Project Management Plan For Book House Ltd – Online Books Retailer

Overview of Assignment

Book House Ltd, an online books retailer headquartered in Sydney and which sells both electronic and hard copies of books in Australian and New Zealand markets has plans to become the leading bookseller in the region. The firm seeks to develop a web based and mobile e-commerce platform where customers can access and buy/ read books at any time and from any location and target a 5% growth in revenues and earnings in the next five years. However, their current operational status as well as financial status shows they cannot achieve this, with poor conversion rates that are already declining while existing customers are not making any repeat purchases in the past year.  The CTO has identified the problem to be a non-responsive website and wants the whole system re-engineered to meet new customer needs, especially the recommendation engine that should improve the customer experience.  The recommended re-engineering areas are the use of machine learning for improving recommendations based on customer profiling. The user interfaces of existing systems need to be redesigned to be more dynamic, interactive, and appealing with user preference profiling and will require migrating existing data into the new system seamlessly. The budget for the project is $ 800000 with a projected payback of two years. Only the applications systems are to be upgraded, with present hardware seeming sufficient for the purposes of running the upgraded system, because such a project attracts various risks, these have to be taken into consideration. The project should be delivered within a six month period

The project will be organized based on the existing stakeholders and the development team as follows;

Role
Executive Sponsors	Mrs. Sally Fergusson, CEO and Mr. Ravi Sharma, CFO Save Time On Research and Writing Hire a Pro to Write You a 100% Plagiarism-Free Paper. Get My Paper
Business Sponsor	Mr James White, CTO
Project Steering Committee	The CEO, CFO, and CTO and Xie Wang (Head of Sales and marketing), Project manager
Project team
Project Manager
Project Accountant
Developers	4
Testers	2
Content consultant
Advertising consultant
Internal IT Liaison	Henry Miller
Internal product Expert	Henrik Ibsen

The organizational structure, based on the stakeholder list is shown below;

The project will be undertaken based on the Incremental Phased Delivery Waterfall model which will mirror the agile method of SCRUM where the solution is developed iteratively with frequent testing, but following the SDLC waterfall model (Cohn, 2014).  The requirements are broken down into smaller multiple standalone modules to make up the SDLC and development is done in steps, starting with the design analysis, implementation, verification and testing, and maintenance (Kerzner, 2009)

The Book House Ltd, an Australian based online book seller that sells books in both digital and electronic format in the Australian and new Zealand markets seeks to grow and improve its operational and business performance. This is because the company seeks to have a 5% growth in revenues and earnings in the next five years; however, their current web and mobile based systems has problems characterized by declining repeat business by existing clients and declining conversion rates for site visitors. The CTO has proposed that the entire system be reengineered from scratch, and this will require developing a more agile, responsive, appealing, easy to use, and highly interactive interface with a back-end machine learning algorithm to improve user profiling and recommendations because this has been identified as one of the major shortfalls of the existing system.  The steering committee and executive sponsor are concerned with the risks inherent in such a project, but satisfied that the proposed project approach will ensure such risks are managed effectively.  The envisaged reengineered system will lead to a 50% increase in visits to the sites and a 25% conversion rate, which is an integral part of the success of the project.

Background of Book House Ltd

The project will entail evaluating the current system, with the help of consultants and analysts and proposing developments to improve the system to solve the problems mentioned in the previous section (problem statement) and meet the desired performance objectives. The project will entail using effective project management approaches as described in the PMBOK and using the Phased Delivery Waterfall model to design a new user interface, algorithm engine, and database for the new solution for both web and mobile applications. The system should work seamlessly in Windows and IOS environments for PCs as well as in IOS and Android mobile environments, with future capabilities to work with Ubuntu.  The system will be developed iteratively and tested, for each phase of the project, working with stakeholders and managing the development effectively so that the stated project objectives and deliverables are fully met (Haughey, 2018; Wysocki, 2006).

1. To evaluate the existing system
2. To design and develop an improved web and mobile application system for Book House Ltd
3. Purchase new hardware components
4. Test the system and correct any issues
5. Implement the system
6. Provide support and maintenance
7. Undertake this within the stipulated six month period and budget of $ 800000

These are captured in the tasks and WBS detailed below

Initiation	Planning and organization	Execution	Closing
Discuss with executive sponsors the requirements	User requirements collection	Develop a new user interface	Develop training and user manuals/ documentation
Justification for project	Verify user requirements to develop use requirements document	Develop database	Handover of project
	Stakeholder identification and analysis	Develop algorithm	Project handover signed off
	Determine staff/ team members	Develop new operational system (programming)	Undertake review of project and lessons learned (documented)
	Develop tasks to be undertaken and project scope definition	Test the developed disparate units	Provide support and maintenance to system
	Define deliverables	Identify hiccups/ performance issues and make changes
	Develop work plan and project management plan	Undertake tests with executive sponsors present and give progress reports
	Develop risk, quality control, and scope plans	Develop the next phases for various components (user interfaces, database, application system)
	Define hardware and software requirements	Undertake tests
	Develop and refine budget	Identify problems and test again with sponsors present
	Allocate roles and duties	Develop progress report
		Finalize developments
		Integrate and test all components of the new system under different conditions
		Identify performance problems and correct them
		Undertake extensive tests for integrated system with sponsors
		Identify issues and correct and create first version
		Undertake real life tests and identify issues
		Correct issues and test again with version two
		Undertake extensive tests and identify issues
		Develop and implement version 3 of system
		Migrate data to new system
		Deploy system in limited basis
		Train users and identify any problems
		Correct problems and ‘go live’ with final system with sponsors present

This phase of the project entails the rigorous evaluation of completed goals, activities, and objectives to establish whether the planned results and objectives have been achieved and the desired change attained.  The evaluation plan is to be undertaken in a series of steps that identify and measure the impacts and outcomes of the project (Lock, 2007; Ruhe & Wohlin, 2016). The evaluation will be undertaken as follows;

Functional and technical assessment		Weight
New application has better appearance, ease of use, and performance	Users and testers, through a survey, report on their perceptions and experiences in using the system	30%
Technical alignment	Application has seamless functionality in Windows and IOS environments and works well with Android and IOS mobile devices seamlessly
	Application works seamless with different web browsers
	Application system has a 96% and does not suffer more than 5% degradation/ slowness in performance under maximum use/ requests
	Application tested for safety and security from hacking
Outcomes		40%
Application meets performance objectives	Application system has led to increased site visits by 50% (or meeting at least 90% of desired increased visits)30%
	The machine learning algorithm is able to match user profiles accurately and make recommendations
	Conversion rate increase of at least 25% achieved
	Increased sales, with projected minimum increase of 5% per year
Scope	Data successfully migrated and working well in new system	30%
	Project completed within time
	Project completed within schedule
	All objectives are met
TOTAL

The schedule is based on the WBS and project tasks developed in the previous section as shown in the Appendix I

Activity Code	Task	Duration in days
1	Discuss with executive sponsors the requirements	2
2	Justification for project	2
3	User requirements collection
4	Verify user requirements to develop use requirements document
5	Stakeholder identification and analysis
6	Determine staff/ team members
7	Develop tasks to be undertaken and project scope definition
8	Define deliverables
9	Develop work plan and project management plan
10	Develop risk, quality control, and scope plans
11	Define hardware and software requirements
12	Develop and refine budget
13	Allocate roles and duties
14	User requirements collection
15	Verify user requirements to develop use requirements document
16	Stakeholder identification and analysis
17	Determine staff/ team members
18	Develop tasks to be undertaken and project scope definition
19	Define deliverables
	Develop work plan and project management plan
	Develop risk, quality control, and scope plans
	Define hardware and software requirements
	Develop and refine budget
	Develop a new user interface
	Develop database
	Develop algorithm
	Develop new operational system (programming)
	Test the developed disparate units
	Identify hiccups/ performance issues and make changes
	Undertake tests with executive sponsors present and give progress reports
	Develop the next phases for various components (user interfaces, database, application system)
	Undertake tests
	Identify problems and test again with sponsors present
	Develop progress report
	Finalize developments
	Integrate and test all components of the new system under different conditions
	Identify performance problems and correct them
	Undertake extensive tests for integrated system with sponsors
	Identify issues and correct and create first version
	Undertake real life tests and identify issues
	Correct issues and test again with version two
	Undertake extensive tests and identify issues
	Develop and implement version 3 of system
	Migrate data to new system
	Deploy system in limited basis
	Train users and identify any problems
	Correct problems and ‘go live’ with final system with sponsors present
	Handover of project
	Project handover signed off
	Undertake review of project and lessons learned (documented)
	Provide support and maintenance to system

The budget is based on descriptions and rates and is shown below;

Code	Activity	Rate	Number	Total
1	hardware Equipment	2000	9	18000
2	IOS	500	9	4500
3	ISO licensing	200	9	1800
4	Software	300	9	2700
5	Marketing	20000	1	20000
6	Labor			0
7	Project manager	200	384	76800
8	Liaison and internal experts	90		0
9	Content consultant	150	112	16800
10	Advertising consultant	150	112	16800
11	Programmers	100	4176	417600
12	Insurance	5000	1	5000
13	Contingency	25000	1	25000
14	Analysts	100	140	14000
15	DBA	200	64	12800
16	Reimbursements	500	10	5000
17	In house resources	90	400	36000
18	Indirect cost charge	0.2	134560
				672800
	Actual Total			807360
	Allocated			810000
	Percent  Surplus (Shortfall)			0.33%

References

Aziz, E. E. (2015, October 10). Project closing the small process group with big impact.

Retrieved October 2, 2018, from https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/importance-of-closing-process-group-9949

Cohn, M. (2014). Agile Needs to Be Both Iterative and Incremental. Retrieved from https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/agile-needs-to-be-both-iterative-and-incremental

Harrin, E. (2018, August 30). Managing Changes On Projects While Keeping It Moving Forward. Retrieved October 2, 2018, from https://www.thebalancecareers.com/managing-changes-on-projects-4041353

Haughey, D. (2018, September 15). Project Planning a Step by Step Guide. Retrieved October 2, 2018, from https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/project-planning-step-by-step.php

Kerzner, H. (2009). Project Management: A Systems Approach To Planning, Scheduling, And Controlling 10E With Case Studies 3E Set (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Lock, D. (2007). The essentials of project management. Aldershot, England: Gower.

O’Dea, T. (2018). Strategies for Managing Change: The Project Manager. Retrieved October 2,2018, from https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/strategies-for-managing-change-the-project-manager.php

Patil, Y. (2018, September 04). Project Crashing Using Critical Path Method. Retrieved October2, 2018, from https://www.projectmanagement.com/articles/488449/Project-Crashing-Using-Critical-Path-Method

‘PMBOK’. (2017). A guide to the project management body of knowledge: (PMBOK® guide).Newtown Square, PA, USA: Project Management Institute.

Roseke, B. (2015, May 13). Project Scope Management according to the PMBOK. Retrieved from https://www.projectengineer.net/project-scope-management-according-to-the-pmbok/

Ruhe, G., & Wohlin, C. (2016). Software Project Management in a Changing World. Berlin: Springer Berlin.

Villafiorita, A. (2016). Introduction to Software Project Management. Auerbach Publications.

Wysocki, R. K. (2006). Effective software project management. Indianapolis: Wiley