CASE STUDY 

The Royal Children's Hospital Education Institute iPad Project 

The Royal Children's Hospital (RCH) Education Institute provides educational services for children and youth whose access to education through their regular schools is disrupted by health issues.  The institute forges links between the young people and their families, schools and health professionals to facilitate continued engagement to learning and connection to the school community.

There are numerous vibrant learning spaces throughout the RCH, which are utilised by in-patients and school groups on excursions alike.  The Education Institute also recognises the need to provide learning opportunities for patients with limited mobility, and is utilising technology to bring the educational experiences directly to the patients.  iPads are becoming a significant component of this programme and the Education Institute is keen to further expand the breadth and depth of this offering through the development of custom apps designed to target specific educational outcomes.

The Education Institute has a Technology in Education committee, led by Martha Jones, which is responsible for the integration of technology into the Institute's educational offerings.  Martha has recently awarded a tender to a development firm, Apps For All, to develop a new iPad app.  Due to the importance of this project, both the CEO of Apps For All, Kate Johnson, and the Director of Development, Mark Little, have  made this project a priority.

Research has shown that students respond positively to the use of apps to enhance their learning experiences. Students who use these apps have been performing better academically. Even parents interviewed indicated that the use of downloaded educational apps had helped them monitor their children's progress. These educational apps are now being created to be more interesting, and to make studying more appealing, and are very beneficial learning companions.

The goal of this project is to develop an iPad app to allow students to virtually explore the learning spaces at the RCH, so that students who are confined to wards are able to interact with and benefit from these experiences.  The app will focus on five learning spaces, namely: the Meerkat enclosure, The Games Children Play tapestry, RCH aquarium, Sky Garden and Creature.  The students will be able to interact directly with elements of the learning spaces, play games to further explore the content, as well as discover interesting reference material relevant to these displays.  Senior managers believe it will take about six months and $190,000 for this important project.

Kate Johnson and Mark Little formed a search committee to find the best candidate for managing the RCH Education Institute App Development Project. After reviewing many strong candidates, they decided to hire you, to manage this critical project. Your previous job was with a consultancy firm where you successfully implemented several iPad application development projects for large enterprises. Since this is a high priority project that should be completed in six months, they felt it was appropriate to go outside the company. They know they are paying a premium for your contract at $130 p/hr for 2 d/wk, but a lot is at stake since the Education Institute is likely to request further app development projects if they are satisfied with this project. Kate and Mark agreed to be joint project sponsors, and they selected Anthony Murray to be the main internal IT liaison and Daniel Cooper to be the Education Institute liaison. They will let you, as the new project manager, form the rest of the project team. In order to get the app developed in the time frame you will use an agile development approach with a team of two programmers (Jessica Frank and Robert Chi) and a digital image specialist (Tuan Ti) working on the app. The programmers will spend the equivalent of half a day a week on project management related activities (e.g. completing status reports and attending meetings etc.) and the remaining 4.5 days on development. They will be paid at a rate of $75 p/hr which is negotiable. You will also need to access to a specialist Education Consultant (Alistair Reid), whose pay rate is negotiable.

You are having several challenges on this project. Apps For You originally focused on developing android apps, but the CEO, Kate Johnson, has emphasized the need to increase profits by tapping into the iPad market. The types of people who work on android apps often have different skill sets from people working in the iPad market and tend to be less supportive of proprietary software.  Most of the people hired in the past year have been hired to support this new market. Even though you and the Apps For You project team tried to do a good job managing key stakeholders, there are some difficulties with integrating the iPad teams. Just a month into the project, several senior managers have voiced their opposition to moving into the more proprietary iPad development arena. A few very vocal managers said that they would continue to work only in the android market.

A memo that the project sponsors and you sent had mixed reviews, but the first monthly meeting was very effective in airing everyone's concerns and clearing up misconceptions. The project team realized that in addition to high-level monthly meetings, they would need to have more detailed meetings and reports to help keep the project on track. Your project team was assigned a user representative from RCH Education Institute (Deborah Poulos). It was critical that the team develop a good list of requirements for the app, emphasizing the most important features early on in the project. They know that new features may be added in future versions.

Your plan is to roll out detailed storyboards, a prototype, alpha, beta and final versions of the app. The project will be considered a success if it is completed on time, on budget, if it meets the scope requirements and if key stakeholders have been pleased with the communication and reporting processes.

Things has also to be done

Status reports

Meeting minutes

Wbs

Guntt chart

Commutation plan

Meeting procedures

Risk import matrix

Risk register

Contingence plan

Organizational chart

Project controls

Network diagram

Project scope

Roles and responsibilities

Quality assistance plan

Change management

Staffing plan

Detailed budget

References in APA

Individual Tasks

Course Objectives

This assessment task relates to the following course objectives:

• identify and understand the critical roles and phases in IT projects
• understand the basic components of project management and its importance in improving the success of IT projects
• understand how to create an IT project plan
• apply the project management knowledge areas to IT projects
• demonstrate knowledge of project management principles and techniques
• demonstrate competence in using appropriate project management software
• discuss current issues in IT project management
• understand and appreciate the importance of project management within a business environment
• value the significance of software quality in IT projects

Overview

As stated by Schwalbe (2013) a project management plan (PMP) is a document used to coordinate all project planning documents and help to guide a project's execution and control.

In this assignment, you will be required to prepare a PMP based on an IT project case study assigned to them and should use their own initiative regarding the scheduling all deliverables. Teams will not be required to produce "product related deliverables" as part of this assignment as the focus is purely on "project management related deliverables".

Team Deliverables

Team deliverables for this assignment include:

1.      Team Project Management Plan:

It is recommended teams use the structure as suggested by Schwalbe (2013) as a guide for preparing and creating their PMP. PMP headings include:

• Introduction
• Organisation
• Management and technical approaches
• Work to perform
• Schedule
• Budget

It is highly recommended that teams organise or conduct their projects using the project management process groups model as discussed by Schwalbe (2013). Minimum suggested project management related deliverables include:

• Project Initiation
  • identify project manager and team
• Project Planning

•  
  • scope statement
  • work breakdown structure (WBS)
  • schedule (Gantt chart)
  • risk management plan

o   detailed budget

• Project Executing (product related deliverables not required - however these should be included in project planning documents e.g. WBS)
• Project Controlling

•  
  • weekly status reports (see individual deliverables)

o   change requests

• Project Closing

•  
  • lessons learned (see individual deliverables)

A quality team PMP will demonstrate a synthesis of plan content, templates and ideas acquired from project management professionals and academic authors with details from the case study provided.

Each team is to encourage maintaining a wiki, which will act as a repository and archive for all project documentation. Links to all versions of documents should be maintained on the wiki. Wikis should be updated weekly, and the organisation and design should be simple and intuitive Speak to your tutor or course lecturer regarding appropriate web spaces for hosting the wiki site. Alternatively, teams may consider using a moodle shell, google groups, dropbox etc.

Innovation marks may be awarded for evidence of additional deliverables completed by individual team members, for ex project selection calculations, earned value management calculations, resource histogram or individual documents such as timesheets, meeting to do lists, etc. These tasks should be submitted with the individual report.