Concentrated Project Finalization Activities And Finally

Identification of Strategic and Operational Requirements

Discuss About The Concentrated Project Finalization Activities And Finally.

The planning and providing direction for the successful completion of the complex IT projects is of great importance in the present IT organizations. All the IT organizations are putting their main focus on the complex projects for getting established in this present competitive market. During the time of successful completion of any project management it is necessary to consider various kinds of factors that includes defining the project scope, determination of the available resources, understanding the deadline properly, and assembling the project team., and monitoring the progress of the team.

Primarily the research concentrates on the planning phase of the project followed by the coordination of project team and project startup activities. The report then focuses on the implementation of the project in addition to the project integration. The report concentrates on the project finalization activities and finally, the report ends with a conclusion.

The strategic and operational requirements of any IT project is known to be the tool that helps in bringing success for the project and the business processes. It includes the strategic and operational planning of how the IT resources are going to be used for making the project successful (Eriksson, 2013).

In the research, it has been found that there are various kinds of ways through which the IT projects can be fitted into the strategic context of the businesses. The lists of steps are as follows:

1. It is necessary to involve the IT projects into strategic level planning.
2. Identification of the project drivers is required.
3. It is required to quantify the strategic value followed by the determination of factors which helps in bringing impact to the success of the project (Alexander, 2015).

Identification of the customer needs is known to be the process of how any customer is requiring the IT product to perform. The requirement of the customers is non-technical in nature and which tries to reflect the perception of the customer.

The industrial codes of practice are known to be the industry standards of conduct and it serves as the guideline between the organization and the clients during the time of any business dealings.

During the time of conducting any risk management analysis, there are simply four basic steps that the IT organizations need to consider which includes:

1. Identification of the project risk.
2. Rating or categorizing the project risk.
3. Management of the risk involved in IT projects.
4. Reviewing the risks.

A risk management plan is known to be the document which a project manager uses to develop for going through the risks and estimated impacts involved with the projects.

A test environment is considered to be the setup of hardware and software that is required by the testing teams for execution of test-oriented cases. A pilot plan for the IT project is known to be a preliminary or experimental test within a limited margin for reviewing the partial success of the project.

Project Fitting within Strategic Context of Business

The initial task of any project is to assemble the team with the required skill for the project. This requires to perform an assessment of the skills of the employees and the selecting the right people on the project team with the ability to share and have correct mental state (Iluz, Moser and Shtub, 2015). The assembly of the team is done right after the work breakdown structure after the identification of the work and the activities that are required to be performed for the completion of the project. The gaps in the skill of the assembled team are required to be filled up with the training and therefore require the planning of the time and budget of the process. The working team has to be working with the organization as a full-time employee to be able to contribute fully to the development of the project along with the team.

The project team role and responsibility is explained in the chart representing the various level of delegated responsibility that produces the outcome of the project. Basically there are three type of roles in a project the leader or the manager who oversees the development process of the project, the member who is the part of the team and contribute in the development of the project, and the executive or the steering committee that governs the project and the decides the direction in which the development should focus. For the identification of the members of the different teams of the organization, the organizational chart has to be produced to understand the power and capabilities of the individual through which the teams can be appropriately allocated.

The skill of the individual is a deciding factor for the selection of the member in the team for the project development. The skill list has to be created for every employee working in the organization are found to be suitable for the required project from the previous step of the identification of the employees. The responsibility assignment matrix gives the understanding of the skills that required being present for the successful implementation of the project. The skills like good observation, inspiring and motivating, communicating are suitable for the leader of the project. The technical skill, work management, design, implementation, quality testing are the skills required of the members of the project team. The skills like the forecasting, estimating the time and budget of the operation of the project, quality assurance, communicating the requirements and managing skills are required for the managers of the project.

Risk Management Analysis and Plan

The communication is managed through the managers of the project that are responsible to lead the different teams that are focuses of contributing to the completion of the project. The Responsibility assignment matrix is helped is visual represent the chart of the roles and the responsibility of the members involved in a project including the teams, managers, and the leader.

Roles Jobs	Team 1	Team 2	Manager 1	Manager 2	Steering committee	Leader
Project planning	I	I	A	A	C	R
Project design	R	I	A			C
Project implementation		R		A		I
Quality testing		I	R	R	R	C
Acceptance testing	I	I	A	A	R	C

Table 1: Responsibility assignment matrix based on RAIC

(Source: Goetsch & Davis, 2014)

The project is required to meet the requirement of the stakeholders and the resolve the issue related to the organization. All the activities, involving cost, risk, time and key requirement area, are required to be managed based on their priorities as they are critical for the success of the project (Varajão et al. 2014).

	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5	Week 6	Week 7
Planning Phase	1 to 2 weeks
Activities of Project Startup		2 to 3 weeks
Project Implementation		2 to 4 weeks
Project Integration				4 to 6 weeks
Activities of Project Finalization						6 to 7 weeks

Table 2: GANTT Chart of the project

(Source: Acharya & Chellappan, 2017)

Currently, the architecture used for the software development is based on the adaptive agile model that provides the flexibility and proper distribution of the work between the team. The purpose architecture for the complex project is a multi-layer software architecture called 5+1 software architecture model. It is able to bear the load of the complex project and manage the resource adequately for the requirements and the constraints that the other well know architectures fail to provide (Guetatand Dakhli, 2013).

The resource planning is required for the project to optimize and properly manage, for maintaining the budget of the project. This is called cost cutting with is a method of cost controlling for the project. The resources are required to be scheduled between the teams and the managers to provide the optimum use with minimum delays. Schedules are required to be communicated among the teams by the managers to prevent collision of the requirement of resources.

The complexity of the project is required to be identified first before determining the adequate tools required for the project. For IT project there is either technical complexity or structural complexity that deals with the installation of the networking components (Remingtonand Pollack, 2016). This requires PERT analysis or CPM to estimate the time required for the competition of the complex activity. Through the visual representation of the activities, there are be better managed in the process defined by the software architecture.

The overall project progress is managed through the Gantt Chart that is provide the tabular representation of the task along with the estimated time and it reports about the current status of the task. It also supports multi-tasking hence different teams can use the same Gantt chart to show the status of their work progress to the superiors and the higher authorities.

Test Environment and Pilot Plan Identification

The conflict arises anytime is the project development stage due to various reason like lack of resource, more waiting time in the availability of the resources of the development of the software or due failure of maintenance of the schedule. Conflict resolution attempts to settle the dispute in the development of the project and reorganizes the responsibilities with few updates to meets the need or requirement of the conflicting areas.

The change is likely to be introduced into the software and therefore it requires flexibility in the organization structure. The output of the individual can change within the development of the project and also their skill might increase. The change can occur due to the change in the requirement, resources, skill, schedule, external interference, market and the financial status. It is the responsibility of the leader to manage the change smoothly and bring the development of the project back on the track (Wallensteen, 2015). 

The leader must be able to exhibit the following leadership quality to motivate the team and manage the development process smoothly.

1. Brilliant communication and social skills
2. Inspire others by sharing his vision with the team
3. Maintain enthusiasm with a positive attitude
4. Integrity
5. High Competency
6. Maintain calm composer
7. Problem solver
8. Industrialist
9. Excellent decision maker

The strategies that help in keeping the project development on the track are:

1. Frequent verification and validation of the project development
2. Completing the activities according to the project schedule.
3. Contributing their part in the project development by the responsible individual.
4. Observing priority and high-quality development of the key element of the project as highlighted by the critical aspect of the project requirement.

The communication plan is to follow the following guiltiness:

1. Identification of the purpose of the communication
2. Identification of the audience of the communication.
3. Request for the approval of the communication process for the superior authority.
4. Plan the design and the content of the message by considering resources.
5. The action plan for delivering the message.

The setup of the test environment includes the following:

1. Collection of the test data
2. Hardware and the software test
3. Server and network test
4. Execution of the project with the collected test data
5. Load testing
6. Error handling and fault tolerance

Release management is for the reporting the activities performed through the complex operational infrastructure (Leiber, Stensaker & Harvey, 2018). The release management prepares the documentation of the processes that are used in for the development of the project and the information about the project scheduling and the resources used. This information is represented to the stakeholders for the approval and the acceptance.

The report and the charts prepared by the organization are presented to the stakeholder for the acceptance testing. The End-user test also performed on the software demonstrating all the functional and the key areas are fulfilled the requirement of the project.

The project activities integration is known to be the collection of the process that controls the project workflow and checks its execution according to the projected plan. This is implemented by the following the project plan and the schedule that is prepared for the project to ensure is a success.

The IT project manager has the responsibility to perform regular consultation followed by reporting mechanisms which are applied based on the communication plan. A communication plan tries to outline the methodologies and strategies which are going to be utilized in the project communication as well as information distribution.

Team Assembly and Skill Requirements

The monitoring and the measurements of the activities are done through the Gantt chart. The outcome of the activities is recording the testing report of the project. The repeat validation checks keep the project on the right track of development.

Showing judgment with respect to the analysis of deliverables when there is a comparison against specification and reported to proper stakeholders 

During the time of analyzing the project deliverables, it can be seen that there are several chances of failing while managing any project changes and the changes that need to be reported to the stakeholders includes technical changes, market changes, and contractual changes.  

According to the research it has been found that poor management of requirements leads to the failure of any IT project and for that reason there need to be supporting of packages that are generally offered by the identification of requirements. Requirements are regarded as the capabilities which need to be met by the IT product for satisfying the needs of the users.

During the time of developing an IT project, it is always necessary to receive proper authorization from both the government and client end for carrying out the process of testing, building, trialing, evaluation and project development in a successful manner.

A rollback strategy plan is known to be the written document which helps in outlining various kinds of steps for recovering the application before carrying out the deployment process and it is much required in any IT project.

The project handover is also known to be the project close-out which is regarded as the final phase of any project and it needs to be done after the completion of the project before providing it to the customer.

SWOT analysis is considered to be the strategic planning tool which is used by the IT personnel for evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to the project. The plan involved in the utilization of the SWOT analysis includes the act of specifying the goal of the project thereby identification of the external and internal factors which are favorable or unfavorable for achieving that particular goal (Leiber, Stensaker & Harvey, 2018).

Conclusion 

After the analysis of the overall report, it can be concluded that the strategic and operational requirements of any IT project are known to be the tool that helps in bringing success for the project and the business processes. The different levels involved in the completion of any IT project includes planning phase, activities related to project start-up, project implementation, project integration, and activities of project finalization.

References 

Ahern, T., Leavy, B., and Byrne, P.J., 2014. Complex project management as complex problem solving: A distributed knowledge management perspective. International Journal of Project Management, 32(8), pp.1371-1381.

Alexander, M., (2015). 6 proven strategies for evaluating and prioritizing IT projects. Retrieved from: https://www.cio.com/article/3007575/project-management/6-proven-strategies-for-evaluating-and-prioritizing-it-projects.html

Eriksson, U., (2013). WHY A REQUIREMENTS STRATEGY AND A REQUIREMENTS PLAN HELPS TO STREAMLINE YOUR WORK. Retrieved from: https://reqtest.com/requirements-blog/why-a-requirements-strategy-and-a-requirements-plan-helps-to-streamline-your-work/

Guetta, S.B.A. andDakhli, S.B.D., 2013. A multi-layered software architecture model for building software solutions in an urbanized information system. International Journal of Information Systems and Project Management, 1(1), pp.19-34.

Iluz, M., Moser, B. andShtub, A., 2015. Shared Awareness among Project Team Members through Role-based Simulation during Planning–A Comparative Study. Procedia Computer Science, 44, pp.295-304.Remington, K. and Pollack, J., 2016. Tools for complex projects. Routledge.

Varajão, J., Dominguez, C., Ribeiro, P. and Paiva, A., 2014. CRITICAL SUCCESS ASPECTS IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE CONSTRUCTION AND THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY. TehnickiVjesnik/Technical Gazette, 21(3).

Wallensteen, P., 2015. Understanding conflict resolution. Sage.

Goetsch, D. L., & Davis, S. B. (2014). Quality management for organizational excellence. Upper Saddle River, NJ: pearson.

Acharya, S., & Chellappan, S. (2017). Chart Forms. In Pro Tableau (pp. 547-663). Apress, Berkeley, CA.

Leiber, T., Stensaker, B., & Harvey, L. C. (2018). Bridging theory and practice of impact evaluation of quality management in higher education institutions: a SWOT analysis. European Journal of Higher Education, 1-15.