Global Project Management Of Gower Publishing, Ltd.

Project Charter

Discuss about the Global Project Management of Gower Publishing, Ltd.?

The background of the organization and the project are outlined in the Appendix section. This project is focused on the design and development of a suitable ecommerce website for the gift shop. There are certain business requirements that will be key factors while designing and developing the ecommerce website for the organization.

In the next sections of the report, the project charter, communication plan and work breakdown structure for the project will be described and discussed. As a part of the project charter, the scope, objectives and other project related information will be discussed.

Name of the Project: Design and Development of the Ecommerce website for the Gift Shop.

Authority of the Project

The project charter has been developed to document the formal authorization of the project on design and development of an ecommerce website for the local gift shop. A project plan will be developed based on this charter and delivered to the sponsor of the project. The project plan will have scope statement of the project, Budget, cost and schedule estimation of the project, provisions for schedule, scope and resources related to the project, information about communication, risk, quality management for the project, stakeholder management and information about control management for the project. The project sponsor is the owner of the Gift shop,Mr.James.

The main purpose of this project is to help the Gift shop in moving their business to the ecommerce platform. It will help them to expand their business, manage supply chain, customer relations, sales, marketing, transactions etc. over the online platform. The project meets their requirements from an online business platform that will help them to compete with their competitors and managing their business in a better way. The operational costs will be reduced, the business processes will be more optimized and organized, and there will be lesser errors in the data collection processes, the ecommerce website will also help in analysis of customers’ demographics, sales and other transactional data.

A fully functional ecommerce website meeting the business requirements of the gift shop will be delivered to the project sponsor at the completion of the project. Other detailed project deliverables include project plan, schedule, designs, mockups, coding and testing documents, implementation details, integration with the ERP system of the business that is being developed in parallel to the project.

The purpose of this ecommerce website is to move the business of the Gift Shop over the online platform. It will help the customers to shop from the online store, pay for their order and getting the orders delivered to their addresses. The website will also help the customers to communicate with the gift shop authorities. The local Gift shop is undertaking this project as this project will help them to make their current business process more agile, they will be able to extend their customer base, they will be run their business 24×7, and they will have a new set of online marketing options for their business. All these opportunities will help them in up lifting their business to a new level and in earning more revenues. Ecommerce will add more scalability to their business. There are various ecommerce business and revenue model and the business will be able to utilize it.

Scope of the Project

In a nut shell, the business will be able to expand and grow over a global and more effective platform.

Local small gift selling businesses can also use the platform to sell their goods. The suppliers will also be able to communicate with the Gift shop through the ecommerce website.

The project manager is . The project manager is authorize in interfacing with the management and project sponsor as required. He has the sole responsibility to negotiate resources, giving suggestions to modify project framework, communicate to the other stakeholders and contractors as and when required. He is also responsible to deliver the project successfully within the time and budget constraints. The project manager has the responsibilities of developing project plan, tracking the progress according to the schedule, scope and cost of the project, monitoring and manage project implementation and holding control over the project by measurement of the project performance. If needed, the project manager is authorized to take any corrective action and plan during the life cycle of the project.

Following milestones will be part of the detailed project schedule. After approval of the project plan, the resources will be allocated to the different activities in the project schedule. If there is any changes in the approved project schedule then the modified schedules will be again submitted for approval from the project sponsor. The high level milestone summary for the project schedule has been described below,

Date	Milestone Description	Current State	Stakeholder Judge	Acceptance Criteria
Thu 3/12/15	Completion and approval of project Plan	Development and approval of project plan is completed.	Project manager.	All details of the project is there, the plan is signed by related authorities.
Thu 4/2/15	Selection and approval of the ecommerce website design.	Pending	Project manager and owner of the local gift shop.	The final web design with all requirements and detailed design planning is approved from the project sponsor.
Fri 5/1/15	Completion of coding and development.	Pending	Project manager	All coding are completed for the selected website design.
Mon 5/11/15	Completing on testing	Pending	Project manager	Complete list of test plans and results of testing is available. The website has passed all testing.
Wed 5/6/15	Integration with the ecommerce website	Pending	Project manager	The website is working after integration.
Thu 5/14/15	Completion of Acceptance testing	Pending	Project manager	The website is accepted by the end users and the owner of the local Gift shop.
Fri 5/15/15	Completion of implementation.	Pending	Project manager, owner of the local gift shop.	The website is working satisfactory level after implementation.

The funding for the project will come from the project sponsor that is the owner of the Gift shop. The budget of the project has been estimated as $42,640.00.

The project duration has been estimated as 66 working days. The project is expected to start on Monday 3/9/15 and end on Monday 6/8/15, the ecommerce website will go live on Monday 5/18/15

Risks are unavoidable in a project. As a part of the risk management at the charter level, following risk register matrix has summarized the identified risks, possible impact of the risks of the project and probable mitigation strategies for those risks. (Meredith & Samuel J. Mantel, 2011)

Risk ID	Risk Description	Risk Owner	Mitigation plan
1	Lack of funding	Project sponsor	Ensure budget and cost management. Keeping contingencies.
2	Schedule slippage	Project manager	Prepare project schedule considering different circumstances and constraints. Keeping contingencies.
3	Lack of resources	Project manager	Ensure availability of resources and balancing the project team to ensure cross functionalities among the skills and knowledge of the team members.
4	Not meeting the business requirements	Project manager	Preparing thorough system requirement specification and feasibility study.
5	Post-implementation failure	Project manager	There should be enough monitoring, maintenance support.
6	Failure in acceptance test	Project manager	Testing the website rigorously.
7	Lack of communication among the stakeholders	Project manager	Preparing and stick to stakeholder management and communication plan.

The stakeholders of this project are listed as, (Eskerod & Jepsen, 2013)

Stakeholder	Role	Connection to the project
The business owner	Project Sponsor is responsible for the funding of the project and being the owner of the project he will be directly affected from the outcome of the project.	High
	Project Manager, is responsible to manage the project successfully by adjusting the constraints. He is also responsible for the outcome of the project.	High
Project Team members including system analyst, coder, tester, designer etc.	They are responsible for working on the project, assuring the quality of the project throughout its life cycle.	High
Employees of the Gift shop	They are responsible for delivering information about the current business process, the drawbacks, requirements etc. During the system analysis phase, they will be the source of information. They are related to the project as they will be the end users of the system and website being developed in this project.	Medium
Customers	They are the important stakeholders as they are the end users of the website. Usability and acceptability of the website to the customers matters a lot for this this project.	High

Lessons learned from success and failure of similar projects in website development for small to medium scale businesses. These information will guide as practical advices in this project. The details of the business process are learned from documentation and interviews of the owners, staffs etc. of the business. Other than that, theoretical knowledge on project management will also help in this project. The lesson learned are,

• Project scope will be followed by all parties to avoid chances of scope creep.
• Good or bad experiences from other similar projects, should be shared by all parties.
• The team will be aligned to the expectations of the project sponsor. This is a very critical requirement.
• The project sponsored will be informed regularly about the project. In this way the project manager will be committed to the project.
• If there is requirement for any change, then those are needed to be requested and resolved as soon as possible. The project will follow some change management process and formats. Those are needed to be followed.
• To avoid schedule slippage, the updates on projects should be tracked on weekly basis.
• In all stages, review of previous stages and events are needed to ensure learning any specific lesson from those.

Team operation rules are developed for enhancing team functioning. These rules will help in increasing team effectiveness. These rules are applicable to all team members and they should work according to these rules.

The team operating rules are,

The team members will be available all the time. If there is some cases, when they can’t be available, then they have to inform the project manager in advance.

The team members will work as a team not as individual team members. They may need to take cross functional role if necessary.

Business Case

There will be weekly reporting to project manager about the progress and status of the works, every team member is needed to attend those meetings. It will be a meeting with the between team members and the project manager. a meeting is supposed to continue for 60 minutes to 90 minutes.

Team members should work collaboratively and peacefully, they should respect each other.

Whenever necessary, any team member may communicate to peers or the project manager.

All team members are needed to follow behavioral conducts and policies of the company.

Each team member will prepare their minutes of meeting.

The role of recorder in a meeting will be rotated among the team members.

Project Sponsor Name:	Project Manager Name:
Project Sponsor Signature:	Project Manager Signature:

The project communication plan is aimed to manage the communication across the project is an effective way. There will be various types of challenges and difficulties in a project. These difficulties may be related to schedule, technical aspects or cost of the project. Communication is essential in the project. A project will have different functional units, different project members and different stakeholders. There should be effective communication, co-ordination and co-operation among them. An effective communication plan may help in this context.

A communication plan developed for a project should be workable enough. The communication plan will be managed by a project manager. It will help in managing expectations of stakeholders and in completing the project within time.

The communication matrix for the project on design and development of the ecommerce website for the gift shop has been given below, (Kloppenborg, 2014)

Stakeholder	Learn from	Share With	Timing	Method	Owner
Project Owner	Project progress details.	Formal approval, documents, notices etc.	Weekly or periodically	Emails, meetings.	Project Manager
Project Manager	Project documents, process, control management etc.	Format reports and project deliverables.	Daily	Email, phone, meeting	System analyst, designer, developer tester
System Analyst	Interviews, observations.	System requirement specification document.	During requirement analysis phase.	Email, phone, meeting	Project owner, employees.
Designer	Requirement specification document, feedbacks from project owner.	Design mockups, reports.	During design phase	Email, phone, meeting	Project manager
Developer	Designs, system requirement specifications	Code, reports.	During development phase.	Email, phone, meeting	Project manager, designer.
Tester	System  requirement specifications, codes, test plans	Test plan, test reports.	During testing	Email, phone, meeting	Project manager, developer, and designer.
Employees of the Gift Shop	Notices and information from the project manager or the project owner.	Forms	Periodically	Email, notices	Project owner, project manager.
Customers of the Gift Shop	Notices and advertises from the project owner.	Forms, feedbacks.	At the end of the project or when required.	Email, advertisements.	Project owner.

Agenda of meeting and minutes of meeting will help in documenting the meetings held for a project. There will be timely descriptions for the minutes of a meeting. Information like, agendas of a meeting, participants in a meeting, discussion details etc. will be recorded through these documents. These will be signed and will be used as official documents.

An agenda of meeting and minutes of meeting will be similar as,

Project Name: Design and Development of the Ecommerce website for the Gift Shop
Agenda for project meeting: weekly update on project progress.
Date of Meeting
Time
Location
Participants	Project manager, all project team members
Other information
Serial number	Time	Topic of discussion
		Introduction
		Minutes of the day approval
		Highlighted issues.
		Discussion on issue 1
		Discussion on issue 2
		…
		New topic
		…
		Question and answer session.
		Scheduling next date of meeting.
Signatures

The work breakdown structure for the project is,

Initiation of the Project

• Development of Project charter
• Approval of project charter

Completion and approval of project plan.

• Requirement Analysis
• Interview stakeholders
• Observation
• Preparation of requirement specification document
• Feasibility study
    
Planning

• Develop project schedule
• Get approval for the project schedule
• Allocate resources
• Communication management planning
• Stakeholder management planning
• Risk management planning
• Control management planning
• Test plan development
    
Design of Website

• Prepare design mock ups.
• Approval of design mockup
• Creation of final website design

Development

• Coding
• Testing
• Completion on coding and development.
• Integration with the ERP system
• Integration with the Ecommerce website.

Testing

• Integration testing
• Completion of testing
• Acceptance testing
• Completion of acceptance testing.

Implementation

• Hosting the website
• Completion of implementation.
• Go Live

Post Implementation Maintenance and troubleshooting

Based on this work breakdown structure, the following WBS along with milestones has been developed in the Microsoft Project 2013

References

Binder, J. C., 2007. Global Project Management. s.l.:Gower Publishing, Ltd..

Carroll, J., 2012. Effective Project Management in Easy Steps. s.l.:In Easy Steps.

Chatfield, C. & Johnson, T., 2013. Microsoft Project 2013 Step by Step. s.l.:Pearson .

Eskerod, P. & Jepsen, A. L., 2013. Project Stakeholder Management. s.l.:Gower Publishing, Ltd..

Forbes, D. E., 2000. Project Management Information Systems. s.l.:Transportation Research Board.

Kloppenborg, T., 2014. Contemporary Project Management. s.l.:Cengage Learning.

Meredith, J. R. & Samuel J. Mantel, J., 2011. Project Management. s.l.:John Wiley & Sons.

PMBOK, 2013. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge. s.l.:Project Management Institute, Incorporated.

University of Delaware, 2015. sample letter of sponsorship – University of Delaware. [Online]

Available at: https://www.udel.edu/eli/sponsor-letter-individual.pdf

[Accessed 2015].

Young, T. L., 2013. Successful Project Management. s.l.:Kogan Page Publishers.