Project Management of Nigel Longford - Case Study Example

PROJECT MANAGEMENT [The of the will appear here] [The of the id will appear here] [The of the will appear here] [The name of the course number will appear here] Introduction Project Management is the task of planning, implementing, monitoring and controlling resources in order to achieve a specific task. In this case, the task is to launch and market a website of Nigel Longford. This is a project management report for the same task. Project Planning Methodology The project planning methodology would be divided into five phases: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and control and closure. Initiation In this stage, the project charter is created. A project charter is a document that formally recognizes the existence of a project and provides a summary of the projects objectives and management (Schlwalbe, 2008). In this case, the project charter deals with the marketing and launch of a website. The project is to be completed within one month and has a budget of 50,000 dollars. The marketing team at Nigel Longford would be responsible for the marketing and launch of the website across various mediums so as to expand the reach of the website. The marketing team would consist of a team of 10 people. The project scope does not include designing and programming the website, which has already been conducted by the companys design and development team. The domain name has also been bought. Planning In this phase, the project contract is developed. This contains the scope of the project, the Gantt chart, selection of team, risk planning and identifying deliverables. The scope of the project is to market and launch the website of Nigel Longford and to reach the maximum number of customers. The team would be based on 10 people. One of these people would be the team leader or the manager of the project. Three of the team members would work on the testing of the website. This includes checking and proofreading content, testing website and its link, user testing and also launching the website on the given date. This team would work closely with the design and development team. The other team, consisting of 6 people, would be responsible for marketing the website. A creative designer and an art director would be responsible for designing the marketing campaign. Two team members would be responsible for overseeing print and outdoor advertisement while the remaining two would be responsible for submitting and marketing the website across search engines, social networking websites and business directories (Barbara, n.d.) In the end, the team would be responsible for a workable website that should be launched on the given date. Also a marketing campaign, both print and digital, should be delivered as a project outcome. Execution In this stage, the team would work in mostly pairs to achieve their objectives. Daily meetings would be conducted where all team members would be required to update the team leader about the success of the website. In these meetings, problems and conflicts will also be dealt with by the manager. The success of the project would be evaluated by comparing the weekly progress with the expected progress as planned in the Gantt chart. Monitoring and Control Monitoring and Control is discussed later on in this report. Closure One week after the launch of the website, the project team would deliver a report regarding the success of the website. This would be based on the traffic brought to the website. Google analytic tool is a good measure of a success of a website and the report would depend mostly on this tool. Project Specification Project Specification outlines what the project aims to achieve, how its successes would be measured, and the constraints under which it will need to operate (Select Knowledge, n.d.) The aim of the project is to achieve the following objectives: 1. Test the website for its ability to conform of user standards; 2. Select Launch date and announce it through press release; 3. Market the website on a range of platforms including digital, print and outdoor advertising; 4. Drive maximum traffic to the website; 5. Increase the chances of people sharing pages of the websites with friends through various social media websites; 6. Determine the reach of the website by using Google Analytics. The project would be considered successful if the website becomes successful in the first one month. This would be judged by applying the Google Analytic Tool. This tool will help determine the traffic in the website during the entire month, the referrals, the average time spent, the bounce rate, and unique visitors (Hawes, 2013). The aim is to get 100 unique visitors per day who spent 20 minutes on the website. The bounce rate should be less than 25 percent. Typically project constraints are divided into three types: time, cost and scope. Usually managers have to compromise on constraint in order to achieve the project deliverables. In this case, the scope of the project can be compromised. This means that the project can cut down on its marketing activities in order to complete the project on time and within the given budget. Kim Helden (2009) has identified more projects constraint including quality, resource, schedule, technology and directive. In this particular case, the project faces resource constraint and budget constraint. There are only 10 team members to overlook the launch of the project. Also in this age when hundreds of websites are launched every day, companies need to invest heavily into marketing in order to stand apart from the crowd. This website, however, is limited in terms of its marketing budget. Monitoring and Control The purpose of monitoring and control is to review project work results and compare them with the planned results (Synder, 2010). It is important to monitor the project during all phases of the project and periodically. This is then compared with the expected progress to understand whether the project is going on track. When the manager evaluates the project is not going as expected, he should be able to put more pressure on the team members and demand accountability for the lack of progress. In this case, formal weekly meetings would be conducted to evaluate the progress of the project. The manager would also be conducting informal meetings daily with the team members to evaluate the progress of the project. The team leader should be able to monitor and control different aspects of the project in order to evaluate the success of the different components of the website. These different aspects include monitoring cost, monitoring quality, monitoring performance of the team members, monitoring schedule etc. Project Communication In a project, there are three main communication channels that a manager must be aware of. These include upward communication, downward communication and lateral communication. The communication between the manager and the team members constitute upward and downward communication while that among the team members is considered to be lateral communication. Communication between all three channels is important because without this, the project will fail. It is the first meeting between the leader and the team members that would develop the communication strategy for the project. In this meeting, the leader would lay down the roles of the team members to minimize conflict. At the same time, the leader would announce that weekly meetings would be held during the course of the project. These meetings would be conducted at the end of the last working day of the week. In these meetings, every member would be asked to inform the leader about the progress that he made during the week and the obstacles he faced. The issues of the team and its members would be discussed during these meetings and everyone would be asked to contribute in the problem solving discussion. The final decision, however, would rest with the team leader. The leader would then file a report of these meetings and this report would be emailed to all team members. This report would also contain suggestions for improvement for the team and its members. Apart from the weekly meetings, the leader would be conducting informal meetings with the team members daily to discuss progress and issues. No formal written report would be filed for these meetings and they would be impromptu meetings. At the end of the project, a closure meeting would be held. In this meeting, the leader would discuss the success rate of the project. He would thank every team member and specially mention those that worked hard and stood out. The project manager would then file a report of this meeting and the entire project. Risk Management Analysis All projects are followed by certain risks that arise due to uncertainties in the project. Risk management is a systematic process that begins with identifying, evaluating and overcoming the inherent risks in the project. For risk management, a risk management model will be followed. This begins with identifying the risks (JISC, n.d.). The risks in the project include project costs exceeding the budget. Since the budget is fixed, aspects of the project would suffer. There is also a risk of not completing the project on the given time. This would cause a disruption in the entire project. Another risk is that the website would not be properly tested and therefore would have issues during the time of launch. This would led to negative image of the website among the initial viewers and could affect word of mouth publicity. For instance, the website may not be able to handle the amount of traffic in the website at the time of launch. The third risk is failure of the website to attract and retain the target customers. The main aim of the website is to attract maximum viewers to the website. The entire project would fail if customers do not visit the website. Once the risks are identified, the second part is qualitative analysis of the risk. This is done by evaluating two parameters, probability and impact, to determine the seriousness of the risk. The table below distributes the risk factors into probability and impact. Risk Probability Impact Exceeding Budget Medium Probability Low to Medium Impact Failure to Launch Low Probability Highest Impact Unable to attract viewers Low Probability High Impact The next time is conducting a quantitative analysis of the risk. This is done through the following table: Risk Impact Cost Time Quality 1 Medium Requires Additional Funding Slight impact on the deadline Slight impact of quality 2 Very High Does not require any funding Significantly affect time of the project Good impact on quality 3 High May require funding A good impact on the deadline of the project Significant impact on quality The fourth step is response planning of the risk. If budget exceeds the given amount, the response would be to reduce marketing reach. Some aspect of print and outdoor advertising would be reduced. If the project faces any issues with website launch, it would be communicated to the marketing department to extend deadline. The website would be tested and calibrated for the expected high traffic during the launch dates. The third risk is being unable to attract the target market. For this, the marketing department would conduct intensive marketing on the internet through blogs and social media which is often free of charge. The fifth step of risk management is monitoring and control. The project leader would be responsible for monitoring and applying relevant response if he finds that the probability of a certain risk is increasing. Project Management Issues There are certain project management issues that can impact the performance of the project. These include: 1. Conflict among team members: This is usually the most common issue that arises in a project. Since most team members are coming together to form the team for the first time, there is a strong risk of conflict. This however can be resolved earlier on by properly defining the roles and responsibilities of the team members. Also the team leader would closely check for conflicts and deal with them in the initial stages to prevent them from impacting the performance of the project. 2. Loss of Vision: At times, team members often lose the vision of the project. They begin to invest time and resources into irrelevant work. This places constraint on both the time and resources. This can be managed by guiding the members during every weekly meeting towards the right goal. References Barbara, V. n.d. How to launch a website, Retrieved from http://www.businessmarketingblog.org/how-to-launch-a-website/ [Accessed 12 August, 2014] Hawes, T. 2013. How to measure website success, Retrieved from http://blog.hostgator.com/2013/08/21/how-to-measure-website-success/ [Accessed 12 August, 2014] Heldman, K. 2009 PMP Project Management Professional Exam Study Guide, NJ: John Wiley and Sons JISC n.d A five step risk management model, Retrieved from http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/risk-management/five-step-model/ [Accessed 14 August, 2014] Schwalbe, K. 2008. Introduction to Project Management, Ohio: Cengage Learning Select Knowledge. n.d. Managing Projects, UK: University of Cambridge. Snyder, C. 2010, A Project Managers Book of Forms: A Companion to the PMBOK Guide, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Read More