Project Management - Week Twelve Questions

Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management. Within a project there are three primary variables, these are cost, scope and time. They have an interdependent relationship and all projects are limited in some way by one of these variables. The framework for evaluating these competing demands is known as the triple constraint. If one of these factors changes, at least one of the other factors will also be affected. Project management involves making trade-offs between the time, cost and scope of the project. Each of the factors plays a significant part in the value of a project. The triple constraint makes necessary contributions to projects when considering establishing success. 2.      Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning Two diagrams most frequently used in project planning are PERT charts and Gantt Charts. A PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) chart is a graphical network model that depicts projects tasks and the relationships between these tasks. It defines the dependency between project tasks before the tasks are scheduled. In the diagram boxes display various attributes for the project such as schedule and the arrows indicate the one task that is dependent on the start or completion of another task. A Gantt Chart is a simple bar chart that depicts tasks against a calendar. Within this chart the tasks are listed vertically against the schedule which is horizontal. This particular diagram is ideal for representing the schedule of a project Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success The three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success include: 1)      People 2)      Communications and 3)      Change People involve managing those who participate in completing the project and any conflicts that may arise during the duration of the project. Managing people is a difficult facto in ensuring the smooth completion of the project. Communication is the key to a successful project and it is often helpful if the project manager plans what and how to communicate as a formal part of the project management plan. A communication plan is where the manager distributes timely, accurate and meaningful information such as time, cost, quality and scope. Also involved with the communication is the need for the project manager to update stakeholders of the progress. Change can come in the form of a crisis, market, shift or even a technological development. Every successful project manager must learn how to adapt to and predict changes over the course of the project. Change within the duration of the project in inevitable and with the challenges and complexities that organisations face in todays rapidly sparse changing environment, effective change management is essential and a critical core competency. Change management is a set of techniques that aid in the evolution, composition and policy management of the design implementation of a system. Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed.

Two reasons as to why people fail consist of the following: 1.      Poor scope – Essentially referring to the work that must be completed in order to deliver products with the specified functions and features. A project scope statement includes assumptions, requirements and constraints. If the scope of a project is not adequately organised and planned the final products won’t be achieved due to either not meeting the requirements or the work will also affect the time and cost of the project. With the poor scope, the designated work will take longer than initially estimated or even come in over budget. 2.      Lack of project management – Essentially can lead to numerous issues such as unreasonable time, cost and scope, there is a need to seek a good balance on these competing demands throughout the project. Between 30-70% of projects fail due to a project not being delivered upon schedule, come in over budget or do not deliver the scope initially agreed upon. Two reasons as to why people fail consist of the following: 1.      Good communication – A project will have the adequate support of all involved due to the fact that they will be informed and understand the requirements of the project. It everything involved is kept in adequate communicative bounds they will be able to contribute effectively whilst also feeling part of a team or group environment. 2.      Good decision making structure – This reason involved initially choosing the correct people, cost, time and scope of the project. It can also mean making decisions regarding whether or not to outsource the project, these are vital in the success of the project. Good decision making can also be a factor when changes occur during the project duration and a manager must make crucial decisions to ensure success.

Customer Relationship management & Business Intelligence - Week Eleven Questions

1.     What is your understanding of CRM? Customer Relationship Management involves managing all aspects of a customer’s relationship with an organization to increase customer loyalty and retention as well as organizations profitability. CRM allows an organization to gain insights into customers’ shopping and buying behaviors. Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management. Operational customer relationship management supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations systems that deal directly with the customers. Whereas, analytical customer relationship management supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers. 3.     Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments The customer relationship management technologies allows businesses to gather and analyse customer information to deploy successful marketing campaigns, therefore marketing departments are able to transform to this new way of doing business by using CRM technologies. In addition to this is customer relationship management technologies used by sales departments were the first to begin developing CRM systems. Sales departments had two primary reasons to track customer sales information electronically. 1)     Sales representatives were struggling with the overwhelming amount of customer account information they were required to maintain and track. 2)     Companies were struggling with the issues that much of their vital customer and sales information remained in the heads of their sales representatives. 4.      How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies? Operational customer relationship management supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers. A sales department could help automate each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales represent co-ordinate and organise all of accounts. Features include, calendars to help plan customer meetings, alarm reminds signalling important tasks, customisable multimedia presentations and document generation. 5.     Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses Business intelligence (BI) refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to and analyze data and information to support decision-making efforts. Business intelligence has a high value to business as it allows for systems and tools of business users to receive data for analysis. 6.     Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem The problem associated with business intelligence is experience, knowledge and the rule of thumb taking years to develop as some employees never acquire them. 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. 7.     What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?

Data mining is the process of analysing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone. Data mining can begin at a summary information level and progress through increasing levels of detail or the reverse. Data mining is the primary tool used to uncover business intelligence in vast amounts of data.

Operations Management and Supply Chain - Week Nine Questions

1.       Define the term operations management

Operations management (OM) is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources (including human resources) into goods and services.

2.       Explain operations management’s role in business

Operations management is responsible for managing the core processes used to manufacture goods and produce services.

3.       Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology

Information technology enables businesses to differentiate themselves from competitors to gain competitive advantage and works to maximise the efficiency of IT operations so that the business can focus on their resources on providing value for the business. In conjunction to this operations management ensures that these efficiencies of IT operations are conducted as a result of being the core processes used to manufacture goods and produce the services.

4.       Explain supply chain management and its role in a business

Supply chain management (SCM) involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximise total supply chain effectiveness and profitability.  

5.       List and describe the five components of a typical supply chain

1)      Plan – Strategic portion of supply chain management. A company must have a plan for managing all the resources that go towards meeting customer demand for products or services.  A significant part of planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain so that it is efficient, effective, costs less, and delivers high quality and value to customers.

2)      Source – Companies must carefully choose reliable suppliers that will deliver goods and services required for making products. Companies must endeavour to develop a set of pricing, delivery, and payment processes with suppliers and create metrics for monitoring and improving the relationships.

3)      Make – Companies must manufacture their products or services. This can include scheduling the activities necessary for production, testing, packaging, and preparing for delivery. This is the most metric-intensive portion of the supply chain, measuring quality levels, production output and worker productivity.

4)      Deliver – Commonly referred to as logistics. It is the set of processes that plans for and controls the efficient and effective transportation and storage of supplies from suppliers to customers.  During this, companies must ensure they are able to receive orders from customers, fulfil the order via a network of warehouses, pick transportation companies to deliver the products, and implement a billing and invoicing system to facilitate payments.

5)      Return – This is typically the most problematic step in the supply chain, companies must ensure they create a network for receiving defective and excess products and support customers who have issues with delivered products.

Networks & Wireless - Week Nine Questions

1.       Explain the business benefits of using wireless technology.

Wireless technology refers to any type of electoral or electronic operations that is accomplished without the use of a ‘hard wired’ connection and is a means of linking computers using infrared or radio signals.. The benefit of utilising wireless technology is cost effective, companies/residents no longer have to rip up buildings or streets or lay down expensive cables. Wireless technology has obvious advantages for people on the move who would like access to the internet in airports, restaurants and hotels.

2.       Describe the business benefits associated with VoIP

Voice over IP (VoIP) uses TCP/IP technology to transmit voice calls over Internet technology. The telecommunications industry has experienced excellent benefits from combining VoIP with emerging standards that allow for easier development, interoperability among systems and application integration.

3.       Compare LANs and WANs

A local area network (LAN) is designed to connect a group of computers in close proximity to each other such as in an office building, a school or a home. A LAN is useful for sharing resources like files, printers, games, or other application. It often connects to other LANs and to the internet or wide area networks. In contrast to this local area network, a wide area network (WAN) spans a large geographical area, such as a state, province or country. WANs connect multiple smaller networks, such as local area networks.

4.       Describe RFID and how it can be used to help make a supply chain more effective.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies use active or passive tags in the form of chips or smart label that can store unique identifiers and relay this information to electronic readers. RFDI tags can cut costs by requiring fewer workers fir scanning items; they also can provide more current and more accurate information to the entire supply chain.

5.       What is one new emerging technology that could change a specific industry

An emerging technology that could potentially change the way in which Wi-Fi access operates is WiMAX, this can solve all of the issues involved with Wi-Fi such as:

-          Small hotspots, and as a result coverage is sparse.

This evolving technology can cover an area of as much as 48,000 square kilometres, depending on the number of users.

Databases and Data Warehouses - Week seven Questions

1.     List, describe, and provide an example of each of the five characteristics of high quality information.

Accuracy – Are all the values correct? For example, is the name spelled correctly? Is the dollar amount recorded properly?

Completeness – Are any of these values missing? For example, is the address complete including street, city, state and postcode?

Consistency – Is aggregate or summary information in agreement with detailed information? For example, do all total fields equal the true total of the individual fields?

Uniqueness – Is each transaction, entity and event represented only once in the information? For Example, are there any duplicate customers?

Timeliness? – Is the information current with respect to the business requirements? For example, is information updated weekly, daily, or hourly?

2.     Define the relationship between a database and a database management system.

A database maintains information about various types of objects (inventory), events (transactions), people

(employees) and places (warehouses).Typically, a given database has a structural description of the type of

facts held in that database: this description is known as a schema. In contrast to a database management

system (DBMS) which is a computer program used to manage and query a database. The properties and

design of database systems are included in the study of information science.

3.     Describe the advantages an organisation can gain by using a database.

A good database can handle changes quickly and easily, just as any good business needs to be able to

handle changes quickly and easily.

The advantages and organisation can gain by using a database are as follows:

-  Increased flexibility;

-  Increased scalability and performance;

-   Reduced information redundancy;

 - Increased information integrity (quality);

-   Increased information security;

4. Describe the benefits of a data-driven website.

- Development: Allows the website owner to make changes 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 training.

- Content management: A static website requires a programmer to make updates. This adds an unnecessary

layer between the business and its web content, which can lead to misunderstandings and slow turnarounds for

desired changes.

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

 static site. Changing the layout, displays and functionality of the site (adding more features and sections) is

easier with a data-driven solution.