My Stationary Pty Ltd is a Brisbane based business which supplies stationary (paper, pens, labels, etc.) to business clients but primarily specialises in educational supplies to schools and parents with school age children (text and exercise books, classroom aids, etc.). My Stationary’s busiest time of year starts towards the end of the school year when they supply back-to-school packs to parents and schools.
My Stationary was bought by businessman and ex school principle Ben Duffy in 2012 and has become well respected for its quality range of educational supplies and the good advice Ben is able to give teachers and parents. My Stationary is especially well known among the Home Schooling community who value Ben’s advice and the range of text books that are always in stock and exclusively available at My Stationary. Management and Retail sales processes are managed through Quickbooks. Ben has a small but experienced team of staff with Sandra as general manager, Janice is great managing the retail shop floor, Joe manages the warehouse and Bev in accounts keeps the business accounts organised.
A big money earner for My Stationary is the annual back-to-school (BTS) process where over 4500 school pack orders are received, packed and delivered. This starts early November, runs through Christmas, and winds up a few weeks after school goes back in early February. The BTS is one of Sandra’s special areas of expertise where she has many years’ experience and knows all the products well (Joe in the warehouse is sure she can read barcodes!). During this BTS time of year Sandra manages 5 extra people to pack school stationary boxes and help with the BTS process. There is a particular skill required in making sure packers are packing the right items for the right people in the right school. There are thousands of different items and each school is very particular about which products they want!
However, Sandra is continually frustrated by the online BTS book pack ordering system, which Ben inherited from the previous owners. The online BTS system allows parents to order and pay for book packs specific to their children’s school. Ben negotiates with each school to supply specific stationary at a specific price. Parents can choose to either pick their book packs up personally or have them shipped to their home address. It is basically functional but Sandra has to be very gentle with it and is constantly contacting the support people when things don’t go quite right and something else is broken as a result of a previous ‘repair’. One of its good features is the online BTS system’s ability to interface with Quickbooks where it automatically enters orders, adjusts sock levels and generates invoices.
My Stationary are wining more and more BTS contracts because of their excellent reputation, and ability to deliver the right items on time. Parents of uncontracted schools ask for their school’s book lists to be put up online for ordering as well. However, the increasing work highlights the inadequacies of their current online BTS processing system which is increasing staff stress levels in the office. Sandra is the only person who can manage the current online system because it so brittle and has many fatal errors which only Sandra has a handle on. Ben is making enquiries as to his options with a new system. He knows he needs a system which is intuitive for both BTS parents and his staff to use. Ben likes to be able to provide work for less able people especially in the packing area so the system must also cater for their user needs as well. Ben knows that his business viability and reputation depends on having effective information systems in order to keep parents happy and coming back. If parents are happy then
the school will be easier to negotiate with and Ben won’t have to compete so much on BTS pack price.
Having worked with a number of very effective (but proprietary) BTS systems, Sandra knows exactly how the process should work. She has been talking with Ben for a while now about allowing her to work with a good information system project manager to redesign the BTS system. Ben is unsure and has decided to spend $10,000 on a feasibility study to investigate developing a new system or other unexplored alternatives.
In your role as a business analyst you were approached by Ben for guidance on evaluating and selecting a suitable information system solution for their business. Your initial job was to negotiate a Project Charter knowing that Ben is prepared to invest up to $200,000 on replacing the current online BTS book pack ordering system depending on the outcome of your feasibility study. Ben has accepted your project charter and your recommendations from your feasibility report. He has asked for a more detailed report on how you intend to proceed with the project. Ben needs a more detailed assessment of the project based on your feasibility report recommendations, before he is willing to allocate money and resources.
Prepare a project report on how you plan to manage this project. Please include the following sections in the main body of the report. Standard report structure must be adhered to.
1. Project Background which includes the following sub-sections
• Project Background
• Project goal
• Project objective
• Project Deliverable
• Strategic alignment of project.
2. Project Schedule which includes the following sub-sections
• Milestones
• Project requirements
• Limits and exclusions
• Work/ process breakdown schedule
3. Time and cost management which includes the following sub-sections
• Time management
• Cost management
4. Resource management
5. Risk management
6. Communication management plan
7. Recommendations
The resources available in the project are listed below.
Resources
Project manager
$85/ hour
Business analyst
$50/ hour
Programmer (two available)
$50/ hour
Database developer
$50/ hour
Graphical user interface developer
$50/ hour
Tester
$40/ hour
Administration officer
$30/ hour
You should use the information you developed in Task 2 project charter as input into the assignment.
Assignment Requirements and Deliverables
Your report should be no less than two thousand (2000) words and it would be best to be no longer than three thousand five hundred (3500) words long. There are several tables and diagrams required so this report is time intensive.
The report is to be prepared as a single Microsoft Word document adhering to all conventions detailed in:
Summers, J. and Smith, B., 2009, Communication Skills Handbook: How to succeed in written and oral communication, 3rd Ed, Wiley, Singapore
Appropriate referencing is required, both in-text and reference list. The textbook is a valid resource, however at least four (4) other good quality resources must also be used.
Submission
The completed assignment is to be submitted by SafeAssign on or before the due date.
The assignment will be assessed according to the marking sheet (Appendix A). Late submission of the assignment will result in a deduction of 10% of the available marks for each day that the assignment is late (This includes weekends).
Assignment Return and Release of Grades
Assignment grades will be available on the course web site on two weeks after submission at the latest. An assignment marking sheet will be uploaded to Blackboard.
Where an assignment is undergoing investigation for alleged plagiarism or collusion the grade for the assignment and the assignment will be withheld until the investigation has concluded.
Assignment Guidelines
This assignment will take a number of weeks to complete and will require a good understanding of the Project Management material for successful completion. It is imperative that students take heed of the following points in relation to doing this assignment:
1. It would pay to start this assignment early.
2. Ensure that you clearly understand the requirements for the assignment – what must be done and what are the deliverables.
ICT352 ICT Project Management Task 3
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3. You need to have a clear understanding of what this project in particular will require and will need to do some research on how to breakdown the work for the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). In previous years, typically students who ensure that their WBS is detailed and show a clear understanding of how this project could be undertaken do well in the rest of the report.
4. If you do not understand any of the assignment requirements – ASK the Course Co-ordinator.
5. Each time you work on any aspect of the assignment reread the assignment requirements to ensure that what is required is clearly understood.