ERP Implementation For Publishing Company Using Agile Project Management

Iron Triangle as Success Criteria

Question:

Describe the project’s premise – deliverable(s), constraints (the iron triangle + external environment: organisation (setup and strategy), industry, economy)?

The project success criteria will be set using iron triangle. Other than iron triangle, there are other consideration for ensuring project success. Those are,

• Satisfaction of the stakeholders
• Satisfaction of the end users.
• Impact on ROI.
• Qualitative and quantitative benefits from the project.

Iron triangle is used to measure the balance between three important factors of project management, time, cost and quality. Iron triangle helps to embed sustainability in a project. It considers the scope and objectives of the project also. (Newton, 2013)

The iron triangle of the project is,

It describes the fact that, right balance of time, cost and scope brings out the best quality project management.

The project constraints will be explained using the following diagram. (Maylor, 2003)

In the context of the current project,

• Integration of the business processes.
• Security of the copyrighted materials.
• An efficient eBusiness platform.

• An integrated ERP solution for the publishing business
• An eBusiness solution
• Implementation of information security in the project.

Knowledge comprises of people, capital and technology.

• The capital is the cost of the existing infrastructure, its resources etc.
• The people in this project are the persons from management of the publishing company.
• The IT project team from the consultancy.
• The end users.

Then the technologies are,

• Technology for implementation of a LAN based office environments.
• Servers, related technologies.
• ERP solution.
• Ecommerce and web technologies.
• Information and network security technologies like firewall, anti-virus, proxy servers etc.

The constraints on the project are,

• The project should be completed within time and budget.
• All required functionalities should be implemented.

The context of the project has been described below,

The project will help the publishing company in implementation of information technology in their business. ERP system implementation will integrate all their business process and the technologies. The business processes will be faster and more efficient. ROI will be more from this project. The eBusiness platform will help to extend their business over the online platforms. (Hobbs, 2009)

The project management strategy will be agile project management. It will help the business to deliver their needs within their budget and time. As the business don’t have similar infrastructure, so they may wish to change. Thus agile strategy has been taken. It will also allow constant participation of the end users and the management team from the business into the project. So, there will be enhanced communication and collaboration.

There will be matrix structure followed in the project management. It will be balanced. The authority and decision making power will be distributed to the top level functional manager from the business and the IT manager from the consultancy, who the project manager also. (Hill & Jones, 2012)

The culture in the organization is quite good. People are co-operative and enthusiastic. The project team will work collaboratively as a single team. Administration has control over its employees. Participation and all type of communication for the project will be ensured. The management team from the business is highly qualifies and have detailed ideas of the business process. Their skills and knowledge will help the IT project management team to understand the business process and work accordingly. (Kousholt, 2007)

The objective of the project is to have a high quality system within the cost and time constraints. The summary of the project objective tradeoffs can be,

	Time	Cost	Quality
Performance conformance	Moderate time is available for the project.	Moderate budget is available.	Highest quality is needed.

The project is about ERP implementation for the publishing company. They want a quality system having all required security implementation. There are copyrighted materials used in the business, thus it need to ensure all kind of data privacy and protection cases.

The project will develop an integrated ERP system for the business. It will cover all business processes and eBusienss facilities. The implementation of the system will be done in 2 phases. At first the core business processes will be implemented using the ERP solution then the rest will be implemented. There is an important part to transfer data from the old system to the new one.

Project Constraints

Name of the Project: Implementation of ERP in the Publishing House.

Project Sponsor:

Project manager:

Date of Commencement

Duration of the project

Scope:

Deliverables:

Version	Document	Prepared by	Changes
1.0	Project proposal	Project Manager	Initial document.

Status: Approved / Rejected

Signed by

Date

Stakeholder	Influence	Role
Project Sponsor	Very high	Project sponsor provides the funding of the project and will be directly affected from the outcome from this project.
Top level management	Very high	The top level management will be responsible for managing the project successfully.
Project manager	Very high	The project manager will be responsible to carry out the instruction of the top level management and complete the project successfully using the available resources and satisfying all constraints.
Project team members	Moderate	Will be responsible to follow up the instructions from project manager.
IT consultancy	Very high	They are responsible to implement the ERP system successfully and that the main focus of the project. All technical aspects will be carried out by them.
Authors	High	The authors will share their manuscripts with the publication house. If those are not protected by the system then they will be badly affected.
Bookstore owners	Moderate	The bookstores will be able to place order and communicate with the publishing house through the online eBusiness platform.
Employees	Moderate	The employees are part of the organization. So the will be affected from the outcome of the project to some extent.

The gantt chart and work break down structure is,

The network diagram and critical path is,

There are different type of cost planning methods for a project. The main objective of cost planning for a project is to identify the relationship among price, cost and profit of a project. (Kerzner, 2013)

The simple equations are, cost + profit = price. 

The price will consider the cost for materials, labor, project overhead, other overheads and profit. There are two types of cost estimation techniques. Top down and bottom up.

The project manager will be responsible for cost planning process.

• The funding of this project is the responsibility of the publishing house. Thus the project manager will have funding for the project from them.
• A constraint on the project management will be avoiding cash flows.
• The payment done to the suppliers will be tracked.
• The planning will consider the accounting period of the funding and scheduling time of the project.
• The spending on the project will be tracked.

The quality planning for this project will be considers based the following decisions, (Kerzner, 2013)

• What are the standards and specifications that are required to meet in this project?
• What are the metrics that will be used to evaluate whether the specifications have met the standards?
• Different criteria of project authorization process in different phases.
• What will be the tools and techniques used in Quality assurance and Quality control?
• Different quality control activities to be performed in different phases on project management.

Risk management will help to uncover the risks related to a project in the early of the project development process. An effective risk management process will consider identification of the risks, evaluation of the risks and possible mitigations. (Hillson, 2012)

The risk register is,

ID	Risk	Impact of the risk	Likelihood of occurrence	Countermeasures
1	Shortage of funding	Project may get suspended	Low	Proper cost estimation considering contingencies should be done
2	Schedule slippage	Project may get suspended	Low	Critical path should be considered carefully.
3	Lack of resources	Project may pause.	Low	Resources can be arranged if necessary.
4	Failure of the system in first phase	Project may get suspended	High	The project management should be done very carefully and so is the ERP implementation.
5	Loss of data during transition from old  to new system	System may not work properly	High	It must be done very carefully with adequate back up arrangements.
6	Attacks by hackers	System may not work properly	High	Proper information security implementations will be done.
7	Information theft	There will be legal issue and the business will be badly affected.	High	Proper information security implementations will be done.

Change control of the project or Change management of the project is defined in the very first of the project and it will be followed throughout the project. (Newton, 2013)

There will be a standard format to request change. All change requests should be submitted following this format. There should be clear description on the following topics in a change request.

• Brief and concise details of the actual change request. This is needed in the form of a statement. It will help in outlining the targeted item for change. The project management team will get the subject of the request from this information.
• Clear and detailed reasoning behind the change request. The rationale behind the change request should be given in details in this part.
• In this section there should be detailed information about the changes if the change request in accepted and implemented.
• Then there should be an expected date for implementation of the change. It does not confirms that the change will be implemented within this date for sure.

After receiving change request the project manager will review it and forward the same to the top level management, with explanation of his/ her opinion on it. The top level management then review it and take decision about this change request. It may be accepted or rejected. If it is accepted then the project manager will implement all required changed in the project schedule.

The project portfolio management or PPM will have a centralized approach in the management of the project. The processes, technologies and methodologies used in the project by the project management officers and project managers will be considered in the project portfolio management. All these technologies, processes and methodologies will be analyzed collectively. (Meredith & Mantel, 2011)

The operational and financial goals will be analyzed in portfolio management. The optimal mix of the resources conforming to the delivery of the project successfully will be considered in this case. There are several environmental factors like strategic objectives, customers etc. those things will be covered also.

The project management maturity model will be used for assessing the processes and carrying out portfolio management. The key processes will be hierarchically structured. It will help in setting sensible and realistic goals around the key processes. There are 5 such structured levels for assessment of project maturity. Those are,

1. Project awareness at level 1
2. Repeatable processes at level 2
3. Defining processes at level 3
4. Management of processes at level 4
5. Optimization of processes at level 5

During this stakeholder management and organizational behavior will be closely monitored. There will be different controls set for it. Some of the best practices to be followed are, (Fusco, 1997)

• There will be clear communication among the team members and stakeholders.
• As all stakeholders have some responsibilities to the project and they have some degree of influence on the project, hence, their opinions will be considered very closely.
• All stakeholders will be requested to participate in the project management during the process whenever necessary. Thus active participations from all stakeholders should be encouraged throughout the project.
• All members, employees and stakeholders will work like a team, no incident that may encourage the team spirit or morale will be entertained.

There will be in house team and they will work on site. There will be top level management with various managers from different departments of the publishing business. Under them the project manager assigned from the IT consultancy will manage the project.

References

Fusco, J. C., 1997. Better Policies Provide the Key to Implementing Project Management. Project Management Journal.

Futrell, R. T., Shafer, D. F. & Shafer, L., 2002. Quality Software Project Management. s.l.:Prentice Hall Professional.

Harrison, J. & John, C. S., 2013. Foundations in Strategic Management. s.l.:Cengage Learning.

Highsmith, J., 2009. Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products. s.l.:Pearson Education.

Hill, C. & Jones, G., 2009. Strategic Management Theory: An Integrated Approach. s.l.:Cengage Learning.

Hill, C. & Jones, G., 2012. Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach. s.l.:Cengage Learning.

Hillson, D., 2012. Managing Risk in Projects. s.l.:Gower Publishing, Ltd..

Hobbs, P., 2009. Project Management. s.l.:Dorling Kindersley Limited.

Kerzner, H. R., 2013. Project Management Metrics, KPIs, and Dashboards: A Guide to Measuring and Monitoring Project Performance. s.l.:John Wiley & Sons.

Kerzner, H. R., 2013. Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling. s.l.:John Wiley & Sons.

Kousholt, B., 2007. Project Management –Theory and practice. s.l.:s.n.

Larson, E. W. & Gray, C. F., 2011. Project Management. s.l.:McGraw Hill.

Lock, D., 2007. Project Management. s.l.:s.n.

Maylor, H., 2003. Project Management. s.l.:Pearson.

Meredith, J. R. & Mantel, J. S. J., 2011. Project Management: A Managerial Approach. s.l.:John Wiley & Sons.

Morrison, E. D. et al., 2011. Strategic alignment of business processes. International Workshop on Engineering Service-Oriented Applications.

Newton, R., 2013. The Project Management Book. s.l.:Pearson UK.

Schwalbe, K., 2013. Information Technology Project Management. s.l.:Cengage Learning.