rapid-fire monologue is associated with high-pressure sales methods, how can you link this ti the unconscious?
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Search for an example of Medicare or Medicaid fraud and abuse in the last three years.
In two to three paragraphs and in your own words explain the wrongdoing; and the law(s) and/or regulations that were violated.
In your opinion indicate whether there is some ethical reason that could justify the wrongdoing.
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After reviewing the article "Project Leadership: What Drives You to the Finish Line?" from Project Management Institute(PMI). Please answer the following questions
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Debate the inputs, tools and techniques, and the outputs of the risk management process as prescribed by the PMI. Your discussion must reference the case study even if you have to make some assumptions
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Please I want answer for this and I will give big thump. Thanks
Generally in project management, there are three basic forms of organizational structure that is functional, project and matrix. Suppose you are responsible for advising an health care product company on changes to an organizational structure, to embrace the growing need for effective project management in creating new health care products. Draw the sample organization structure of health care products and conduct an assessment of the advantages and limitations of each of the three structure types. Which would you recommend?
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* Please I want answer for these questions and I will give big thump for it. Thanks
Read the following case study and answer the following question.
The Five star Hotel ELV (Extra Low Voltage) project was located in Bahrain and completed in 2011. The purpose of this project was to install, test, and commission the IT, communication infrastructure, and services for the hotel. The ELV project was part of a total program to deliver 11 sub system, including installation of data, voice, music, wireless and CCTV systems. The project stakeholders included the hotel owner, the consultant they had employed on their behalf and various civil, electrical and construction teams involved in implementing the ELV project.
This case study focuses on the Audio visual (AV)sub system, primarily installation of projectors and screens in the meeting rooms and conference facilities. Renosh Thomas as the vendor’s project manager was responsible for issuing the client with complete drawings detailing the projects electrical requirements. Renosh knew these drawings needed to be accurate as these would be handed over to the civil and construction teams for use when building the sites. The final phases of the ELV project required Renosh team to visit the sites, install, and test the electrical equipment.
At initiation and during the project planning phases, the AV requirements were issued and communicated via drawings between the consultant, appointed by the customer and Renosh electrical team. The product specifications were based on lessons learned and templates from a similar project implemented in Dubai. The project scope was determined via the bill of quantities, materials and tender documents.
Renosh received only electrical drawings for the sites and continued to plan the installation requirements based on these drawings, going by the assumption that they were correct, accurate and most recent. Throughout planning, the electrical team was not privy to any of the civil or construction drawings from other teams, and hence remainded completely unaware of structural changes being made on the original plans that they were still working on too.
During installation of the AV system, the team encountered a major problem- the projection was faulty. The projectors and screens were not aligning; images are cut off and unclear. Upon investigation it became apparent that certain structural changes had been added, drawings and calculations inaccurate.
The customers response to this communication oversight was to respond by sending Renosh a full collection of civil and construction drawings including all the latest revisions. Renosh spent considerable time reviewing the drawings to identify the relevant adjustments. This resulted in delays, rework and wasted time as he ploughed through drawings, many of which were excessive to his requirements.
The problem the installation team encountered was that ceilings had been elevated higher than the original design and this had been approved by the customer who failed to communicate the new changes and approvals to Renosh electrical team. Renosh revised and issued new electrical drawings to the customer that went through the approval process again.
The site had been handed over from civil and construction completed with decoration. However, this vital communication error resulted in the solution requiring reworking of parts of the site, such as opening the ceilings to access the electrical panels and make the new changes. This impacted the schedule by 8-10 days and reworked costs of opening, adjusting and redecorating the site.
Questions:
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What polices and protocols should businesses have in place to provide a safe work environment while also ensuring that employees are being treated fairly?
For example, what, if any, business policies should be developed or implemented to address the following?
Identifying the employees the policy applies to.
Detailing the consequences of testing positive or refusing to be tested.
Providing notice to employees prior to the implementation of a policy.
In: Operations Management
QUESTION 1
A local electrical company orders a special type of widget from an Asian supplier at a cost of $8.00 per widget. The company has a daily demand of 100 widgets with a standard deviation of 25 widgets. Annual holding cost is $2.50 per widget and cost to place an order of $15. It takes 7 days to receive an order and the company operates 250 days for the year. The manager has set a 96% service level.
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Fact Scenario:
Quik Results, Inc.(QRI), a Michigan corporation, makes and sells Power Up!, a super energy boosting, carbonated beverage. Power Up! is made in Michigan, but shipped to stores all across the Midwest and East Coast. Power Up! is made by QRI, and delivered on QRI. trucks, by QRI employees. QRI has in-house accounting and marketing staff.
QRI, hires Cole to its in-house marketing team to develop and implement an e-commerce strategy for marketing Power Up!. Cole signs a contract that includes a clause prohibiting him from competing with QRI during and after the employment. After creating the strategy, but before the strategy is implemented, Cole resigns from QRI's employ and opens a business to compete with QRI. In QRI's suit against Cole, to determine whether Cole may compete with QRI, what are the most important factors the court should consider? What will be the result of the suit?
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MAX Z = 2x1 + 8x2 + 4x3 + 9x4
subject to
2x1 + 3x2 + 2x4 <= 8
2x2 + 5x3 + x4 <= 12
3x1 + x2 + 4x3 + 2x4 <= 15
and x1,x2,x3,x4 >= 0
apply the Primal Simplex Method to recover optimality.
In: Operations Management
Create your own e-commerce business in Saudi Arabia (website or mobile application), you need to explain the process that you will follow in building your e-commerce presence.
Before you begin to build a website or app of your own, there are some important questions you will need to think about and answer. The answers to these questions will drive the development and implementation of your e-commerce presence.
Set up Your E-Commerce Presence
Building an E-Commerce Site: A Systematic Approach
Choosing Software
The development of e-commerce required a great deal more interactive functionality, such as the ability to respond to user input (name and address forms), take customer orders for goods and services, clear credit card transactions on the fly, consult price and product databases, and even adjust advertising on the screen based on user characteristics.
Explain the different software you need for your site functionality.
Choosing Hardware
Payment and Security
Categorize marketing and advertising strategy and method.
Explain your business e-commerce process
Conclude your report.
In: Operations Management
Describe the pricing strategy of a recently launched product of your choice.
What is the pricing structure and the logic behind it?
What did the organization do to implement its pricing successfully in the marketplace?
What was the analysis / decision making process that the company went through in arriving at the launch price?
What role did competitive pricing behavior play in influencing the success/failure of the product?
What improvements could you suggest on how the company approached pricing and the actual pricing strategy?
Before the analysis, you should aim to give an adequate history of the firm and product itself. What economic and market situations led to the introduction of this new product? What about competition? After the analysis, give your opinion on the strategy you identified. Do you believe the launch will be successful? Not successful? Why?
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Is My Work Computer Really Mine? If you work, do you think you have a right to privacy at your job? What can your employer find out about you and your work? You might be surprised at the answers! Employers can (and do), among other things, read your e-mail (even those marked “personal or confidential”), tap your telephone, monitor your work by computer, store and review computer files, monitor you in an employee bathroom or dressing room, and track your whereabouts in a company vehicle. And these actions aren’t that uncommon. In fact, some 30 percent of companies have fired workers for misusing the Internet and another 28 percent have terminated workers for e-mail misuse. What are your feelings about, if you were an employee and also if you were an employer Find examples of how these issues have created either legal or hostile issues at workplace. How will you manage your employees if you were running a company or a division. Now for than ever, when many people are working from home, what could be the challenges for managers? discuss
In: Operations Management
Enterprise Transformation at Trustworthy Insurance
CIO Sheila Lee had every reason to be pleased with herself on this crisp winter day. She smiled at her image in the ladies room mirror as she checked her suit jacket. A petite Asian who dressed with flair, she had recently been recognized as one of the country’s top 100 most powerful women. A newcomer to Trustworthy Insurance’s executive leadership team, she had successfully delivered a huge new enterprise initiative that was central to her company’s transformation strategy—on time and on budget. Concerto Insurance was North America’s first fully online direct insurance business—and a new brand of its parent company, Trustworthy Insurance. For the first time, customers could obtain a fully binding quote for their car or home insurance directly online and purchase it without the need to go through a customer service representative or insurance broker to finalize the deal.
Although it was entirely ITbased, Concerto had been a significant undertaking for the entire company, Sheila reflected, as she walked down the hall to the boardroom. She couldn’t have done it without the CEO’s support and that of the entire business leadership team. When Sheila joined Trustworthy Insurance two years ago it was a midsized multichannel insurance company founded in 1871 with premiums of more than $2 billion annually and $6 billion in assets. Over the years it had experienced considerable growth and change through the acquisition of a number of different brands, including a pet insurance division and a commercial insurance division. Until Concerto, however, its business model had essentially remained the same. It relied on its network of independent brokers who worked in agencies across the country to recommend Trustworthy products. But as CEO Kelly Mason noted in a shareholders’ meeting three years’ ago, the insurance industry was changing rapidly and companies that didn’t keep pace would be left behind. “We have a vision of becoming a top property and casualty insurer,” she had said. “Our executive leadership team is committed to growing our business and we want to deliver the best possible products and service to our customers. We can’t do this simply by doing business in the same old way. We have a great broker network and we’re fully supportive of it, but our research shows that there are many customers we are not reaching.
Even excluding the impact of our investment in Concerto, our adjusted combined ratio is still 104.6 percent, which is too high. And we expect our strategic investments will continue to increase operating expenses over the next few years. However, we hope these investments will begin to improve our operational efficiency over the next few quarters and expect to see profitable growth in the longer term as a result. A key challenge in addressing these numbers has been our underwriting performance that has been poorer than expected. As you know, our goal with Concerto was to rewrite underwriting to make it fully automated for our customers. We will need to continue to tweak this component in order to make it more cost beneficial. And finally, while the market has given us a bit of a break this past year, we can expect it to be tougher on us going forward.” With that, Ron sat down and Kelly nodded at Jim Jenkins. Jim, who looked every bit of the actuary he was, in a pinstripe suit and horn-rimmed glasses, glanced around the room somewhat nervously. “Well,” he said, “I guess that puts us in Underwriting on the hot seat.
As you all know, automating underwriting has been a significant component of Concerto. We invested heavily in big data so we could access both structured and unstructured data about an individual’s home and car without them having to answer numerous questions. This required developing real-time access to a variety of third-party data providers through external interfaces. We can now get comprehensive information about properties in a particular postal area from a variety of service providers and details about an individual’s claims and driving history from the insurance bureau and Ministry of Transportation information simply by asking a customer a few key questions. We had to put a lot of work into these questions to get this right. We then developed advanced analytics so we could prepare a binding quote for an online buyer in real time. We wanted to keep things simple and straightforward but to know enough to be able to offer a customer a unique product tailored to their needs. This has been an instrumental component in providing our customers a unique insurance experience.” Jim gazed at the ceiling as if seeking inspiration to continue.
After a long pause he said, “As you all know, Concerto suggests three levels of coverage for each customer request: economy, recommended, and premium. However, as you have seen from the financials, there is still work to be done in our underwriting processes. We are constantly working to improve our ability to gather and use information, and tweaking our underwriting algorithms is our number one priority. Our use of big data and realtime analytics has captured global attention in the insurance industry and already sets us apart. Our full attention in Underwriting will now be on making the necessary adjustments to remain price competitive while reducing our combined ratios.” Kristen Stewart then took the floor. Although much younger than everyone else in the room, she had won their respect through her social media acumen and intuitive grasp of customer needs. “Marketing’s research played a significant role in the development of the Concerto strategy,” she said. “You all know that a key value of our company is our commitment to an exceptional customer experience. That is why we value our brokers so highly and why we invested significantly in customer research before making the decision to develop an online channel. We believe these investments have helped us create a highly customer-centric product with Concerto.
We, in Marketing, began this process several years ago with an initiative to explore shifting customer expectations and identify unmet customer needs.” “We found that almost one-half of all personal insurance policies were sold online, and that number was growing annually. But most players in the industry tap into rational marketing drivers such as price. We felt there was also some white space there around an emotional connection. In fact, our research revealed that when it comes to buying insurance 56 percent of purchasing drivers are actually emotional. Combining this with the needs of potential millennial customers, we realized that we could win the hearts and minds of these customers by changing everything about their experience with buying insurance, not just putting a traditional insurance experience online. Our goal was to be known as ‘not your typical insurance company.’ In short, Concerto has been designed to be a parallel digital experience. It doesn’t take away from our brokerage offerings but expands our market significantly.” Warming to her topic, Kristen held up three fingers. “When we began work on Concerto, we based it on three pillars: make it simple; make it available at their fingertips; and offer a customized product that best meets customer needs. To this end the Concerto team first mapped the end-to-end customer journey through the discovery, quoting, purchasing, servicing, and claims processes and then ensured these three pillars were addressed at every touch point.
Concerto products are also written in everyday language—like we speak—and clean modern design is used in both our print and online materials to help customers easily understand complex topics. They provide an engaging experience for customers that informs and creates connections for them.” “This new approach at Concerto was complemented by a broader shift to an even more customer-centric focus at Trustworthy that positions us as a forward-looking partner in the industry as well as a trusted one. We’ve simplified our overall image to create a more modern look that better reflects our ambitions as a company. We have refreshed our brand and redesigned our web site to more accurately tell our company story. Our biggest challenge now is to bring what we’ve learned with Concerto to our broker community to help them offer a best-in-class experience combining advice and digital support. But we aren’t sure what this will look like yet.” “Thank you Kristen,” said Kelly. “I think we all agree that our new look-and-feel is impressive. I’ll now ask Sheila to summarize IT’s perspective on Concerto and our ongoing transformation needs.” “Thanks Kelly,” said Sheila, walking to the front of the room. “As the newest member of our leadership team, who missed participating in the strategy development process, I deeply appreciate all the support you’ve given me since I joined Trustworthy. Although Concerto looks like an IT product, what we’ve just heard reinforces the fact that it’s a business strategy and its success required full business participation. From a technology point of view, this was an ideal project. Not only did we have a fully committed business team, we also had Kelly’s support at every single steering committee meeting.” Gesturing to the room, she bowed briefly to each of them.
“It is thanks to each of you that we’ve come so far so fast.” Smiling broadly, she continued. “When I joined Trustworthy as its CIO, frankly, I was uncertain we could pull this off, but I was very impressed with the discipline I found at all levels. In addition to full business support, I believe a critical success factor for this project was the fact that we were supported in taking a green field approach. By creating a separate office and team, we were freed from having to deal with a lot of legacy technology baggage. Although there was some back-end systems integration to contend with, we got knowledgeable people moved over to the Concerto office to help us. Creating a separate Concerto team enabled us to adopt a collaborative working model that facilitated problem solving.” Sheila’s enthusiasm was infectious although the group had only a limited understanding of the technological details she was speaking about. “The Concerto project adopted agile and DevOps practices from the start,” she said. “We divided our staff into small multidisciplinary teams so that each could work to continuously develop, integrate, and implement new functionality. We also developed a hybrid model of cloud and on-premise technology that has enabled an agile environment and which now helps us respond to new demands and opportunities extremely quickly.
“In fact, the main challenge I am dealing with right now is handling our other IT staff who want to know why the Concerto team is having so much fun! And we need to figure out how to bring what we’ve learned at Concerto back to our parent Trustworthy IT and business organizations.” “Thank you Sheila,” said Kelly warmly, as she stood up and began a round of applause. “I think I speak for all of us when I say we couldn’t have done it without you! A business strategy is only as good as its execution and Concerto in my opinion has been superbly executed. Well done! “Concerto has helped bring our growth strategy to life,” Kelly continued. “It started us on a journey of digital transformation but it’s just a start. Our next step will be to leverage our Concerto platform and experience for the rest of our business, especially our broker channel. From the beginning, we’ve been careful in how we managed our broker relationships, but now we have to redesign the rest of the insurance experience by combining digital transformation with deep industry expertise. As I said earlier, we cannot afford to stand still. We either have to disrupt or be disrupted.
Therefore, our challenges are twofold: to continue to improve the Concerto brand, and to apply what we’ve learned to our other Trustworthy brands and processes. “I see this as part of our multichannel evolution. It will involve further research, new ways of using data, new delivery mechanisms, new digital services, education, and cultural change. Our focus must continue to be on providing a superb customer experience regardless of the process or channel used. You have all been an important part of our transformation to date. I believe we as a company are unique in that we have taken a multifaceted approach to change. Our competitors have tended to focus only on technology. Fundamentally, the key to our competitiveness has been the successful business–IT collaboration at multiple levels. For this reason, I have decided to create a new position on our executive team here at Trustworthy. Please congratulate Sheila Lee as our new Chief Transformation Officer. She will be working with each of you and our new CIO to lead our company-wide digital transformation forward.” She paused, allowing Sheila to accept the congratulations of her peers. Then turning to Sheila she said, “The ball is in your court Sheila. What’s our next move?” “Thanks, Kelly,” Sheila said, standing up and smoothing her skirt. She had known about her new role for two days and had been thinking exclusively about the “next move.” She began cautiously. “Each of you has touched on part of the challenge we have with Concerto. We need to find ways to manage our costs down. It’s not just new business we’re after but profitable business and business efficiency. We must focus on how to use data to manage the risks of the business—such as exposure to different markets and products, dependence on third-party data, and changing demographics— as well as simply improving underwriting. And we are re-positioning ourselves in the marketplace with our three-pronged approach to customer experience. “But our bigger challenge as an organization is how do we leverage what we have learned with Concerto? First, we have to consider our traditional business, which has been our bread-and-butter. Kelly has just underlined the strategic importance of our agents to the future success of the company.
Discussion Questions
1. 1. Flesh out Sheila’s nightmare. Describe a scenario where Concerto becomes “disintermediated by a non-traditional company.” What impacts would this have on Trustworthy Insurance?
2. 2. Why would this be important to consider before designing any future transformation initiatives?
3. 3. Outline the next steps of a business strategy for Trustworthy Insurance that would extend transformation further into the organization. .
In: Operations Management