for Stakeholders
Relevant information categories include scope changes, testing schedules, action items, deliverable updates, financial forecasts, and issue logs. Executives will receive high-level summaries and milestone tracking reports. Developers will be updated on bug fixes, task completion status, and design requirements. Business users will review usability assessments, test results, and functional performance reviews. Legal stakeholders will receive timely updates on policy documentation progress, and vendors will be informed of pending integration tasks and payment timelines. According to Erik Larson et al., estimating time and cost can help the team create a reasonable project. Also, it can help fix any issues or solutions that the team and the management are facing before new solutions are presented, from creating methods on how to estimate time and cost, and who is responsible for using these methods it can help them identify new ways of creating a better software for the public to use. (Larson, et al, 2024). By using new methods, the project will become a complete success without any worries about recreating new strategies and can make this project to come in a complete success. For example, how to create methods will provide a report and instructions on how the new objectives and strategies will work for the company and how the public will use our software to use on their system. Using a top-down, bottom-up, analogous, and parametric estimating system can help the team to know how to spend money and how to reduce time when the project is ready to be launched.
Information Resides
All project-related information will reside in a centralized, secure, and searchable repository with defined access roles. This includes meeting minutes, progress reports, risk and issue logs, scope change documentation, technical designs, testing results, and budget tracking dashboards. Information will be organized by category and updated in real time. Access control will ensure confidentiality and operational integrity. The repository will serve as the authoritative source for project data, improving traceability and supporting informed decision-making.
Information Collection Methods
Information will be gathered through organized meetings, task updates, feedback sessions, and documentation workflows. Meetings will follow set agendas and conclude with documented action items. Developers and testers will submit reports to the project repository, and business users will provide feedback during usability reviews. Financial and scheduling data will be collected from internal systems and updated regularly in the budget dashboard. All scope changes, risks, and issues will be recorded in tracking logs and discussed during team meetings. This structured collection process will promote continuous improvement and collaboration across teams.
Strategic Recommendation Based on Selection Criteria
While complete financial cash flow data is unavailable to calculate the exact payback period, we can apply cost estimation techniques and comparative market research to assess project viability. Medical Informatics has already invested in a robust infrastructureMS SQL Server 2008 R2, Teradata 14, SSRS reporting tools, and Microsoft development environmentswhich represent substantial sunk costs. These legacy technologies carry ongoing maintenance burdens but are deeply embedded within internal systems.
According to the latest progress report, $230,892 has already been spent out of a budgeted $441,650, and current projections place the total cost at $529,980only slightly above the 20% overrun mark, and still well under the company's stated tolerance of a 50% increase. Using parametric models and historical analogs, final module completioncovering coding, vendor payment, testing, and supportmay require an additional $75,000 to $100,000.
Alternatives such as migrating to a cloud-based analytics solution or third-party platforms may promise faster deployment and reduced internal labor. However, those options could introduce new risks: recurring fees, limited customization, data migration complexity, and potential vendor lock-in. Given the deep domain expertise of the internal team and the progress already achieved, abandoning the current project would forfeit investments and slow down-market entry.
Therefore, the best course is to continue with a controlled scope, clear leadership reestablished, and immediate investments in testing and communication. If these adjustments are executed with discipline, the company can regain momentum and successfully launch within acceptable time and budget parameters, supporting its strategic position in the wellness analytics market. Also, with improved leadership, reinforced testing, and structured communication, Medical Informatics can complete the development within revised time and budget constraints. The marginal cost of completion is lower than the financial and strategic cost of cancellation or migration to external platforms. By reestablishing team coordination, restoring formal planning practices, and closing communication gaps across departments, the company can confidently pursue final module delivery and achieve a successful launch. This path preserves prior investments, honors stakeholder objectives, and positions Medical Informatics to deliver a timely, high-quality solution in a competitive healthcare analytics environment.
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