WBS for a project.

List of resources and allocate resources based on the tasks you identified

Resource allocation plan

ADDITIONAL CASES INTRODUCTION This document provides four cases in addition to the Global Treps running case in Chapters 4 through 13 of Information Technology Project Management, Eighth Edition. The first two cases include tasks ordered by each of the 10 knowledge areas discussed in Chapters 4 through 13. The first one, Manage Your Health, was in the seventh edition. The third and fourth cases include tasks based on the five project management process groups and are based on Kathy Schwalbe's text, An Introduction to Project Management, Fifth Edition. The purpose of these cases is to help you practice and develop the project management skills you learned from this text. Several of the tasks involve using templates provided on the companion Web site (www.cengagebrain.com) and the author's personal Web site (www. kathyschwaibe.com). Some suggested solutions are provided for the Manage Your Health case in the instructor's solutions manual, but other solutions are not provided as answers will vary. ADDITIONAL CASE 1: MANAGE YOUR HEALTH Note: This case was in the seventh edition of Information Technology Project Management. References to figure numbers may vary from the eighth edition. Part 1: Project Integration Management Manage Your Health, Inc. (MYH) is a Fortune 500 company that provides a variety of healthca re services across the globe. MYH has more than 20,000 full-time employees and more than 5,000 parttime employees. MYH recently updated its strategic plan; key goals include reducing internal costs, increasing cross-selling of products, and exploiting new Web-based technologies to help employees, customers, and suppliers work together to improve the development and delivery of healthca re products and services. Below are some ideas the IT department has developed for supporting these strategic goals: 1. Recreation and Wellness Intranet Project: Provide an application on the current intranet to help employees improve their health. A recent study found that MYH, Inc. pays 20 percent more than the industry average for employee healthcare premiums, primarily due to the poor health of its employees. You believe that this application will help improve employee health within one year of its rollout so that you can negotiate lower health insurance premiums, providing net savings of at least S30/employee/year for full-time employees over the next four yea rs. This application would include the following capabilities: 0 Allow employees to register for com pa ny-sponsored recreational programs, such as soccer, softball, bowling, jogging, and walking. 0 Allow employees to register for com pa nysponsored classes and programs to help them manage their weight, reduce stress, stop smoking, and manage other health-related issues. 0 Track data on employee involvement in these recreational and healthmanagement programs. 0 Offer incentives for people to join the programs and do well in them (e.g., incentives for achieving weight goals, winning sports team competitions, etc.). Schwalbe Additional Cases 2015 1 2. Health Coverage Costs Business Model: Develop an application to track employee healthca re expenses and company healthcare costs. Healthcare premiums continue to increase, and the company has changed insurance carriers several times in the past 10 years. This application should allow business modeling of various scenarios as well as tracking and analyzing current and past employee healthcare expenses and company healthca re costs. This application must be secure and run on the current intranet so several managers and analysts can access it and download selected data for further analysis. The new application must also import data from the current systems that track employee expenses submitted to the company and the corn pa ny's costs to the insurance provider. You believe that having this data will help you revise policies concerning employee contributions to healthcare premiums and help you negotiate for lower premiums with insurance companies. You estimate that this application would save your company about $20/employee/year for full-time employees over the next four yea rs and cost about $100,000 to develop. CrossSelling System: Develop an application to improve crossselling to current customers. The current sales management system has separate sections for major product and service categories and different sales reps based on those products and services. You see great opportunities to increase sales to current customers by providing discounts when they purchase multiple products and services. You estimate that this system would increase profits by $1 million each year for the next three years and cost about $800,000 each year for development and maintenance. Web-Enhanced Communications System: Develop a Web-based application to improve development and delivery of products and services. There are currently several incompatible systems related to the development and delivery of products and services to customers. This application would allow customers and suppliers to provide suggestions, enter orders, view the status and history of orders, and use electronic commerce capabilities to purchase and sell their products. You estimate that this system would save your company about $2 million each year for three years after implementation. You estimate that the system will take one year and $3 million to develop and require 20 percent of development costs each year to maintain. Tasks 1. Summarize each of the proposed projects in the Running Case section using a simple table format suitable for presentation to top management. Include the name of each project, identify how each one supports business strategies, assess the potential financial benefits and other benefits of each project, and provide your initial assessment of the value of each project. Write your results in a one to twopage memo to top management, including appropriate back-up information and calculations. Evaluate the four projects in the Running Case section by preparing a weighted scoring model using the template provided on the companion Web site for this text. Develop at least four criteria, assign weights to each criterion, assign scores, and then calculate the weighted scores. Print the spreadsheet and bar chart with the results. Also write a one-page pa per that describes this weighted scoring model and the results. Prepare a business case for the recreation and wellness intranet project. Assume that the project will take six months to complete and cost about $200,000. Use the business case template provided on the companion Web site for this text. Prepare a project charter for the recreation and wellness intranet project. Assume that the project will take six months to complete and cost about $200,000. Use the project charter Schwalbe Additional Cases 2015 2 specialist; Nancy, a business analyst; and Bonnie, another programmer/analyst. Other people are supporting the project from other departments, including Yusaff from human resources and Cassandra from finance. Assume that these are the only people who can be assigned and charged to work on project activities. Recall that your schedule and cost goals are to complete the project in six months for under $200,000. Tasks 1. Review the WBS and Gantt chart you created for Tasks 3 and 4 in Chapter 5. Propose three to five additional activities that would help you estimate resources and durations. Write a one-page pa per describing these new activities. 2. Identify at least eight milestones for the Recreation and Wellness Intranet Project. Write a short pa per describing each milestone using the SMART criteria. Discuss how determining these milestones might add activities or tasks to the Ga ntt chart. Remember that milestones normally have no duration, so you must have tasks that will lead to completing the milestone. 3. Using the Gantt chart you created for Task 4 in Chapter 5 and the new activities and milestones you proposed in Tasks 1 and 2 above, create a new Ga ntt chart using Project 2013. Estimate the task durations and enter dependencies as appropriate. Remember that your schedule goal for the project is six months. Print the Gantt chart and network diagram, each on one page. 4. Write a short paper summarizing how you would assign people to each activity from Tasks 1, 2, and 3. Include a table or matrix listing how many hours each person would work on each task. These resource assignments should make sense given the duration estimates made in Task 3 above. Remember that duration estimates are not the same as effort estimates because they include elapsed time. Part 4: Project Cost Management Tony Prince and his team are working on the Recreation and Wellness Intranet Project. They have been asked to refine the existing cost estimate for the project so they can evaluate supplier bids and have a solid cost baseline for evaluating project performance. Recall that your schedule and cost goals are to complete the project in six months for under $200,000. Tasks 1. Prepare and print a one-page cost model for the project described in the Running Case, similar to the model provided in Figure 72. Use the following WBS, and be sure to document your assumptions in preparing the cost model. Assume a labor rate of $100/hour for the project manager and $60/hour for other project team members. Assume that none of the work is outsourced, labor costs for users are not included, and there are no additional hardware costs. The total estimate should be $200,000. 1. Project management 2. Requirements definition 3. Web site design 3.1 Registration for recreational programs 3.2 Registration for classes and programs 3.3 Tracking system 3.4 Incentive system 4. Web site development 4.1 Registration for recreational programs 4.2 Registration for classes and programs 4.3 Tracking system Schwalbe Additional Cases 2015 4 4.4 Incentive system 5. Testing 6. Training, rollout, and support Using the cost model you created in Task 1, prepare a cost baseline by allocating the costs by WBS for each month of the project. Assume that you have completed three months of the project. The BAC was $200,000 for this six-month project. You can also make the following assumptions: PV = $120,000 EV = $100,000 AC = $90,000 a. What is the cost variance, schedule variance, cost performance index (CPI), and schedule performance index (SPI) for the project? b. How is the project doing? Is it ahead of schedule or behind schedule? Is it under bud get or over budget? c. Use the CPI to calculate the estimate at completion (EAC) for this project. Is the project performing better or worse than planned? d. Use the SPI to estimate how long it will take to finish this project. e. Sketch an earned value chart using the preceding information. See Figure 7-5 as a guide. Part 5: Project Quality Management The Recreation and Wellness Intranet Project team is working hard to ensure thatthe new system they develop meets expectations. The team has a detailed scope statement, but the project manager, Tony Prince, wants to make sure they're not forgetting requirements that might affect how people view the quality of the project. He knows that the project's sponsor and other senior managers are most concerned with getting people to use the system, improve their health, and reduce healthcare costs. Users want the system to be user-friendly, informative, fun to use, and fast. Tasks 1. Develop a list of quality standards or requirements related to meeting the stakeholder expectations described in the Running Case. Also provide a brief description of each requirement. For example, a requirement might be that 90 percent of employees have logged into the system within two weeks after the system rolls out. 2. Based on the list created for Task 1, determine how you will measure progress on meeting the requirements. For example, you might have employees log into the system as pa rt of the training program and track who attends the training. You could also build a feature into the system to track usage by user name, department, and other criteria. 3. After analyzing survey information, you decide to create a Pareto chart to see which types of recreational programs and company-sponsored classes generated the most interest. First, create a spreadsheet in Excel using the data in the following table. List the most frequently requested programs or classes first. Use the Excel template called pareto_chart.xls on the text's companion Web site and check your entries so the resulting chart looks similar to the one in Figure 87. See the companion Web site for help in creating Pareto charts. Requested Programs/Classes # of Times Requested Walking program 7,115 Volleyball program 2,054 Weight reduction class 8,875 Stop smoking class 4,889 Stress reduction class 1,894 Schwalbe Additional Cases 2015 5 Soccer program 3,297 Table tennis program 120 Softball program 976 Part6: Project Human Resource Management Several people working on the Recreation and Wellness Intranet Project are confused about their responsibilities for the testing portion of the project. Recall that the team members include you, a programmer/analyst and aspiring project manager; Patrick, a network specialist; Nancy, a business analyst; and Bonnie, another programmer/analyst. Tony Prince is the project manager, and he has been working closely with managers in other departments to make sure everyone knows what's going on with the project. 1. Prepare a responsibility assignment matrix based on the following information: The main tasks for testing include writing a test plan, unit testing, integration testing for each of the main system modules (registration, tracking, and incentives), system testing, and user acceptance testing. In addition to the project team members, a team of user representatives is available to help with testing, and Tony has also hired an outside consulting firm to help as needed. Prepare a RACI chart to help clarify roles and responsibilities for these testing tasks. Document key assumptions you make in preparing the chart. 2. The employees of the outside consulting firm and the user representatives have asked you to create a resource histogram to show how many people you think the project will need for testing, and to show when testing will occur. Assume that the consulting firm has junior and senior testers and that the user group has workers and managers. You estimate that you'll need the involvement of both groups in testing over a period of six weeks. Assume that you'll need one senior tester for all six weeks, two junior testers for the last four weeks, two usergroup workers for the first week, four usergroup workers for the last three weeks, and two user-group managers for the last two weeks. Create a resource histogram like the one in Figure 96 based on this information. 3. One of the issues in Tony's issue log is the ability to work effectively with the user group during testing. According to MBTI classifications, Tony knows that several of his project team members are very introverted and strong thinking types, while several members of the user group are very extroverted and strong feeling types. Write a onepage pa per that describes options for resolving this issue. Part 7: Project Communications Management Several issues have arisen on the Recreation and Wellness Intranet Project. The person from the HR department who was supporting the project left the company, and now the team needs more support from that group. A member of the user group that supports the project is extremely vocal and hard to work with, and other users can hardly get a word in at meetings. The project manager, Tony, is getting weekly status reports from all of his team members, but many of them do not address obvious challenges that people are facing. The team is having difficulty deciding how to communicate various project reports and documents and where to store all of the information being generated. Recall that the team members include you, a programmer/a nalyst and aspiring project manager; Patrick, a network specialist; Nancy, a business analyst; and Bonnie, another programmer/analyst. 1. Prepare a partial communications management plan to address some of the challenges mentioned in the previous paragraph. 2. Prepare a template and sample ofa good weekly progress report that could be used for this project. Include a list of tips to help team members provide information on these reports. Schwalbe Additional Cases 2015 6 0 Management approach, 15% 0 Technical approach, 15% 0 Past performance, 20% 0 Price, 20% 0 Interview results and samples, 30% Using Figure 125 and the weighted scoring model template as guides, create a spreadsheet that could be used to enter ratings and calculate scores for each criterion and total weighted scores for three proposals. Enter scores for Proposal 1 as 80, 90, 70, 90, and 80, respectively. Enter scores for Proposal 2 as 90, 50, 95, 80, and 95. Enter scores for Proposal 3 as 60, 90, 90, 80, and 65. Add a paragraph to the spreadsheet that summarizes the results and your recommendation. Print your results on one page. 3. Draft potential clauses that you could include in the contract to provide incentives to the seller based on MYH achieving its main goal of improving employee health and lowering healthca re premiums as a result of this project. Be creative in your response, and document your ideas in a onepage paper. Part 10: Project Stakeholder Management Recall from previous chapters that the following people are involved in the Manage Your Health, Inc. (MYH) Recreation and Wellness system: 0 Tony Prince, the project manager 0 Hillary, the project sponsor 0 You and Bonnie, programmer/analysts in the IT department 0 Patrick, a network specialist in IT 0 Nancy, a business analyst in IT 0 Gayle, the sponsor and VP of human resources 0 Yusaff, a human resources specialist o Cassandra, a finance specialist o Supplier A, who was hired to handle training on the new system and manage an incentives program 0 20,000 full-time employees and 5,000 part-time employees, all of whom are potential users of the new system 1. Prepare a stakeholder register using the preceding information. Make up other information as needed. 2. Create a stakeholder management strategy for the project, focusing on members who are not on the project team, such as Hillary, Gayle, the lead person from Supplier A, and a vocal member of a user group testing the new system. Be creative in developing potential management strategies. 3. Prepare an issue log for the project. Include past issues discussed in prior chapters, such as Yusaff leaving the company, a difficult and vocal member of the user group, and unproductive meetings. Make up three additional potential issues. ADDITIONAL CASE 2: GREEN COMPUTING RESEARCH PROJECT Note: This case was based on the seventh edition of Information Technology Project Management. References to figure numbers may vary from the eighth edition. Part 1: Project Integration Management Sohwalbe Additional Cases 2015 8