Website Development Project Management

MILESTONE 1

Overview of the Project

A website development project has been proposed by ABC organization. The fully accessible website would be created to enhance the procurement management and the resources of the vendors and suppliers of the company. The website will deal with the challenges which are faced by the organization regarding procurement and the development of the fully accessible website would also enhance the visibility of the company (Bjarne, 2008).

This project would result in a completely designed online presence of the company and also the development of the supporting documentation. This would serve as the primary communication tool and the information source where dealings and business with the suppliers and vendors would be conducted(Harrison, 2004). This is a 6 months project and the budget allocated by the project sponsor for website development if $ 500,000. This report details all the necessary components of project management and develops the detailed website development project.

MILESTONE 2

Project Scope

The website development project is a 6 months’ project which will develop the website for the organization. This project is associated with addressing the challenges associated with procuring from the suppliers and doing business with the vendors. The project would begin on 1ST January 2018 and end on 1 July 2018. An accessible website will be created by our team which will enhance the visibility of the organization, expand our supplier base and the WordPress platform would be used to design the website. The final deliverable of this project is the fully accessible website built through WordPress and serves as the central location for all the information for the suppliers and vendors.

Success Criteria

We want to develop a website for our business / Organization in order to enhance Procurement Management and Resources with suppliers and vendors. This is the ultimate objective of our project. The range of different success criteria are as follows:

Success Criteria for Project:

• Enhance the relationships with the suppliers and vendors.
• Complete the project within the deadline of approximately two weeks.
• Complete the budget within the estimated costs of the budget.
• Complete the budget without amending the plan of the project at any stage.
• Make the transaction processing more quick and user friendly.
• Increase the revenues by approaching new suppliers and lowering acquisition costs.

Work Breakdown Structure for Project (WBS)

The work breakdown structure for the website development project is shown below:

The work breakdown structure tree has also been generated which is shown below:

MILESTONE 3

Project Budget and Financial Analysis of Project

The budgeted costs of the project are shown in the table below and the Financial Analysis has been performed assuming that the project would be completed within 2 weeks. However, this is just an assumption the actual project completion time has been computed later through the use of critical path method. Based on the given benefits and operating expenses and a discount rate of 6%, the financial returns of this project would be as follows (Meredith, 2014):

Project AON Timeline & Critical Path Identification

The activity list and the activity attributes with their duration in days and dependencies have been generated in the excel spreadsheet to perform a CPM exercise. These are shown in the table below:

The network diagram of all the above activities is shown in the diagram below:

We have also generated the results of the total project completion time in days and the critical paths have also been identified for the project. The critical paths are activity A, B, C, D and F, G.(Kerzner, 2013) The total time for the completion of the project is 16 days. The results are shown in the table below:

Finally, the Gantt chart for the website development project has also been drawn with the help of MS project as shown below:

Project Charter

The purpose of the Project Charter is to define the scope, project organization, objectives and the overall approach for the project. This is shown below:

Key Stakeholders

Project Milestones

The project milestone would be achieved when the programming of the website would be completed.

Project Budget

The total budget for this project is $ 500,000

Constraints, Assumptions, Risks and Dependencies

Approval Signatures

MILESTONE 4

Risk Assessment

There are a number of key schedule influences which can impact on the projects negatively or positively and therefore risk assessment is highly important to design a project plan. One of the research shows that 75% to 90% of the project fail because of their failure to meet their project objectives. This same research also identified that there mainly the human behaviors are the one which are responsible for the failure of the projects as the negatively impact on the schedule of these projects (Kerzner, 2013). The main key schedule influences who can impact upon small or large projects are as follows:

• Failure to align the project priorities is one of the key influence due to which projects fail. When the project managers fail to derail the program priorities, then the schedule for the projects deviates.
• If any project has unequipped or unmotivated team members then that project is likely to fail. According to research 80% of the projects fail because the members of the team are not able to track and support the schedule of the project optimally.
• Fact free planning is also a key schedule influence. 85% of the projects fail because of setting the resource limits and the deadlines without considering the external realities or taking input from experienced consultants.
• Finally, the failure to build the most effective direction setting alliances is another key schedule influence. 65% of the projects fail because of negative impact on their schedules due to lack of sponsorship which proves to be insufficient to achieve the intended purpose of the project.

Handling the above key schedule influencers is highly important for achieving the purpose and successful completion of the projects. One of the most important solution for managing and handling such key schedule influencers is to form a ‘Net Map’ which will identify the influence networks and depict the complete project information in a quantitative and intuitive manner (Milosevic, 2005). All the participants of the project can easily visualize their own networks within the group network. Apart from this, influence maps can also be used to identify the stakeholders who can influence the project schedule and then it could be used as a guide to manage the various relationships among them(Meredith, 2014).

Risk Mitigation

The monitoring and the control activities for the project take place at the same time and these consist of all those activities which are performed for observing the execution of the project and potential problems could be identified in advance and immediate corrective action could be taken. We will be monitoring the project by identifying the critical path activities(Meredith, 2014). Along with this a milestone slip chart can also be produced or a Gantt chart could be generated to monitor the progress of the project.

Metrics, reports & graphs

A range of different metrics, reports and graphs will be used to monitor the progress of the project. For the graphs we will use the milestone slip chart, Gantt chart and the precedence chart to monitor the progress of the activities. The project budget monitoring can be performed by filming the S curve (Woolf, 2012). Apart from this, many other metrics could be used to monitor the progress of the project such as Pareto Analysis and Earned Value Analysis.

Determining Cause of Variation

The milestone slip chart and the Gantt chart would work in similar fashion and both can be created using MS Project. These charts will highlight the key milestones with their respective dates and then comparison could b easily made with the actual progress of the project. The precedence chart can be used to guide the project execution and help us to monitor why particular activity is dependent on another activity. The Pareto Analysis can help us to determine the 20% of the activities which are responsible for 80% of the costs of the project. After these are identified we can adjust our monitoring and focus on these activities. Finally, the EVA can be used to find out that whether the project is getting value for money or not(Meredith, 2014).

Responding to Deviations

When particular deviations are identified in the project by using the above monitoring tools and techniques then immediate corrective actions will be taken. If the project is running over the budget then the contingency budget would be utilized however, before that the causes for the deviation will be identified and removed. If the project is running before the schedule and not making significant progress, then management can decrease the time for non-critical activities and utilize that time for the completion of the critical activities of the project. Overall, when the project would deviate from the baseline then updated risk identification and risk Analysis will be performed. The contingency plan would be applied in such situations(Meredith, 2014). If the deviation is still not handled, then a request for the change of the project plan would be submitted.