The History Of The Electronics

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Part 1 Project Management

Describe a project you are currently working on for school or work or your personal hobbies and interests that would benefit from Project Management concepts and tools, listing at least two Project Management knowledge areas and two benefits. If you are not working on any projects, use your imagination to create one and describe this instead.

The project I'm currently working on is to create a tutor-student website which acts as a third party to basically match the student's preferred option in terms of modules, experience of tutor, tutor's race and gender, etc, to the respective tutors and be the matchmaker to link them together and earn commission from it. Basically, the student will search for the tutors with their preferred options in the search engine, and the system will retrieve the result from the database, which then display to let the student pick their preferred tutors. After choosing their tutor, our website will link them up by sending emails and SMS to inform them. The project team consists of 4 programmers and 3 multimedia designers. It was first started on October 2012 and were expecting to be complete by February 2014. Some of the knowledge areas that my project would gain benefits from:

Time Management

By planning a detailed schedule for each section of the project work and monitor the progress against the milestones to help in keeping the project work on the run and able to meet the deadline. Developing the website and database requires lot of time and effort, therefore with time management, the project will be able to meet all the milestones datelines and smoothly progress till the completion of the project.

Risk Management

Risk management is a very critical and important part that have to be considered when doing such IT projects because it is used to identify and review those risks for failure and how it can be predicted in advance to prevent such failure when the project is up and running for business. For example, the database needs to be able to foreseen the future and be designed properly else when the problem starts to arise, it will not only waste additional costs to alter the database, it will also causes the business operation to be affected.

Describe the main knowledge areas of project management. How do these apply to your example?

Answer:

Main Knowledge Areas

Scope Management

Often the main problem area of every failed development projects because of its constantly changing system requirements demand. Scope creep means that the addition of new functions to the new system requirements after its initial phase of discovery activities and system specifications design planning. Thus, the project manager must emphasize the important of the impact of adding new requirements to the team members and users, so that the project can be completed by the given dateline and within the budget of the project.

Time Management

Managing the project schedule to meet the client's demand dateline to produce the completed project. Time management techniques is all about planning and editing the project schedule with milestones to be met, monitoring the project progress against the milestones and trying to shorten the project schedule using various optimization techniques. The project manager must manage and ensure that the project schedule able to accommodates all the work to be done and complete the project on time.

Cost Management

Managing cost and time is very much related with each other, when the projects that requires additional time and efforts, it will naturally cost more because of additional human resource costs. Cost management is about analyzing the estimated benefits and estimated anticipated project costs and do comparison between them before any project begins. It will monitor the actual project expenditures which allows the project manager to control and not spending exceeding the project budget. The effectiveness of the cost control will determine the project is whether profitable or not.

Quality Management

One of the key responsibility for the project manager is to ensure the quality of the final project outcome. Project manager must establish a quality plan and quality control activities for each project phase. Especially for developing software as it is more subject to errors and failures. The failure of a single line programming code in the software can bring down the entire system and causes inconvenient to the users. As the society becomes more dependent on technology, some of the systems were used on our daily lives, such as, traffic control system, telephone and communication systems which demand extremely high level of accuracy and performance. The objective of project quality management must be able to produce a system that is user-friendly, designed for its intended purposes, robustness, reliability and maintainability.

Human Resource Management

The employees are the most important asset to any companies. In order to produce any project smoothly and efficiently as possible, the project manager must establish a working environment suitable for the project team. Human resource management techniques basically consists about six primary objectives such as, acquisition of staff when needed, provide appropriate training for project members, organise the project team for better effective work, encouraging team members to improve their work efficiency, provide vision and leadership to team members as to motivate them and lastly optimize the working environment as to ensure that the facilities, tools and support are well provided. It is important for project manager to utilize the human resource management techniques as they are required clear obstacles so that the project team able to develop the project smoothly.

Communications Management

Communication is the most important key aspect for any project to be successful, imagine if there are no communication in the project team, there won't be any flow of information from internal and external sources, which will then definitely become a failure project. Basically it's to organize the discussion of communications from all the sources and ensure that the necessary information is gathered properly, accurately and have a smooth flow of information shared with the team members throughout the project.

Risk Management

Risk management is critical if any projects wants to be successful. In order to prevent from such failure, the project manager must determine and review the potential areas of high risk and then to develop strategies and plans to prevent, monitor and control the identified project risks.

Procurement Management

It is about dealing with providers that offers specific hardware, software or services and to manage and control the performance of the provider. Procurement management is a wide complex area which can range from developing of request for proposals, negotiate contracts, perform assessment to daily work relationships and chains of authority.

Integration Management

A key element of project management that coordinates all the aspects of a project which to ensure that all processes are running smoothly of the project. Integration management involves six processes from development of the project charter, project plan, process of project execution, manage the project work, control of integrated changes and closure of the project upon completion.

How do these apply to your example?

Scope Management

Scope management will manage my project to keep it on track and allow the project manager to verify the new additional requests functions and consider its benefits before adding the functions into the scope. For example, if the request is to add additional attribute into the database system, it will affect lot of areas such as, the system interfaces, input forms, output reports, etc. Therefore, project manager must control the additional requests for new functions to avoid scope creep problems.

Time Management

With the help of time management techniques, my project team will manage their time properly to meet and complete the milestones. This allows us to concentrate on each milestone at a time and finish the work within the given date, which will then help in overall project schedule and able to complete the project without any delays.

Cost Management

Every projects absolutely require cost management, if there is no cost control, the projects will definitely spend over the budget and will become a failure project. This apply to my project too, maintaining the cost is a very important issue especially for designing a database. Developing database can be very expensive, therefore we should try to control and reduce the expenses, so that the project can remain within the budget till completion.

Quality Management

Quality control for each phase of my project would be able to prevent from errors, bugs in the future and provide a more user-friendly and stable business web operations. The development of each phase of the website and database requires high quality work, as to ensure that each functions such as searching for tutors details from the database, should not have any problems retrieving the information to the users.

Human Resource Management

Having an excellent working environment for us to concentrate on our project does improve our working condition efficiency. With the help of human resource management, our project manager treat our project team well and motivates us, which make us work happily together in the team and able to complete each milestones quickly and easily.

Communications Management

Communication management has played a part in our project team as well, internal communication among our project team is extremely important because we have to keep each other updated, such as, our development of the programming section, as to avoid any programming issues and other decisions and technical issues..

Risk Management

Being able to foreseen and predict the risks ahead, allow us to develop strategies to prevent it from occurring. Especially for IT projects, as it is more prone to high-risk failure according to the history with many failed projects. Our project manager able to identify the potential risks, for example, towards the database approach, the installation and management cost, complexity and conversion costs, etc. This allow the project manager to develop plans for all these identified risks.

Procurement Management

Our project team uses procurement management to deal with our providers such as, web hosting providers and database site providers. The project manager uses the techniques to manage and evaluate other alternative providers.

Integration Management

Our project manager uses the integration management techniques to deal with all the processes from the initiated planning of projects and up to the completion of the project.

Using your example above, draw basic WBS and network diagram for your tasks

Answer:

WBS:

1.0 Conduct initial planning

1.1 Listen to stakeholders suggestions and opinions

1.2 Conduct research about the project

1.3 Develop the project structure layout

2.0 Design the website and database

2.1 Draw the website storyboard

2.2 Write all the required features of the website

2.3 Draw ER-Diagram for the database

2.4 Check the ER-Diagram with the required features

2.5 Final check the ER-Diagram upon implementation

3.0 Program the website and database

3.1 Start programming the website

3.2 Edit the websites to any modification requests

3.3 Start programming the database

3.4 Check for database anomalies

4.0 Test the website features and functions

4.1 Check the produced website with the initial design planning

4.2 Check the produced database with the ER-Diagram

4.3 Test all the web features and functions

4.4 Access the database from the web

4.5 Final test on the whole project operations

5.0 Set the website up for business

Tasks

Predecessor

1.1

NIL

1.2

1.1

1.3

1.2

2.1

1.3

2.2

2.1

2.3

1.3

2.4

2.3

2.5

2.4

3.1

2.2

3.2

3.1

3.3

2.5

3.4

3.3

4.1

3.2

4.2

3.4

4.3

4.1

4.4

4.2, 4.3

4.5

4.4

Network Diagram:

Start

End

4.3

4.4

4.2

3.4

3.3

2.4

2.5

2.3

4.1

3.2

3.1

2.1

1.3

1.2

1.1

2.2

4.5

Are you employing a predictive or an adaptive approach – explain the reasons.

Answer:

Predictive approach

This project's requirements are well understood and defined so that the structure of the project can be planned out in advance. Requirements such as, how many tables and attributes of the database are required, the website design concept and other features, are provided by the customer in advance. Therefore, predictive approach is suitable for the project as all the requirements are given and will have low technical risk.

How would project management differ had you chosen a different approach?

Answer:

Adaptive approach most often used when the exact requirements of the user are yet to be determined. Therefore, the project cannot be planned completely in advance. The project will be will risky if we were chosen the adaptive approach, meaning that, the pre-defined requirements are not determined, hence, the structure of the website and database cannot be designed and planned in advance. When new requirements are added on later, the whole structure have to be re-planned, example the database, more costs will be needed in order to alter the database structure to add more tables or attributes.

Part 2 Case Study

Perform a cause and effect analysis and document your findings using a Problems, Opportunities, Objectives, and Constraints Matrix. (see sample matrix on LMS with material for Tutorial 2 for an example).

Answer:

PROBLEMS, OPPORTUNITIES, OBJECTIVES AND CONSTRAINTS MATRIX

Project: Massmart Data Warehouse Case

Project Manager: Jayden

Created by: Jayden

Last Updated by: Jayden

Date Created: 04/02/2013

Date Last Updated: 06/02/2013

CAUSE AND EFFECT ANALYSIS

SYSTEM IMPROVEMENT OBJECTIVES

Problem or Opportunity

Causes and Effects

System Objective

1. It takes too long to request flat files from the specific divisions.

Cause(s):

The procedure to request by sending emails from the system to the technical DW member and then to the non technical DW member takes too much time.

Effect(s):

It takes about 10 minutes just to get the message over from the system to the specific division.

Reduce the time to request flat files to less than 2 minutes.

Produce a new system that able to convert the request directly from the system to the related division.

CAUSE AND EFFECT ANALYSIS

SYSTEM IMPROVEMENT OBJECTIVES

Problem or Opportunity

Causes and Effects

System Objective

Slow re-request processing speed results in significant lost time meaning that the company is losing money.

ETL process takes too long to complete.

Cause(s):

Keep requesting the user to enter instructions and command.

The ETL process structure requires too many steps to complete.

Effect(s):

It takes 30 - 45 minutes for the ETL process to be completed.

Employees have to stay alert during the process to wait for system prompting for error and emails from the system.

Reduce the amount of time and steps it takes to complete an ETL process by 30%.

CAUSE AND EFFECT ANALYSIS

SYSTEM IMPROVEMENT OBJECTIVES

Problem or Opportunity

Causes and Effects

System Objective

There is an opportunity to improve the communication between the related business process staff members by using telephone to communicate instead of email.

Effect(s):

Decrease the time for the staff members to check and wait for new emails on the progress of the process.

Allow faster communication between the related working staff by using telephone to call and inform straight away.

Improve communication method and reduce the overall process time by 50%.

Create a list of use cases and list these in a table with the associated actor and a two line description of the use case. This is for the items associated with the main current business processes discussed in the case.

Answer:

Use-Case Name

Use-Case Description

Participating Actors and Roles

Submit Sales Data Flat Files

This use case describes the event of the collection of weekly sales data from each of the division.

Operating Divisions (primary business)

Data warehouse (internal database system)

Receive Notification Email for re-request and submitted of flat files

This use case describes the event of receiving email from the data warehouse system to request for flat files for the specific divisions that never submit by Thursday and those division that have submitted their flat files.

Technical DW Member (internal staff member)

Data warehouse (internal database system)

Non-Technical DW Member (internal staff member)

Operating Divisions (primary business)

Start ETL process

This use case describes the event of when the technical DW member start the ETL process upon receive the flat files. The process will extract, transform and load the sales data into the data warehouse data store.

Technical DW Member (internal staff member)

Data warehouse (internal database system)

Receive Completion Email for ETL process

This use case describes the event of receiving the completion email of the ETL process. When the ETL process is completed, the data warehouse system will email the technical DW member to inform them.

Technical DW Member (internal staff member)

Data warehouse (internal database system)

Review ETL process

This use case describes the event of the technical DW member reviewing the email for the completed ETL process to check whether the flat files have been loaded successfully or not.

Technical DW Member (internal staff member)

Restart ETL process

This use case describes the event of restarting the ETL process if the flat files have not been loaded successfully.

Technical DW Member (internal staff member)

Data warehouse (internal database system)

Receive Completion Email for the loaded flat files

This use case describes the event of the technical DW member sending email to a non-technical team member to inform them that the flat files have been loaded successfully.

Technical DW Member (internal staff member)

Non-Technical DW Member (internal staff member)

Verify Loaded Sales Data

This use case describes the event of the non-technical DW member verifying the newly loaded sales data to check is the data is correct or not.

Non-Technical DW Member (internal staff member)

Re-Request of Sales Data Flat Files

This use case describes the event of the non-technical DW member re-requesting the sales data flat files from the specific division for those newly loaded sales data is incorrect.

Non-Technical DW Member (internal staff member)

Operating Divisions (primary business)

Send Email To Inform Upper Management and Executives

This use case describes the event of the non-technical DW member informing the upper management and executives when all the months weekly data is loaded and verified and can be used to generate monthly reports.

Non-Technical DW Member (internal staff member)

Upper Management & Executives (internal high ranking staff member)

Prepare a fully-documented use case description for the "ETL SUB PROCESS" use case.

Answer:

Use Case Description

ETL Sub Process

Author (s): Jayden Date: 04/02/2013

Version: 1.0

Use-Case Name:

Start ETL Process

Use-Case Type

Business Requirements:

Use-Case ID:

ETL-1.0

Priority:

High

Source:

Division's sales data flat files

Primary Business Actor:

Technical DW Member

Other Participating Actors:

Data warehouse (internal database system)

Other Interested Stakeholders:

Non-technical DW Member - interested in the successfully loaded sales data for verification of the percentage difference.

Descriptions:

This use case describes the event of when the technical DW member start the ETL process upon receive the flat files. The process will extract, transform and load the sales data into the data warehouse data store. On completion, the technical DW member will review the process to check whether the process have been loaded successfully or not, which will then inform the non-technical DW member if the process have been loaded successful to allow the non-technical DW member to verify the data.

Pre-condition:

The process must be started by a technical DW member.

Trigger:

This use case is initiated when a new sales data flat files is received.

Typical Course of Events:

Actor Action

Systems Response

Step 1: The division submit their weekly sales data flat files.

Step 2: The technical DW member will start the ETL process.

Step 3: The system will extract the sales data from the flat files and performs few instructions to check the basic structure and format.

Step 4: The system will prompt the user to request for data syntax and match rules to be used.

Step 5: The system will verify if the current settings and rules apply to the entire batch of files or single next file.

Step 6: The ETL process will be started and display a percentage complete graph on screen.

Step 7: The system will prompt the user for instructions when a non-critical error is found.

Step 8: The system will terminate the process when a critical error is found.

Step 9: Once the ETL process is completed, the system will email to inform the technical DW member.

Alternate Courses:

Alt-Step 3: The system will not proceed until the basic structure and format is acceptable by the system.

Alt-Step 5: The whole process will repeat when the single file option was selected after the ETL process is completed.

Alt-Step 7: The system will email to inform the technical DW member that a non-critical error was found, and prompt the user to cancel or continue.

Alt-Step 8: The system will email to inform the technical DW member that a critical error was found, which will terminates the process with no confirmation required.

Conclusion:

This use case concludes when the ETL process is completed and loaded successfully.

Post condition:

The system will write a progress summary log to a file and roll back the system if the process terminates prematurely either due to error or user intervention.

Business Rules:

Basic structure and format must be acceptable.

Data syntax and match rules to be used for validation.

Implementation Constraints and Specifications:

Not Applicable

Assumptions:

All divisions will send in their weekly sales data flat files on time.

Open Issues:

Need to reduce the number of steps for the process to be started.