Project Selection For Widget ‘R Us Sustainability

Alternatives for Achieving Organizational Goals

(Table 5: Binder 2016)

Widget ‘R Us (WRU) is a firm known having expertise in manufacturing and designing of widget.  Globalization has changed the market scenario where the demands for developing widgets have increased significantly.  WRU has been lagging behind and has been unable to keep up with the change in demand in the market. The market has become dynamic and the company products are slow to respond and the competitors have developed innovative products. The organization has been unable to take counter measures and forecast the change in product specifications.  The organization is also facing internal issues as well where the internal communication is poor. The majority of the information goes to the higher authorities that have authority on the specific information. The team work between departments is worse and each department blames other department for problem faced by WRU. Therefore, the organization will have to develop a project in order to mitigate the internal issues and the technical issues faced by the organization.  

The current approaches, existing products, technologies are relevant to the new products as the organizational approaches are inadequate and they lack in innovation and technology. The organization has been known for their low cost servings and in order to improve their operational efficiency the organization will have to use the new approaches and technologies used by rival companies (Schwalbe  2015). The organization requires drastic change in their organizational policy and their product specifications so present approaches, existing products and technologies in the market are a key to maintaining organizational sustainability.

(Table 1: Summerville, Uzsoy and Gaytán 2015)

In this current business case, there are three alternatives to achieving the goals of the organization and managing their sustainability.

Table 2

The project selection matrix has been instrumental in evaluating the alternative options in this business case.  The evaluation shows that project 2 is the appropriate project as the weighted score is highest in the project. The different criteria that are essential for the success and sustainability are set as the parameters of evaluation. The factors are relevancy to organizations objectives well developed Internal support, potential market(large), relevancy and realism of technology,  implementation in six months, addresses the organizational issues and  low level of risk which are key to gaining competitive advantage. The weight has been provided as per the importance of each of the criteria and rankings have been provided based on the ability of the project to address those criteria on a scale of 1-100. The cumulative weighted score of the projects are used to determine the project that is most appropriate for mitigating the issues faced by the organization.

Project Selection Matrix

The project selection matrix has been developed and the weighted score model has been used to calculate the feasibility of each of the projects. The results show that the project 2 has the highest weighted score so it is the project having maximum effectiveness in the organizational context.

This project will be developed to bring about transformational changes to the operations and products of Widget ‘R U (WRU).

The mission of the project is development widgets that are technologically superior in the market and restructuring of the organization to prevent loss of information and better management of the organization.

The project objectives consist of outcomes and results of the study. The objectives of the project are as follows:

• Developing technologically advanced widgets at low cost
• Restricting of the organization to increase the effectiveness of the management

The project requirements will consist of the specifications of the new organizational structure and the specifications of the new technologically advanced widget. The requirements of the project are as follows:

• Developing an flat hierarchical structure
• Increasing the  implementation speed
• Improving the communication level with the organization
• Develop packaging format for the new widget
• Develop configuration document for the new widget
• Develop Application programming interface for the widget
• Improve the user experience and standardize the few aspects of the user agents
• Develop effective security options along with digital signatures

(Table 3: Kerzner and Kerzner 2017) 

The key performance indicators are the tools and techniques used to measure the performance of the project (Nicholas and Steyn 2017). The measurement and tracking of the key performance indicators are critical in order to evaluate the progress and deviation from the actual requirement. The key performance indicators in the project are as follows:

• Cycle time: The time taken for completion of each of the tasks in the project is essential for understanding the duration needed.
• Schedule Adjustments:  The number of adjustments made to the project schedule and finish date of the overall project.
• Budget Variance: The budget prepared in the project plan is the estimated budget and the actual budget in general varies. Therefore, baselines are set which will measure the variance from the projected budget.
• Quality metrics: This consists of measuring the different quality aspects of the products including the quality and errors of the products. The consumer feedback and their satisfaction regarding the product will also be evaluated.
• Returns:  The cost benefit analysis of the project and the actual returns from the project will have to be tallied to identify the return from the project.

The feasibility study of the project can be understood by evaluating the current capabilities of the organization in respect to the project. WRU is capable of investing the amount required for the project and the benefit obtained from the project is also high as it will help in reaching the desired target. The project has its own weaknesses and strengths but the project is realistic in nature and the organizational capabilities are well suited to the current project needs. The time span of the project and the cost of the project are within the organizational capabilities and weighted scoring model has shown that this project is appropriate for the organization and will facilitate in mitigating the issues faced by Widget ‘R U (WRU).

The strengths of the project are as follows:

• The project is addressing all the issues by Widget ‘R U (WRU)
• The project will transform the organizational activities and product to provided sustainability in the market
• The project will be completed within a affordable budget of the organization
• The project will establish better management of human resources within the organization

The weaknesses of the project are as follows:

• The widget will be developed according to the current consumer trends and market trends which can change at any point of time making the product redundant
• The project is not focused on innovation and product upgradation has not been taken into account

The project will require approval from the project owner, sponsor and the project board where they approve the requirement based on the requirements of the consumers. The project manager will also provide approval for proceeding with each of the phases of the tasks and the team manager will provide approvals for proceeding with each of the tasks.

Feasibility Study

The project assumptions are as follows:

• Project owner, sponsor and board has given approval of all the requirements of the project
• The other departments have been made aware of the purpose of the project so that the other departments and teams can align their work in respect to the project
• The code of conduct of the regulatory bodies will be taken into account before proceeding with the task
• The other departments will cooperate with the work that has to be done is case of additional help is required
• The software will be developed by taking into all the current market specifications

The constraints in the current project are as follows:

• The project has a time constraint of 200 days
• The project has a budget constraint of $45,000.00
• The project board has set a human resource constraint of 15 people
• The project will have to comply with the applications of Prince 2 in project management
• The widget requirements cannot be changed after the fourth phase of the project so the project team and the board will have to clear about the requirement of the project so that timeline can be maintained

The possible improvements in project are as follows:

• The goals of the project scan be made more realistic and accurate
• The resources can be harmonized in a better way
• The project scope can be made broader and address other grey areas if the budget is increased
• The organization can hire better talents for ensuring the success  of the project
• There are possible improvements in the field of fund seeking

(Table 4: Eskerod and Jepsen 2016)

The project will develop effective communication plan which will be essential for developing team work and team bonding (Harrison and Lock 2017). Moreover, this will prevent delay in approval and supply of essential components for the project.

(Table 6: Kerzner 2018)

(Table 7: Fuller et al .2017)

This is the projected budget and real life prices have been taken into consideration. However, there are other complexities and processes which are involved in a ICT project which has not been taken into account in the report. The project will have to set baseline budget for each of the task so that budget limit can be controlled.

(Table 8: Martinelli and Milosevic 2016)

(Table 9: Tomanek and Juricek 2015)

The make or buy analysis of the project shows that product development is more feasible than product outsourcing. The organization is known for their cheap services and outsourcing of the products will drastically increase the cost of their products. The cost of outsourcing the project to developing countries could have been beneficial for large scale and medium organizations (Battista et al. 2017). However, as WRU is a medium scale organization it would not be problematic for the organization to outsource the product. Therefore, outsourcing the development of their widget could provide them with the best possible result in the current situation.

Conclusion 

Thus, it can be concluded from the report that effective project management plan has been developed which will be used for restricting of the organization and developing a Widget that is equivalent to the products offered to the market. The project schedule, deliverables, milestones, risks and quality control metrics have been defined in the report.

References

Battista, F., Camacho, Y.M., Hernández, S., Bensaid, S., Herrmann, A., Krause, H., Trimis, D. and Fino, D., 2017. LCA evaluation for the hydrogen production from biogas through the innovative BioRobur project concept. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 42(19), pp.14030-14043.

Binder, J., 2016. Global project management: communication, collaboration and management across borders. Routledge.

Eskerod, P. and Jepsen, A.L., 2016. Project stakeholder management. Routledge.

Fuller, M.A., Valacich, J.S., George, J.F. and Schneider, C., 2017. Information Systems Project Management: A Process and Team Approach, Edition 1.1. Prospect Press.

Harrison, F. and Lock, D., 2017. Advanced project management: a structured approach. Routledge.

Kerzner, H. and Kerzner, H.R., 2017. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Kerzner, H., 2018. Project management best practices: Achieving global excellence. John Wiley & Sons.

Martinelli, R.J. and Milosevic, D.Z., 2016. Project management toolbox: tools and techniques for the practicing project manager. John Wiley & Sons.

Nicholas, J.M. and Steyn, H., 2017. Project management for engineering, business and technology. Taylor & Francis.

Schwalbe, K., 2015. Information technology project management. Cengage Learning.

Summerville, N., Uzsoy, R. and Gaytán, J., 2015. A random keys genetic algorithm for a bicriterion project selection and scheduling problem. International Journal of Planning and Scheduling, 2(2), pp.110-133.

Tomanek, M. and Juricek, J., 2015. Project risk management model based on PRINCE2 and SCRUM frameworks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.03595.

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