Key Responsibilities as the New Chief Information Officer
In this technology oriented world, the websites play a vital role in presenting the organizations. Any organization requires an effective website. Because, it acts as a means of communication for the customers. This case study projects on a small enterprise, (HDS) Hosted Desktop Solutions’ website which is not maintained well. Despite that, this enterprise provides hosted “open-source” IT solutions for both the small and medium sized businesses.
The organizations must perform business analysis, because their advice is worth to improve the business. The business analysts analyze the condition of the business, then identifies and evaluates important suggestions which can help to improve the business system. Further, after an appropriate option is selected the requirements are defined for effectively implement it to utilize the information systems foe fulfilling the business needs. The business analysts requires business knowledge to accomplish their role and responsibility of analyzing the business. The important business knowledge includes business case development, expertise in subject matter, business finance, knowledge related to the domain, structure of the organization, information technology principles, architecture of the business and supplier management. Additionally, the analysts must have skills related to communication, critical thinking, political awareness, relationship building, team working, influencing, analytical skills, giving attention to details, leadership, skills to solve problems, professional development and self-confidence.
They should be able to differentiate on significant and insignificant investment to improve the IT in the enterprise. It is essential that the business analysts have competencies on their professional techniques such as, investigation techniques, strategy analysis, Project management, stakeholder analysis and management, gap analysis, requirements engineering, data modelling, business modelling, facilitation skills, agile thinking and portfolio management.
HDS is a small enterprise which is located in Sydney’s IT hub of North Ryde. This company offers full services such as hardware and software installation, configuration, system management and website development along with intranets and extranets. Despite of active participation by the founders Bob and Jeff, the company lacks administration skills. The role and responsibilities of the staff is not defined in HDS, which follows, “Small family business culture.” Its customers are increasing and the founders, whereas the marketing and Customer Relationship Management are also taken care by them. Apart from this, they even handle delivering certain hosted services, from equipment within the premises; developing open source solutions and deployment of clients and its own applications. Seeing the current condition of HDS, the staff don’t feel secured when they think of their future, in this company. The current plan followed by the founders is, ad-hoc strategic plan. HDS has come to a conclusion that cloud computing could increase its opportunities and ensure expanding its services, especially in the education sector. It will help to maximize the revenue, market share and open more market opportunities.
Internal IT Constraints
The following are the main points noted related to the development of the website:
- Business objective is missing for the company i.e., vision and mission.
- The website design is old and retarded. It needs new look and feel.
- The can functionalities of the website are not up to the mark.
- Moreover, it is suggested that the HDS website have SEO strategy (Search Engine Optimization.
Thus, developing a new website will be helpful for the company.
Though HDS works on building various websites for its clients, its own website is not managed effectively. The founders are incapable to manage all the issues which are increasing with the growth of the business. They are similar management issues related to whether the organizational systems is in place or not, for smooth flow of operations in the enterprise. Earlier the founders took care of the internal IT, even after hiring a senior technician the internal IT was fixed by the founders itself, for immediate relief. This continued due to financial blocks i.e., delayed payment form the new clients. Due to the growth of the customers, the founders and the senior technician are away from office most of the time. This has led to this management issue, related to fixing the internal IT in their absence.
Currently, the issue noticed revolves around business IT development for building a new website, as the current website is outdated and lacks important functionalities that is required for an IT firm’s website. Moreover, the company has not updated its information from a long time.
I have been hired as CIO of HDS, which provides hosted “open-source” IT solutions for businesses irrespective of their size (mostly small to medium sized businesses). The founders are Bob and Jeff, who started working as a company only with their laptops. Despite of spending a lot of time on the IT needs of their clients, the founders are unable to attend the issues of their own business’s IT infrastructure, which has become ad-hoc and is incapable to meet the business’s demands on its current growth.
The key objective is to analyze the case study, find the internal IT constraints and issues faced by the firm, for resolving issues on managing and communicating IT solutions for the business.
When its internal IT infrastructure is analyzed it is observed that it networking capacity is underdone and it uses a four years old server for storage, networking, file sharing and for the legacy hosted applications for customers. The server box contain insufficient processing power/RAM, for adding to this issue, from few years the server set-up is becoming unstable, due to instant fixes made by the founders and the senior technician. However, another important point is that the staff’s computes have become old which has bad operating system, hardware and software versions. Further, the Email is hosted via Google Apps, and the hosting of website is done externally. The company works using both paper work and excel files for handling customer management system. This type of mixed approach method is not effective as it makes hard to identify any errors in the records maintained for the customers. The fact is that the current system comprises of incomplete CRM system and the Telephony is inadequate. The helpdesk email monitoring and response management faces high pressure, due to hosting complaints from the clients. HDS also has a separate application development, “box”, which lacks optimal maintenance and is very slow.
Hosted IT Solutions for Business Growth
It is observed that the stakeholder analysis is informal and hardly performed by the founders. Here, only the customers are focused and no one else. This focus on customers has damaged the relationships with the other business stakeholders, especially the internal stakeholders, which has drastic impact on the value creation, productivity and innovation in the organization. With the increasing customers, the complexity with the clients’ projects is also increasing. Additionally, for a successful delivery, the stakeholder and requirements management is turning out to be extremely significant.
The analysis has determined that the company lacks vision and mission statement. Moreover, it has no “tag” line for the business. Only once SWOT analysis was done that too eight years back. The company has not followed any documentation for the critical issued faced by the firm. It has not followed any formal process to identify the constraint for resolving management issues, except time and cost. It has not determined negative impacts which affect the output. In this case, quality is a strategic driver which impacts the company’s sustainability, but HDS gives quality third preference among time, cost and quality. Because, the company is buking up on managing the operational delivery time and cost.
Thus, the case study highlights the challenges and issues of HDS over website development, communication and management of business solutions.
This case study concentrates on improvising HDS’s business by managing its own website effectively. As a newly appointed CIO (Chief Information Officer) of the enterprise, I will have to focus on managing the company’s website, which has been ignored by the founders. The objective is to manage and communicate IT solutions for the business.
Henceforth, as a CIO my responsibilities to meet the objective are listed below:
- To help in gathering necessary requirements for building a new website of HDS.
- To contribute in developing the website.
- To help the founders to update the shared information on the website.
- To manage and communicate IT solutions.
- To give inputs to improve the functionalities, then look and feel of the website.
- To ensure business IT development.
My role of Chief Information Officer (CIO) is to make sure to accomplish the objectives and make the founders get benefited with the following client service needs and new business opportunities:
- To manage increased growth of the business.
- Updated website with accurate information.
- Increasing stability and organizational performance.
- To concentrate on internal strategic activities to help the company continue its growth and innovation, along with the current culture, which is caring and supportive.
- To work on strategic activities.
- To concentrate on the application development strategy.
The scope of any product development project will get changed in the middle of the project, because the stakeholders might think about adding new features to the product. Thus, the changes can result in setting new requirements. However, the changes cannot be avoided, and the company must be ready to schedule the project and increase the budget. If this step is not taken it can result in risks and increases rework (“Scope & Change Control”, 2018).
Therefore, change control is necessary to save from further modifications in the project. But, the best method to combat with the scope and sneaking requirements is to actively engage the company’s key stakeholders in the scope and requirements development and baseline activities (Ewens, Vrij, Jang & Jo, 2014). It is necessary to have stakeholders, because their participation and engagement helps to decrease the adverse effects of change (Shannonhouse & Myers, 2014). Additionally, it will decrease rework, cost overruns and schedule slips.
- Design a WBS (Work Breakdown Structure), execution plan and CBS.
- Hire a control team.
- Create a project management plan and maintain required documents. For instance, cost break down, staffing plan and risk register
- Finally, it must end with a baseline, to execute the project.
- After documenting the baseline, finalize it review it and agree the terms and conditions. The appropriate team is given a copy for tracking the measures, forecasts and reports.
- The project control team generates a baseline summary document which contains milestones, cost and important points.
Stakeholder and Communication Management
Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Integration Initiative will help in accomplishing the above steps, because it helps to adopt more effective management practices (“Software Engineering Management Practices Capability Maturity Model Integration Initiative”, n.d.).
Further, maintain baseline documents for evaluating the needs in each phase of the project i.e., maintain the following documents (“Understanding the Project Baseline”, 2018):
- Project schedule
- Project estimates
- Plan for staffing
- Execution plan
- Internal management risk assessments
Cost baseline
Set the cost baseline for the website development as $9,000, and its monthly maintenance fee as $500 (Spacey, 2016).
Change control is a process which requests reviewing, approving, and performs controlling changes to deliverables of the project. This process is applied when deliverable’s first version is completed and agreed. Moreover, this process helps the team to change the project scope with the help of specified controls and policies. Change can include anything that would impact the project’s budget, time, scope, which affects the quality (Carman, 2018).
In the last stage of identifying and analyzing requirements, if any issues or conflicts emerge, then follow the below mentioned steps to resolve them:
- Check whether the preconditions are fulfilled or not (Aldekhail, Chikh & Ziani, 2016) (De, 2012).
- Consider significant of the cause and the manager must ensure evaluating the cause effect chain (“Annex 2: Conflict Management Tools”, 2018).
- If not check perception and understand the conflicts (“Conflict at Work”, 2018) (Peansupap & Cheang, 2015).
The following sets of steps help in determining how the requirements can be reviewed (Brandenburg, 2018):
- Set the stage i.e., send emails to know that there is a meeting on so and so data, then mention their role for providing feedbacks on the requirements.
- Prepare for the meeting with project documents and project it using LCD, and even have extra copy of the document for the team members.
- As a CIO, go through the requirements beforehand to avoid time wastage.
- Ask for feedbacks, comments, questions and clarifications (WEISSMAN, 2010).
- Update the points in the document, when the team agrees with the review and send the same to them electronically, to remember.
- Finally, mention that so and so edits will be made and make sure everyone is convinced.
Follow the below mentioned steps to secure approval of the requirements from appropriate authority stakeholders:
- Build effective understanding of the solution.
- Make sure that the stakeholders who have approval authority are in agreement with the requirements that the solution will be met.
- Get approval from the finance manager for funding.
- If possible, even take approval from the procurement manager and the staffing manger.
- Get project management procedure with effective schedule (Mochal, 2007).
Project management tool can be used for organizing and examining the impacts of the set of requirements when they are organized. It will also help to view and record the dependencies like critical path, relation of lead and lag can be checked. The task complete or not and its constraints (lack of resource) and dependencies and its effect can be related (“What are dependencies in project management?”, 2018).
Impact assessment helps to check and ensures the set road map is followed or not. It helps to find the sustainability of the services with respect to the development of service. It works as performance measurement. It works on the impact assessment to emphasis change in a specific way.
Impact analysis can be performed as follows:
- Impose periodic analysis of information
- Monitor, learn, improve and assess the performance.
- Evaluation must be enforced during meetings.
- Monitor the activities.
- Monitor the results.
Deployment of requirements management is helpful, because it helps to trace the requirement for compliance with the purposes. It improves the scope and dependency management (Derakhshanmanesh, Fox & Ebert, 2013). It discards inconsistencies in the requirements methodologies and discards the issues in relation with the stakeholder requirements alignment. Finally, ensures controlling the issues (Alexander, 2018).
The following a set of necessary requirement management tools which are important (“List of Requirements Management Tools”, 2018):
- Polarion Requirements (17.1), for requirement management.
- ALM Enterprise / Quality Center Enterprise (12.55) by Micro Focus for testing, issue management and project management.
- Kanban Tool, for supporting the workflow.
The following are the requirements which HDS will use it for a long term:
- Policies
- Business values
- Vision
- Mission
- Functional and technical requirements
- Capital
- Company Website
- IT infrastructure
- Employees
- Software and hardware
- CRM
- Project Management
- Requirements management
- Office Building
- Other office assets like table, desk and so on.
Project Management Methodologies
The following are the requirements which are available for future re-use (Chernak, 2018):
- Software:The software can be reused in future for maintenance and challenging the IT community.
- Vision and Mission: Forremembering the mission and vision of the company.
- Portfolio of the enterprise: For sharing the information of the enterprise.
- Business Rules: For smooth flow of processes.
- SLA: For standard agreements and understanding
Conclusion
It is concluded that, any organization must concentrate on its management, analyzing internal and external environments, strategic developments, IT solutions and its maintenance. It is understood that, the baseline test helps to measure the performance of the service, before it reaches the customer. The performance must be tested. It is expensive to create a usable baseline, so the best thing that can be done is noting down the variable factors which can alter the test results. The baseline test can be run effective under the control state. On the other hand, managing requirements can help to establish and maintain the agreement between the customers and the team members on system’s changing requirements. Therefore, it is necessary to establish and implement change impact analysis and approval process. Make sure the requirement are right and complete, only then establish a change control process and make sure that the requirements are traceable.
A new website development is the object of this report for managing and communicating IT business solution. The case study is analyzed, the internal IT constraints and issues faced by the firm are also identified, to resolve the issues of managing and communicating IT solutions.
The following are the main points noted related to the development of the website- Business objective is missing for the company i.e., vision and mission; the website design is old and retarded. It needs new look and feel; the can functionalities of the website are not up to the mark; moreover, it is suggested that the HDS website have SEO strategy.
Thus, developing a new website will be helpful for the company and its development is expected to improve company’s communication, income and quality of service. Importance of conflict management and requirements management tools is discussed. The founders are expected to have opportunity with the following:
- By managing increased growth of the business.
- By have an updated website with accurate information.
- By increasing stability and organizational performance.
- By concentrating on internal strategic activities to help the company continue its growth and innovation, along with the current culture, which is caring and supportive.
- By working on strategic activities.
- By concentrating on the application development strategy.
References
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Alexander, M. (2018). How to pick the best requirements management tool. Retrieved from https://www.cio.com/article/3053082/project-management/how-to-pick-the-best-requirements-management-tool.html
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Peansupap, V., & Cheang, L. (2015). Identifying Issues of Change Leading to Cost Conflicts: Case Study in Cambodia. Procedia Engineering, 123, 379-387. doi: 10.1016/j.proeng.2015.10.050
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