Chapter 10: Project Management

1. Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management.

The triple constraint involves making tradeoffs between scope, time and cost for a project.  It is inevitable in a project life cycle that there will be changes to the scope, time or cost of the project. A successful project is typically on time, within budget, meets the business’ requirements, and fulfills the customer’s needs

There is a high failure rate in IT projects between 30 to 70 per cent due to late delivery, exceeding budget, or not delivering what was agreed upon

Increased Scope  = increased time +  increased cost

Tight Time = increased costs + reduced scope

Tight Budget = increased time + reduced scope.

Organisations routinely over-schedule their resources (human and otherwise), develop redundant projects and damage profitability by investing non-strategic effort that do not contribute to the organisations bottom line. Therefore, the triple constraints are important in project management as it offers a strategic framework for co-ordinating the numerous activities associated with organisational projects.

2. Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planningPERT chart (program evaluation and review technique) is a graphical model that depicts a projects task and the relationship between those tasks. A dependency is a logical relationship that exists between the project tasks, or between a project task and a milestone. PERT charts define dependency between projects tasks before those task are scheduled. The critical path is a path from the start to finish that passes through all the tasks that are critical to completing the project in the shortest amount of time.

Example of PERT chart:

Gantt chart is a simple bar chart that depicts the projects task against a calendar. In a Gantt chart, tasks are listed vertically and the projects time frame is listed horizontally. A Gantt chart works well for representing the project schedule. It also shows actually progress of tasks against the planned duration.

 Example of gantt chart:

3. Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success

Managing People - managing people is one of the hardest and most critical tasks a project manager undertakes. Resolving conflicts within the team and balancing the needs of the project with the personal and professional needs of the team are two of the challenges facing project managers. Project managers not only need to ‘manage’ the stakeholders and the project, they need to manage the development team.

Managing Communication-while many companies develop unique project management frameworks based in familiar project management standards, or adopt specific methodologies such as PRINCE, all of them agree that communication is the key to excellent project management. It is extremely helpful is a project manager plans what and how he or she will communicate as a formal part of the project management plan. A project manager distributes timely, accurate and meaningful information regarding project objectives that involve time, scope , cost and quality, and the status of each.

Managing Change –

 Change management – a set of techniques that aid in evolution, composition, and policy management of the design and implementation of a system

Change management system – a collection of procedures to document a change request and define the steps necessary to consider the change based on the expected impact of the change

Change control board (CCB) – responsible for approving or rejecting all change requests

4. Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed.

Reasons why projects fail:

- Unrealistic expectations – expectations are too high therefore it is hard to aim project tasks at a hard level when

- Lack of project management – have no time, scope or costs

Reasons why projects succeed:

- Good project charter – organised, and knows where the project is heading

- Good communication- can communicate well between project team, to get the task done efficiently and effectively within the time scope and cost.

Week 10: CRM & BI

Weekly Questions
Customer Relationship Management & Business Intelligence

1. What is your understanding of CRM?
CRM is managing all aspects of a business to improve customer relations; inc. customer loyalty and bus. profitability. CRM in an enterprise- wide effort to acquire and retain customers, through; engage, transact, fufil and support. Through individualization, business interactions are friendlier eg. 'one on one.'

2. Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.
Analytical CRM is strategic analysis, back office operations that deal indirectly with customers.
Operational CRM is transactional day to day operations that deal directly with customers.The primary difference between operational CRM and analytical CRM is the direct interaction between organisations and its customers.


3. Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments. Marketing department CRM technologies-

- List generators: compiles customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns
- Campaign management system: guides users through marketing campaigns
- Cross-selling and up-selling:
Cross-selling – selling additional products or services
Up-selling – increasing the value of the sale
Sales department CRM technologies-
- Sales management- automomate each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales representatives co-ordinate and organise all of their accounts
- Contact management- maintains customer contact information and identifies prospective customers for future sales. E.g. - maintaining organisational charts.
- Opportunity management-target sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales

. Marketing departments:
- list generator
- Campaign management system
- cross selling up selling
Sales departments
- Web based and self service system
- contact / call
- call scripting



4. How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?

By implementing Sales management CRM systems, contact management CRM systems eg increase managements visibility of the sales process, and opportunity management CRM systems by gaining prospective customers




5. Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses: applications and technologies are used to gather and analysis data and information used to support decision making efforts.

Business intelligence (BI) – applications and technologies used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information to support decision-making efforts. BI includes simple MS Excel Pivot tables to highly sophisticated software that fetches data from the different front-and back-office systems.
Many Businesses are finding that they must identify and meet the fast-changing needs and wants of different customer segments in order to stay competitive in today’s consumer-centric market. BI can tell companies things like;
- Determine who is the best and worst customer’s thereby gaining insight into where it needs to concentrate more for its future sales
- Identify exceptional sales people
- Determine whether or not campaigns have been successful
- Determine in which activity they are making or losing money



6. Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem

Companies can have a lot of data, however they are not able to benefit from levering this information and turning it into useful data for analytical and strategic decision making.
The issue most organisations are facing today is that it is next to impossible to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, let alone their enemies, because the enormous amount of organisational data is inaccessible to all but the IT department. The problem: data rich, information poor
The solution: to improve the quality of business decisions, managers can provide existing staff with BI systems and tools that can assist them in making better, more informed decisions. The result creates an agile intelligent enterprise, a few examples of using BI to make informed business decisions include:
- Retail and sales – predicting sales; determining correct inventory levels and distributions schedules among outlets; and loss prevention
- Banking- forecasting levels of bad loans and fraudulent credit card use, credit card spending by new customers and which kind of customers will best respond to (and quality for) new loan offers
- Operation management- predicting machinery failures; finding key factors that control optimisation of manufacturing capacity.


7. What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?

Single point of access to information for all users- organizations can unlock information held within their databases by giving authorised users a single point of access to data.BI across organizational departments-all departments across an organization from sales to operations to customer services can benefit from the value of BI

Week 9

1. Define the term operations management:
Looks at background/operational, turns inputs into outputs.

(OM) the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources into goods or services. 

2. Explain operations management’s role in business:
>forecast, demand, capacity planning, satisfy’s demand, quality control, scheduling
Strategic,
> ie. Lower COGS more profitable firm will be
Operations management is an area of management concerned with overseeing, designing, and redesigning business operations in the production of goods and/or services. It involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient in terms of using as little resources as needed, and effective in terms of meeting customer requirements. It is concerned with managing the process that converts inputs (in the forms of materials, labor, and energy) into outputs (in the form of goods and/or services)


3. Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology
:

An integrated system is the only way to have a consistent view of the data and provide up to the minute results—on a company-wide basis. By automating the most important business practices, business will be able to work more efficiently, reduce overhead, increase agility, and improve insight into business processes.

>Visibility; better quality business decisions.


4. Explain supply chain management and its role in a business:
Supply chain: Series of steps/ flow of goods and services go through from upstream to downstream. Good tight nit supply chain, creating a barrier to entry to other firms trying to come in. ie. maintains customers.
Good supply chain = profitable.



5. List and describe the five components of a typical supply chain
:
Supply chain – upstream and downstream!

Plan- this is the strategic portion of the supply chain management. Company must have a plan for managing all the resources that go toward meeting customer demand for products or services. A big piece of planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain that is efficient, costs less, and delivers high quality and value to customers.

Source- companies must carefully choose reliable suppliers that will deliver goods and services required for making products.  Companies must also develop a set of prices, delivery, and payment processes with suppliers and create metrics for monitoring and improving relationships

Make- this is the step where companies manufacture their products or services. This can include scheduling and the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging, and preparing for delivery. This is by far the most metrics- intensive portion of the supply chain, measuring quality levels, production output and worker productivity.

Deliver- this step is commonly referred to as logistics. Logistics is the set of processed that plans for and controls the efficient and effective transportation and storage of supplies from suppliers to customers. During this step, companies must be able to receive orders from customers, fulfill the orders via a network of warehouses, pick transportation companies to deliver the products, and implement a billing and invoicing system to facilitate payments.

Return- this is typically the most problematic step in the supply chain. Companies must create a network for receiving defective and excess products and support customers who have problems with delivered products.

6. Define the relationship between information technology and the supply chain.
Visibility.

Information technology is becoming increasingly important to allow the valuable sharing of info o that all stake holders can become aware of those tasks that are allocated to particular share holders to achieve the delivery of the goods or services.

An example of I.T is ERP.  SAP is an example of ERP which allows documentation recording and visualization to stake holders across the value chain.

Week 8: Networks & Wireless

Networks & Wireless


1. Explain the business benefits of using wireless technology.
Universal access to information and applications; allowing people to be mobile accessing information anytime, anywhere. The automation of business processes; allowing to centralize critical information, and eliminate redundant processes. User conveinence, timeliness and ability to constantely conduct business via iphones etc. 


2. Describe the business benefits associated with VoIP
VoIP = voice over IP. This allows internet to carry voice over digital format eg. phones, faxes, canceling international calls now internet connections. 
Reduces costs through; using existing computer network, no telecommunication charges, & consumers port their numbers between carriers. 


3. Compare LANs and WANs
LANS (Local area network) connect computers that reside in singular geographic location, where WANS (wide area networks) connect computers in different geographical sites. 

4. Describe RFID and how it can be used to help make a supply chain more effective.
RFID (radio frequency identification), are tags that use radio waves to transfer data; used a lot in inventory tracking. 
Using a passive intenna inside a smartcare, having just enough power to send information back to the database increasing ineffeciency.
Passive & active (more data)
Passports; instantely transmitting data to a national security database eg time, date, place etc.
Transportation; such as eTag. 
Travel; 3.5 people use them, automated the ticketing process.
Social retailing




5. Identify the advantages and disadvantage of deploying mobile technology
Advantages include; ubiquity, convenence, instant connectivity, customization (personalized). 

Week 7: Databases

Databases:

1. List, describe, and provide an example of each of the five characteristics of high quality information
Business decisions are only as good as the quality of information used to make the decisions.
- Accuracy: it is important that information needs to be correct.
- Completeness: needs to be complete to achieve accurate result
- Consistency: making sure that all the data is consistent, eg worldwide data needs consistency
- Uniqueness: eg student registration in notre dame
- Timeliness: being able to extract & deliver information when its needed. eg service orientated architecture

2. Define the relationship between a database and a database management system.
Database is the logical organized collection of data; where the database mgmt system (DBMS) is the actual application. ie. the group of programs that manipulate the database and provide an interface between the database and its users and other application programs,

3. Describe the advantages an organisation can gain by using a database.
Increased flexibility, Increased scalability and performance, Reduced information redundancy, Increased information integrity (quality), Increased information security, accurately store records.
Through the use of a database, an organisation can benefit through; data security (protection from theft,
modification & destruction), data integrity (data meeting constraints) and data independence (applications & data are independent from eachother.) Whilst also preventing; data redundancy, data iscolation & data inconsistency.

4. Define the fundamental concepts of the relational database model.
A relational database is a series of 2D tables that can link to each-other. This allows infinite amounts of data linking to each-other.

5. Describe the benefits of a data-driven website.
By having a database behind the website you only need to update the data once in the website. Development, Content management, Future expandability, Minimising human error, Cutting production and update costs, More efficient, Improved stability, Real time info like stock levels & price changes


6. Describe the roles and purposes of data warehouses and data marts in an organization:
Provide intelligence from many different systems. ie. Relational database management systems specifically designed to support management decision making

Development - allows the website owner to make changes at any time, all without having to rely on a developer or knowing HTML programming. A well structured, data-driven website enables updating with little or no information or no training.

Future expandability- having a data driven website enables the site to grow faster than would be possible with a static site

Minimising Human Error- A well desgined, data-driven website will have 'error trapping' mechanisms to ensure that required information is filled out correctly and that content is entered and displayed in its correct format.

Cutting production costs- convenient and cuts costs, and updates take fraction of time they would with static site

More efficient- system keep track of templates, so users do not have to

Improved Stability- content is never lost, even if your programmer is.

Week Five - Ethics and security

Explain the ethical issues surrounding information technology.

> Intellectual property, Copyright, Fair use doctrine, pirated software, counterfeit software. 

Describe a situation involving technology that is ethical but illegal.

>

Describe and explain one of the computer use policies that a company might employee

> An ethical computer use policy contains general principals to guide computer use behaviour. eg. a policy might explicity state that users should refrain from playing computer games during working hours. This publishes work behaviour standards in relation to computers. 

What are the 5 main technology security risks?

> Human error, Technical failures, Natural disaster, deliberate acts, management failure. 

Outline one way to reduce each risk.

>(i) sufficient training on procedures, strong password, strong penalities, firewalls, system audits to track down malicious activity 

(ii)

(iii) Disaster recovery plan; alternative sites, communications plan, business continuity, location of backup data, regular recovery testing, well documented procedures. 

- buy online safely, secure passwords, avoid being phished, avoid spam, secure data, security tips, 

What is a disaster recovery plan, what strategies might a firm employee?

Week 4 Questions, E-Business

Chapter 3 Questions

1. Why has the web grown so dramatically?

> A world wide collection of millions of computers

A network of networks

Enables us to access vast amounts of information

Search Engines are a key Technology

Getting the right information can be a challenge

2. What is Web 2.0, how does it differ from 1.0?

Web 2.0 is referred to as the Live Web. Users can collaborate and build their own content.This differs from 1.0, where it no longer just links text, but links people, where instead people are actively involved in the creation through; tagging, blogs, wiki etc. 

3.How could a web 2.0 technology be used in business?

CEO’s using Blogs to enhance communication, build trust, supplement press releases and talk from the heart.

rss= statistics, or potential consumers with info 

4.  What is eBusiness, how does it differ from eCommerce?

E business also refers to online exhcnages of information (serving of customers & collaborating with business partners), where ecommece is just the buying and selling of goods (online transactions.)

5. What is pure and partial eCommerce

-The product can be physical or digital.

-The process can be physical or digital

-The delivery agent can be physical or digital.

6.  List and describe the various eBusiness models?

- B2B - Business to business- businessess buying and selling to eachother over the internet. Online access to data (shipping date, delivery date, status etc.) - *electronic marketplaces*

- B2C - Business to consumer - products services to consumers over internet. eg. e-shop, e Mall

- C2B- consumer to businesse. eg webmaster offering advertsing services to Amazon.com

- C2C- consumer to consumer; goods and services to eachother, eg online auctions

7. List and describe the major B2B models?

- The major B2B Models is electronic marketplaces (e-marketplaces) which primary goal is to increase market efficiency by tightening and automating the relationship between buyers and consumers.

8. Outline 2 opportunities and 2 challenges faced by companies doing business online?

Two opportunities:

- Increased customer loyality

- Highly accessable

Challenges:

- Protecting consumers: by the unsolicited goods/ services, which may be illegal or harmful.

- Providing security.