Background
This year, the assignment gives you quite a bit of flexibility as PM to work out how you will deploy your staff and what they will cost - given a basic set of parameters. Feel free to research the basic scenario and come up with an option for the firm.
Unlike in previous years, there is only one part to this assignment - MS Project, so focus on researching the background information as PM and be creative in your implementation.
Project Justification: Standish Roberts is one of the oldest legal firms in Sydney, 1 and in line with the provenance of such a firm, it has had some difficulty moving to the digital age. Standish Roberts does have IT in place - (they would not be in business in 2016 if they did not), but their IT is now outdated and an upgrade is required.
The firm employs roughly 60 lawyers and para-professionals, varying from article clerks through to recent graduates to senior partners.
You however are Bryant May the CIO (which in a law firm also makes you the project manager 2). Standish Roberts needs legal databases accessible sooner rather than later, and given the age of the firm, it has also been financially successful so money is not so much of an object!
You have under you 8 IT staff, so including yourself there are 9 IT staff. You have 1 law librarian in this mix who is also IT trained, but his main role is really searching the paper-based and now online legal databases for the law staff, particularly the older lawyers as the younger ones are quite familiar with IT, having used all manner of databases during their degree within the last decade. Naturally the younger lawyers in the firm are IT savvy (they are frustrated the firm is slow in upgrading the IT, but the status of the firm overcomes this downside of not so up to date IT).
In essence, there is you (CIO/PM), 1 law librarian, 2 BAs, 1 help-desk support, 2 developers and 2 network specialists.
Given the post 9/11 focus on security, the firm's senior partners have it in their heads that a ‘firewall' is needed for an ‘intranet' so that they can store their legal work securely on in-house servers and use legal databases on this same intranet - which can occasionally be updated from the cloud if and when the need arises. In short the firm is not keen on conducting its business solely in the cloud. 3
It is your role as CIO/PM to implement fully this intranet, with associated hardware/software upgrade, legal databases (6 of them) and the appropriate network backbone to support the intranet. This is not a COMP247/347 assignment, so we are talking about the basics of an intranet here - not a highly technical implementation. We are focused more on staffing - who, how much, for how long?
Now the difficult part is that you as CIO/PM have to:
a. work out the basics of what an intranet is going to look like
b. how many hours you are going to have your different staff working on this task, given you have 8 weeks to deliver the intranet, and a total budget of 90k 4 5
c. make notes to the senior partners justifying your assumptions.
1. Implement the above project scope into MS Project 2013 (or appropriate software). The following table forms an idea of the tasks/subtasks to be implemented. Remember the staffing, cost and timeframe constraints you have been provided with. You are free to modify these WBSs as you see appropriate
Again feel free to modify this WBS as you feel appropriate to your task as PM - I provide the WBS below as a starting point.
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Initiating
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Form project team
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Develop project charter
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Planning
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Develop project plan
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Develop and refine other plans
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Define risks and risk management approach
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Create WBS
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Requirements Analysis
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Define requirements
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Evaluate current intranets
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Define user requirements
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Define content requirements
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Define system requirements
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Define specific functionality
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System Design
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Modelling in UML
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Check constraints on models
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Make final decision on platform to be adopted
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Implementing
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Setting up network
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Testing
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Roll Out
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Undertake technical writing of completed system
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Communicate roll out plan to users
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Conduct user training
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Release internal PR
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Support
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Determine what support resources are needed
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Make appropriate staffing changes
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Determine support process
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Conduct Post Implementation Review (PIR)
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Closing
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Prepare and deliver final report and presentation
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2. How long will the project take in days and weeks? Why is this the case? How have you calculated this?
3. Provide the critical path for your implementation. Illustrate your critical path using a sequence of nodes and edges along the following lines.
You may just use the network diagram in MS Project and modify/comment to illustrate your point, rather than redrawing from scratch.
4. Provide a discussion/explanation of your approach - how did you arrive at your costings, timeframes, how staff were allocated etc.
Algorithm
1. Implement the project scope into MS Project 2013 (or appropriate software) with the basic parameters you have been provided, indenting subtasks appropriately.
a. Use the outline numbering feature to display the outline numbers. For example your WBS should start with
i. 1.0 Initiating
b. Enter any durations or dependencies
c. Show costing (hourly rate) for your staff members 6
2. Create a pdf document from your MS Word (or whatever) document in which you have:
a. MS Project WBS charts, including:
i. Gantt chart
ii. Network diagram
iii. Resource graphs (before and after showing correction for over-allocations).
iv. Critical path etc.
v. Explanation (q. 4) of what you have done etc.
1. One MS Project (2013 or appropriate) file.
2. One pdf file containing your MS project solutions (q 1), which will include:
a. MS Project WBS charts, including
i. Gantt chart
ii. Network diagram
iii. Resource graphs etc.