Overview of Woolworths Limited
Discuss about the Project Management for Woolworths Limited.
This report depicts the role of innovation in the business organization and also the way how it positively and negatively impacts the competitive market and the commercial revenue accurately. The company that has been nominated for the implementation of the innovation is Woolworths Limited. The company delivers their products and services mainly in Australia and sometimes out of Australia in New Zealand also.
Traditionally, the company has an old manual data management approach where there was huge chance of error occurrence. In addition to this, the manual data management system was very much time consuming and slow. In order to mitigate the challenges of traditional data management system the innovation that the project manager wishes to incorporate in the installation of the Information System (IS). The action plan for the innovation of the system, design thinking regarding innovation, involvement of the users, prototyping and testing capabilities, cross functional management are also elaborated in this report. Besides this, the positive impacts of innovation in the organization are also illustrated in this report.
In order to implement the innovative information system in Woolworths Limited it is necessary for the company to create an accurate action plan. With the help of proper action plan the company will be able to create a platform for the employees and consumers which are much easy to operate. It can be said that, with the successful implementation of the Information System Woolworth limited will be able to increase the overall managerial an operational capabilities of the company.
The concept of design thinking is very much important for the successful implementation of innovation. It has been found that with the successful implementation of the information system the company will be able to gain log terms sustainability and strategic success as well. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the company is responsible to deliver all necessary technology based strategy to the company.
There are certain basic phases those are necessary for the company to implement in their action plan and the phases are as follows:
Define the problem: Before the final implementation of the information system the company head is required to define the main problems. If at the project initiation phase all the issues are identified by the project manager then it will become much easier for the technical team to implement an innovative item for their company. Based on the standard operating procedure the Information system should be developed.
Challenges in Traditional Data Management System
Collect and analysis data: This is the second phase of project innovation. In this phase the company head are required to collect and summarize all necessary data from different resources. With the help of this collection the issues will be easily resolved.
Clarify and prioritization of the problems: This is the third phase of innovation. In this phase all the identified issues are required to be prioritized accordingly.
Goal statement development: In this phase the project managers are required to develop SMART goal. With system specification and operational management of the Information system theses issues can be eventually resolved.
Implementation of the solution: This is the final phase of the action plan. Based on the project requirements all potential barriers and resource level issues are to be mitigated. For Woolworths Limited the developers should implement an Information system. Information System will increase the business efficiency and minimize all other potential barriers with data integrity and information security.
Design thinking can be defined as a creative action that helps to formalize the practical, creative level resolution for different identified issues and problems. In order to actualize the concept and ideas this design thinking methodology is very beneficial. The five basic step of design thinking are empathy, define, and ideate, prototype and test. It means that, the development of the information system is not rather proper sequential sustainable maintenance approaches are also required to be implemented by the project developers. Before the final implementation the system should be tested in three steps unit testing, integrated testing and acceptance. As soon as the system passed the testing phase the system will be installed by Woolworths Limited.
Figure 1: Diagrammatic presentation of the innovation plan
(Source: Novikova, pp-141)
The involvement of the users measures the key success of the innovation. There are many factors that promote the involvement of the users in terms of role of the leaders, user priorities and decision making (Novikova). It is very much important for the company to innovate the system in such a way so that it can minimize all the issues with traditional data management system. The involvement of the users gives many benefits to the company also. It involves beneficiaries that may empower the information system. The system gives learning opportunity and new skills to the users and at the same time exposes new experience to the users. It helps to shape the overall research work based on the views of the beneficiaries (Dash, Sudhansu, et al.). With the user involvement the project of the company and Woolworths Limited itself will be able to get better insights.
Innovation of Information System for Woolworths Limited
Traditionally, the company has a manual data management system where the employees had to insert data manually which was rime taken. In addition to this, there was a huge chance of error occurrence as the human resources are individually allotted to do the task of data entry. The implementation of the information system is quite costly (Al-Sakran, Hasan Omar). Thus, before the implementation of the system the finance manager are responsible to go through a feasibility study to make sure that, the implementation will be beneficial to Woolworths Limited. After analyzing the detail components of the system it has been found that, the cost that will be required for the successful completion of the information system is $100,000. Though, the amount is very high but still the operational and managerial issues will be completely resolved with the installation if the information system (Marnewick, Carl). It will give the company a reliable, flexible, secured server to the employees. This automated system will minimize the operational level errors. The innovation will be streamlined with the current organizational capabilities.
The information system that will be developed for the Woolworths Limited is though not based o the cloud platform but it has different technical functionalities associated to it. In order to develop the designs the developers are maintain four basic phases such as initiation, planning, development, testing and implementation. The system that is going to be developed for Woolworths Limited has different advanced functionalities (Novikova). The prototype of the information system shows all those operations in a single platform. All the small modules of the system are again interconnected to each other. There are three different testing phases through which the developers are required to run the information system (Benaben, Frederick, et al.). The three phases are unit testing, integrated testing and user acceptance testing. It is the responsibility of the developers to design the system in such a way so that the users can easily use it.
There are many contemporary business organizations those are refocusing their efforts on improving the business process and also revamping the traditional vertical functional structure in order to enhance their performance as well as better meet the requirements of the clients (Marnewick, Carl). The cross functional management is referred to as critical approach to the quality management model as it can wave together the vertical line and the functional management altogether with the horizontal functions of management. The very primary area of the application of the cross functional management includes quality management, cost management expense management, delivery management etc (Benaben, Frederick, et al). Quality improvement is a very important thing for any project to gain effective revenue and commercial profit from the competitive market (Armstrong). Not only this but also the developers are required to develop the product and services considering the all basic factors. In addition to this, the developers are required to develop a cross functional team that is comprise
Design Thinking
With the innovation and implementation of Information system in Woolworths Limited the company will be able to streamlines with the current capabilities of the organization. The cloud based Information System (IS) will give three different benefits in terms of application resilience, disaster recovery and backup storage (Li, Xin, et al.). The data those are lost can be retrieved or fetched easily with the help of the disaster recovery approach. It also gives high level security to the users it means that none of the eternal users will be access information from the server. Information system can improve the communication system, operation management and the record keeping system (Dash, Sudhansu, et al.). It has been found that, with the successful implementation of the system the company will be able to deliver a secured and user friendly system to the employees and to the consumers.
Conclusion
From the overall discussion it can be concluded that with the successful implementation of the innovation information system the business efficiency and the overall rate of commercial revenue will automatically increase. The issues associated to the traditional manual data management system can be completely resolved and minimized with the innovation of the advanced automated data management system. The involvement of the users with the system, the cross functional management, prototyping and testing capabilities are also illustrated in this report. In order to implement the information system a necessary action plan is also developed I this report. It is expected that, with the successful implementation of the information system Woolworths Limited will be able to operate all their functional abilities appropriately.
The future innovation that may affect the implementation of the information system is the cloud based system implementation. In future if a cloud based information system is implemented then that will affect the current innovation. If in future the company develops installs a cloud based Information system then it will give them a disaster recovery approach, application resilience and backup storage also (Armstrong). During the transmission of the information from the manual data management system to the automated system if any information is found to be lost then that can be retrieved easily due to the presence of backup storage. Not only can this but also due to human or technical error if any confidential credentials are lost from the serve then that again be retrieved with the help of the disaster recovery approach (Srivastava, Keerti, et al.). The company wide system will perform all the necessary actions to meet the target of the company that has been developed at the very initial phase of development. Fork model is a knowledge based model that is widely developed by the business organizations for increasing the commercial revenue and departmental requirement. The cloud based system will deliver a much secured server to the consumers and to the employees as well.
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