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