Assignment

** I'm in the group 1 (Project 1), so you should answer these three questions about (Project 1):

- Question 1: Consider the Initiating and Planning process groups and phases for these three projects. You might also think of them as "Concept" and "Development" phases of project feasibility. Below you will be analyzing each project in some depth, but for now think of all three project. Do they each deserve the attention and rigor that Initiating and Planning would bring? Explain why. To put it another way, could you skip the Initiating and Planning process groups for any of these projects?

2. What additional research, if any, would you wish to do for this project in order to select a project management approach suitable for successful completion of the project?

3. Which of the three approaches above does your intuition guide you towards? Explain how you come to this conclusion.

** For (Project 2) and (Project 3) you should answer justthese two questions:

2. What additional research, if any, would you wish to do for this project in order to select a project management approach suitable for successful completion of the project?

3. Which of the three approaches above does your intuition guide you towards? Explain how you come to this conclusion.

Project Lifecycle Selection

The class will be divided into three groups for the purpose of discussing these projects and coming up with a short list of questions to ask the instructor, who will play the role of the key stakeholder / sponsor.

Do not begin work on the questions until after Wednesday's in-class interviews.

Project 1:

You work for We Are Big, Inc., an international firm with more than 100,000 employees in several countries. A strategic goal is to help improve the environment while increasing revenues and reducing costs. The Environmental Technologies Program just started, and the VP of Operations, Natalie, is the program sponsor. Ito is the program manager, and there is a steering committee made up of 10 senior executives, including Natalie, who oversees the program. Several projects operate within this program, including the Green Computing Research Project. The CIO and project sponsor, Ben, has given this project high priority and plans to hold special interviews to hand-pick the project manager and team. Before coming to We Are Big, Ben sponsored a project at a large computer firm to improve data center efficiency.

This project, however, is much broader. The main purpose of the Green Computing Research Project is to research possible applications of green computing, including the following:

• Data center and overall energy efficiency
• Disposal of electronic waste and recycling
• Telecommuting
• Virtualization of server resources
• Thin client solutions
• Use of open source software
• Development of new software to address green computing for internal use and potential sale to other organizations

The budget for the project is $500,000, and the goal is to provide an extensive report, including detailed financial analysis and recommendations for which green computing technologies to implement. Official project request forms for the recommended solutions will also be created as part of the project. Ben decided to have five people working full-time on this six-month project and to call on people in other areas as needed. He wanted to be personally involved in selecting the project manager and to have that person help him select the rest of the project team. Ben also wanted the project manager to do more than just manage the project. The project manager would also do some of the research, writing, and editing required to produce the desired results. Ben was also open to paying expert consultants for their advice and to purchasing books and related articles as needed.

Project 2:

You work at General Power of Oregon as an IT project manager, and the head of desktop IT support, Kim, just came to you with a desperate plea: due to a range of problems over the past few weeks, her backlog of open tickets has grown dramatically and at this rate it may be months before they are caught up. Some senior executives are starting to get very frustrated because their seemingly trivial problems are not getting dealt with in a timely manner.

She has authority to add three temporary IT support staff to her team of 5 for the next month. Kim got approval from your boss to have you help manage this recovery project on a half-time basis. She not only wants to get through the backlog before the temporary staff addition runs out, but she wants to be able to stay on top of urgent items that come through. "Success" means reducing the backlog to normal steady state volumes, around 10-20 open items total. Right now there are over 150 support items in their backlog.

Project 3:

You work for Oregon Health Associates, a healthcare provider, and are the manager of the data integration team. The company is in the process of migrating to a new digital health record system and your team is tasked with performing the data migrations from the old system to the new system.

This work will include:

• Ensuring that the migration scripts developed by the SQL developers work as designed. These have gone through QA but you want to have your own team look at it.

• Running some volume / load tests so that you can predict the run-time with some certainty for when the live data migrations take place.

• Working with the IT steering committee to orchestrate the detailed schedule of when the migration execution(s) will happen.

• Working with employee communications to make sure that all the stakeholders are well informed about the migration plans and how that might impact their jobs.

"Success" means a completion of the data migration with no loss or corruption of data, with system down-time inline with your original plans.

Question 1: Consider the Initiating and Planning process groups and phases for these three projects. You might also think of them as "Concept" and "Development" phases of project feasibility. Below you will be analyzing each project in some depth, but for now think of all three project. Do they each deserve the attention and rigor that Initiating and Planning would bring? Explain why. To put it another way, could you skip the Initiating and Planning process groups for any of these projects?

For simplicity, consider three different project management approaches:

1. Traditional, predictive project management. For software development, this might mean a waterfall style approach. For other types of projects, this means estimating and planning all of the details and milestones up front, then managing to that plan.

2. Agile project management using Scrum with fixed sprint durations of three weeks.

3. Kanban or continuous delivery project management without fixed increments of calendar time to guide the work.

Answer the following questions for each project (therefore, 2 questions to answer for each of the 3 projects):

1. What additional research, if any, would you wish to do for this project in order to select a project management approach suitable for successful completion of the project?

2. Which of the three approaches above does your intuition guide you towards? Explain how you come to this conclusion.