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Consider the case of approving a loan application. In the manual process, it takes 6 persons and considerable amount of time to accept the details, calculating risks and repayment capabilities and letting the application trail through hands of various functional levels. But, when we reengineer the above process, the whole process may be converted to…
While reengineering a business enterprise, we create a process based organization structure for the enterprise to avoid the inefficiencies and time wasting business process cycles as in a functions based organization. ie – the business process information systems and the enterprise wide information infrastructure are integrated in such a way that the people of various functions…
The three basic approaches to reengineering are as follows – 1. STREAMLIING 2. INTEGRATING 3. TRANSFORMING 1. Streamlining – Streamlining approach to reengineering the business offers a basic, segmented, quick-fix methodology for reengineering. It cleans up and treats symptoms but doesn’t necessarily transform a process nor find a cure for a bad process. It doesn’t…
We can generalize Business Process Reengineering (BPR) efforts as an eight step process as follow – Step 1: Formulate / Modify business visions, policies, objectives Step 2: Formulate / Modify business strategies according to changing customer requirements, technology changes and competition Step 3: Analyze the existing business process cycles & workflows and determine how they…
Re-engineering or Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is way of rethinking or redesigning the existing business systems both in technical and behavioral terms. The ultimate goal of BPR is to continuously improve the business process cycles so that a total quality is built to the business system, its processes & workflows that reflects as high quality products…
A classic example would be the project my company executed before the formal PM processes were implemented. The project’s core requirement was to generate reporting system for Medical Underwriting process. There was no Risk Planning for sure, otherwise the company would not have gone through two major design changes and the most worse cases of…
Suppose you called a meeting with your project team, various experts and the stakeholders, to start the risk planning process. One of the senior people asks, “Why are we doing this, anyway? It’s your job to deliver this project — are you saying that the project is already in danger of going down the tubes?”…
EMV is a statistical concept (with a defined formula) which calculates average outcome when there is uncertainty in the final outcome (more than one possible outcome), where as Decision Tree model is an enabling analysis tool to represent the available decision choices as decision tree with their monetary value and probability of occurrence. So I…
Project size and Project Risk: Another interesting topic in Project Management world. From my experience with software development, I think that project risk increases with the size of the project (I guess the size of the product would be directly proportional to the project size). Here is the reason – Consider that software product consists…
Interesting question as I wonder this situation (Risk of failure due to interpersonal issues) is often less addressed anywhere. I shall address the situation using formal approach. Definition of Risk and symptoms: I would consider that the Risk (Project failure due to interpersonal issues within the team or between the team and other stakeholders) is already…
What kind of team-building exercises and/or motivational practices have you used, or participated in? Would you recommend them for use by others? Have you been involved in a project that did not use such an activity or practice, but could have benefited from it? Team building experience: The crux of all the team building methods are…
One of the major Software Quality issue that I experienced is with product xyz which my current employer deployed as the Version control and Change control system (SCCM). xyz is one of the major players (not the top performer) which offers composite package of Version control and Software Change Control management (SCCM). Our company was…
Define one or two aspects of IT product quality that should be considered when planning software project activities. How can they be measured? What are the foreseeable consequences of poor quality from your example(s)? How can the negative consequences be avoided? Interesting question. Some of the most important software quality aspects are – Scope aspect of quality that…
What quality programs, formal or informal, have you experienced in your work? How well do you feel they were implemented? What was the level of management involvement? If you have not experienced working in such an environment, what would you look for to determine whether a company’s quality program was working? I have had experience…
Describe how you would go about finding the root cause of unsatisfactory Earned Value measurements on a project, and what measures you might take to bring the project back into plan. Please be specific. Let’s say that two members of the team, working on unrelated tasks, have both run significantly over schedule in the same…
How do you feel about the concept of such time accounting for technology professionals? (e.g. compared to just reporting progress via e-mail or a progress reporting form.) I guess, this is one the easiest ways to track actual cost/effort estimates for any IT project, so best suited for IT professionals. Reporting progress via email or…
System Background (circumstances):Most of the employers uses a web based time logging application that falls into the category of time attendance systems that we are addressing in this discussion. The goal of the system is to track employee hours spend during a working day under various project heads. The idea is that the top management…
I guess, since we have lesser amount of time left (6 weeks as opposed to 1 year), I would certainly let the sponsor know that we need to utilize ‘Crashing‘ method to compress the schedule and would make sure that the sponsor is willing to put in money for extra resources to do the remaining…
If you were managing a software development project that was a year away from completion and the project sponsor asked you to cut a month from the schedule, what would you tell him or her? What factors would you consider? How would you determine an answer? I would warn him about increased cost in terms…
One of the projects that I executed for one of my employers was an internal employee goal tracking system. The system enables employees from CEO to bottom level, enter their goals supporting their superior’s goals. According to user levels, there is ability to view/edit/approve/reject goals and there are mechanisms to conduct performance management. This project…
Change in IT projects’ life cycle is inevitable. This points at the importance of establishing means to identify, control and document change in a formal approach. There will be changes in Technology, resources and organizational priorities. Equally important is change requests that initiates from the customer/user. In my experience with software development, these change requests…
Scenario: Nicek is a senior technical leader and got a recent promotion as Project Manager, but was not given appropriate training in PM process. Below is what happened and some advice to avoid the gotchas. I think, the main problem in the case was the lack of PM focus in company’s work culture. There was…
Below is a sample work breakdown structure for an online attendance management system that I worked on in the past –
Project background: Developer xyz was in the middle of a project that went several scope changes while in UAT. The project is about implementing capability in the current Underwriting software to do pre-issue Medical Underwriting. The project was initiated by client request to modify the software to account for some new insurance product feature. The system…
I would prefer the mind mapping technique to arrive at WBS (work break down structure), due to my liking for problem solving by visualization and modeling techniques. Another reason to like that technique is that it is very much similar to various modeling tools that we use during the System Analysis phase of product development…
Project description: Project for xyz that included development, maintenance and enhancements to the official web site and web-based intranet applications that supported integrated work flows within various departments. I was leading a team of team members including developers, web-designer and Mr X. Communication Issue: During my tenure leading the project, I have encountered situations where I had…
Project Management skill is very important in information management area. Let me paint a historical (early 2000) projet lead role where I was responsible for managing the E-governance project for the state of Maharashtra, India. Let me frankly state that, we had no defined project management process in place that adheres to PMBOK guidelines. The project processes…
XYZ Company Web Site Concept Draft “Becoming industry’s premier outsourcing solution for managed care services” Overview For the past decade, xyz.coom (fictitious) has been the major online presence for XYZ Company for serving the online needs of its customers as well as exhibiting its capabilities and services to the industry. XYZ Company’s core strategy is to continue generating…
Strategic alignment of IT resources – A case study in Grocery industry (Part 2) Japan UK Spain US Effect of economic situation The effect of recession has prompted Japanese to be more cautious while selecting grocery stores to shop. This situation is breeding ground for underdeveloped private label market in Japan to capitalize…
Strategic Alignment of IT Resources Grocery Industry Kathleen Chan, Deepesh Joseph, Raymond Jones, Paul Walleck Introduction To investigate how and why grocery companies are aligning their information and communication resources (ICT?s) (hardware, software, networks, databases, service offerings, processes, and portal layers) around a focal strategy. Grocery Industry Introduction • NAICS 445110: Supermarkets and Other Grocery…