Question

QUESTION I

Project Background You have just completed a postgraduate diploma in project management and are currently registered for a master’s degree where you have to carry out a mini research on customer care in your organization. Develop a project proposal on the planning, execution, analysis and reporting of the research. All processes planned for should be finalized within 6 months from the 4th august 2018.

GENERAL PROJECT TASK
The following needs to be done:

You know:
 How to conduct research according to the study-guide
 Sample of respondents should be at least 100
 Pilot study to be carried out

You have:
You have constituted a good team, and have decided to pay as follows:

Field Worker / Data Collector	$100 per day
Statistician	$3800
Language Editor	$200 per hour
Printer and Binder	$400

Note: Assign resources as much as you can to accomplish all your identified tasks

State the objective i.e. why your help is needed. State the project goal, plus any constraints or conditions. Break down the goal into several objectives that will be researched, and the value that each objective offers to the research study.

List all resources that will be needed, including your research professionals like a statistician. Discuss assumed resources, including research requirements. Especially note external resources and requirements, e.g. does the study need an external reviewer?

Present the specific tasks you will do as a WBS, and give cost estimates, with sub-totals at each level and total estimated cost. Briefly discuss the estimates, where the costs mainly go, and efforts made to save costs.

Discuss the project dependencies and list the tasks on the critical path. Discuss the critical path tasks, and methods used to shorten the critical path.

List and discuss the milestones and the deliverables for each. Be very specific about each milestone, including the project finish milestone.

Explain the general strategy that will be used to manage the project to completion. Project must have at least two phases. Discuss how they connect to each other, and the milestones. Explain why you took this strategy. Summarise 10 most important project risks, and how they will be dealt with if they occur.

Briefly summarise, giving the overall project cost, the project benefits as bullet points, and the general strategy. Provide a list of meetings with research specialists and others involved in the research process, with details like who, when and where and estimated times, and desired deliverable.

Answer 1

Define Project objective.

The PROJECT OBJECTIVE is to deliver best Customer services in the segments the company is operating into.An effective customer management system is integral to providing quality customer service. It helps to measure customer satisfaction and is a useful source of information and feedback for improving services.

Implementing effective customer management systems within the company:

1. Improves Companies internal complaints handling
2. Reduces recurring complaints
3. Improves standards of service to the community
4. Raises standards of administrative decision-making

• Define Completion Criteria (Deliverables) The completion critriea of the proposed system must also be evaluated. Benefits may be categorized as tangible or intangible.
Tangible benefits that are measured in money terms consist of the saving of

· Time.
· Certain operating costs.

Intangible benefits are more difficult to estimate and justify. They are often impossible to give a money value to.
These may include –

· Satisfaction of the customers

Efficiency in handling complaints :- we need to analyse.. what is the current system followed for attending customer concerns and what would be the proposed system.

• Identify Resources :- Resources need to be identified ar each levels. Who are the people at the Project develop stage.

• Define Tasks (mind mapping):- the task need to broken down into groups and sub-groups. Smaller groups needs to deligated the responsibility at each stage of the project.. like Planning stage... The sub-groups will work in this group to deliver the objectives defined in the "Planning stage."

• Define WBS :- A work breakdown structure (WBS) is a key project deliverable that organizes the team's work into manageable sections. The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines the work breakdown structure as a "deliverable oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the project team." The work breakdown structure visually defines the scope into manageable chunks that a project team can understand, as each level of the work breakdown structure provides further definition and detail.
In attaining Customer satisfaction - what are the factors for customer dissatisfaction in the current structure. What process needs to be followed to reslove the issue.

• Allocate Resources to Task (Activity detail):- Each stage need to be allocated resources such as Man-power, Equipments, finance, budget, and time to compleate the activity.

• Create Dependency Relations :- planning--> execution--> analysis--> reporting. All teams at all time must be reporting to the Core Group. So the core group is involved and interactive with all teams all the time.

• Prepare Schedule (Gantt chart) :-

WBS	TASK	LEAD	START	END
1.1	Plan	Mr.X	1.1.2018	15.01.2018
1.2	Design	Mr.X & Y	07.01.2018	20.01.2018

• Prepare network Diagram and Review Critical path :-

Step 1	Identify & Meet with customer care team
Step 2	Set & Prioritize Goals
Step 3	Define Deliverables. ...
Step 4	Create the Project Schedule
Step 5	Identify Issues and Complete a Risk Assessment. And finally PRESENT to the core group

• Set Milestones and Control Points. Milestones needs to be defined at each stage of work in progress. The control points will be with the group and will be monitered by the core group.

In this case study the problem defined is Customer care. So all focus has to be on this Objective.

For this exercise the research methodology that would be most applicable is

1. The waterfall process model:- It is usually referred to as the oldest and most well known process model. In this model there are different phases (Requirements, Design, Implementation, Testing and Maintenance). These phases are using feedback from the previous one and therefore the phases are executed one after another.

2. Prototyping Model:- Its used for software development according to which a throwaway
prototype of the proposed system, based on the currently known requirements, is given to the
user so that he has a fair idea about how the proposed system is going to be like. This will
help him in deciding the interface, input and output requirements.

The core group has to assign the responsibility to a sub group for Data Analysis. Is the data collected in a proper way. Are all the fields being filled? Is the data being stored in a proper manner?

The new proposed system will affect the users in the following areas

• Accuracy
• Efficiency
• Productivity
• Robustness
• Lesser time consuming

Since the scope of the project is on al large sacle, so the information collected from the customers would be on a large volume. For such Volume of information Technology such as MySQL, etc need to implemented.To develop the software, where this information can be captured needs to be designed and approved at the planning stage. In the Execution stage the human resource needs to be trained to gather full information and to run the software to the maximum usage.

An experienced external reviewer is always and important part of bigger projects, so he would play an important role in the development & implementation of this project. The role of Statisticians come into play for data analysis to and make recomandations to increase customer satisfaction and care.

Now the project cost can be calculated based on each step as is defined above.