1. Decide on a set of appropriate actions (minimum of 2 per stakeholder group) that you can take to maximise the chances of the following stakeholder groups actively participating in your project: Divisional Finance staff, HQ Finance staff and the I.T. team. For each action that you suggest ensure that you consider both the potential positive and negative sides of your approach. 2. Comment on the statement that “that if asked about job losses that you are to say that there are no plans to cut numbers either in HQ Finance or within the various Divisions”. Do you think that is a sensible approach? If not why not?
Deep Blue Seaways currently outsources all its IT works to a number of leading consultancies.
Your firm, SFS, have just won a £3 million contract from DBS that will require you the Project Manager to execute. You are pretty certain from your experience with Deep Blue Seaways that this project is seriously underfunded by possibly as much as £1 million. You are to replace their outdated finance systems with your company’s renowned Finance Wizard product, a system that processes all financial information, and produces an infinite array of management information reports that have been proved to improve strategic decision making in existing user companies by significant margins. Deep Blue Seaways comprises of an Head Office and 4 divisions. From your previous dealings with this company you know that the Finance Heads of each Division are not renowned for their co-operative approach with each other. In addition, the project that you have won will result in major changes (in terms of work processes) for all Divisional finance staff in Deep Blue Seaways; given that they have just completed an arduous one year long project you hear that they are very unhappy about this new project. Conversely, the project is likely to make the work for the Finance staff in Head Office a lot easier as it will streamline the data coming into them from the 4 divisions so they will no longer have to interpret data according to which Division it comes from. However, they too will see significant changes to their working processes. Part of the system development will be to significantly enhance the management information that the Deep Blue Seaways Executives will see which should significantly improve their ability to make sound commercial decisions. You appreciate early on that the Financial Staff are going to be very hostile towards you, and it doesn’t help that you and your team are located in the Head Office as most of the divisional finance staff are fed up with being pestered not by one, but by up to four teams within Head Office, with queries about their submitted data.
Your project will require a lot of assistance from the Deep Blue Seaways IT department in terms of providing adequate servers, installing your software on their machines and so on. You are also aware that they have many priorities and are seriously understaffed. Morale is this team is very low.
The Senior Executive has said that it is imperative that this system enables them to save on staff numbers within the Finance areas, but you have been told that if asked about job losses that you are to say that there are no plans to cut numbers either in HQ Finance or within the various Divisions. Other issues that you need to address are how the divisions are going to standardise their information so that your system receives their data in a consistent format. It is suggested that you should determine which of the 4 Divisions follows “best practice” and use their data formats.
1. Decide on a set of appropriate actions (minimum of 2 per stakeholder group) that you can take to maximise the chances of the following stakeholder groups actively participating in your project: Divisional Finance staff, HQ Finance staff and the I.T. team. For each action that you suggest ensure that you consider both the potential positive and negative sides of your approach.
2. Comment on the statement that “that if asked about job losses that you are to say that there are no plans to cut numbers either in HQ Finance or within the various Divisions”. Do you think that is a sensible approach? If not why not?
3. Produce a spreadsheet (perhaps a Gantt Chart) showing the duration and logical linkages for the project, making the following assumptions:
There are 50 working weeks a year, 5 working days a week, and that 8 hours are worked per day. Project Manager is full time for the 2 years duration of the project. There are 8000 hours of Business Analyst work, 12,000 hours of programming work, 2000 hours of system testing, 2000 hours of manual writing, and 500 hours of user testing. The project must be completed in 2 years.
You are therefore using the following list of resources:
1. Project Manager 2. Business Analysts 3. Programmers 4. Systems Testers 5. Manual writer 6. User Acceptance Testers
4. You know that the project is underfunded by £1million. What actions may you consider to rectify this situation?
5. List out 5 critical risks associated with this project and recommend what actions that you should take to minimise their impact
6. The organisation has 2 strategic objectives: to lower its costs base by 10% within the next 2 years, and, to introduce new services that generate an additional 20% revenues within the next 18 months. Which of these strategic objectives does this project most align itself to and why?
7. Clearly your system is not going to operate in isolation from other systems that Deep Blue Seaways have. Consider what these systems are and what issues that you may have in linking up with them
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