Week 12 - Project Management

1. Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management

The triple constraint is the framework which evaluates the relationship between three primary variables in any project - time, cost and scope. These three variable are interdependent. All projects are limited in some way by these three constraints. The relationship between these variables is such that if any one of the three factors change, at least one other factor is likely to be affected. Project management is the science of making intelligent trade-offs between time, cost and scope. All three of the factors combined determine a project's quality.

2. Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning

The two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning are PERT and Gantt chart.

PERT chart - is a graphical network model that depicts a project's tasks and the relationships between those tasks. PERT charts define dependency between project tasks before tasks are scheduled. PERT charts frequently display a projects critical path.


 
An e.g. PERT chart

Gantt chart - simple bar chart that depicts project tasks against a calender. In a Gantt chart, tasks are listed vertically and the project's time frame is listed horizontally. It shows actual progress of tasks against the planned duration



e.g. Gantt Chart
3. Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success

The three primary areas a project manager must focus on to ensure success, include:

• Managing People - Being able to resolve conflict within the team and balancing the needs of the project. As such communication, negotiation, marketing and salesmanship are just as important
• Managing communication - project manager distributes timely, accurate and meaningful information regarding project objectives that involve time, cost, scope and quality. Another important aspect of communication is receiving feedback
• Managing change - Successful organisations and successful people learn to anticipate and react appropriately to change

4. Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed

2 reason why projects fail include:

• length of contract - most contracts have long contracts this is because of high cost of transferring assets. It cause difficulties to get out of contract, problems reforming IT department
• Increase competitors

2 reasons why projects succeed

• increase in quality and efficiency of a process, service or function
• access to advanced technologies, reduced operating costs

Week 10 - CRM & BI

1. What is your understanding of CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) involves managing all aspects of a customer's relationship with an organisation to increase customer loyalty and retention as well as an organisation's profitability. CRM allows an organisation to gain insights into customers' shopping and buying behaviours.

2. Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management

The two primary components of a CRM strategy are operational CRM and analytical CRM.
Operational CRM supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers.
Analytical CRM supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers.

3. Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales  departments

There are three primary operational CRM technologies a marketing department can implement to increase customer satisfaction, they are:

• Light generator - compile customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing segments. Information sources includes website questionnaires, surveys
• campaign management systems - guides users through marketing campaigns performing such tasks as planning, scheduling and success analysis
• cross-selling - is selling additional products or services to a customer

The three primary operational CRM technologies a sales department can implement to increase customer satisfaction are:

• sales management CRM systems - automate each phase of the sales process
• contact management CRM systems - maintains customer contact information and identifies prospective customers for future sales
• opportunity management CRM systems - target sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales.

4. How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?

They could do this through using list generators. List generators are able to provide information on precise features of an organisation e.g. a marketing campaign would have list of customers in a geographic area and it can to arrange the lists of each customer in an area. Other strategies include campaign definition, planning and systems and cost sell or up sell.

5. Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to applications that are used to gather, provide access to and analyse data and information to support decision-making efforts. Business Intelligence is used for any tool that gives a longer length assortment of decision making and encourages types of decision making such as patterns and trends.




6. Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem

As businesses increase their reliance on enterprise systems such as CRM, they are rapidly accumulating vast amounts of data. The amount of data being generated is doubling every year and some think it will soon begin to double every month. Data are a strategic asset for a business; if the aset is not used, the business is wasting resources.
If there is too much data an organisation may have limited knowledge on where data is or who their competitors may be.Hence may not be unable to make the best strategic implementation due to insufficient tools to back up data and support decision making to their strategic goals. The solution approach that they could take is business intelligence where it helps an organisation make decisions. Functional areas of an organisation can make decisions where they can be able to see more data analysis and reduce the latency of information in making good decisions

7. What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?

The two possible outcomes a company could get from data miming is that it can increase profits and allow an organisation to have better sales and confined resources. Another two outcomes include cluster and statistical analysis. Cluster analysis is the searching of equal or non equal but alike data in the many types of databases. However to undertake the cluster analysis, behavioural traits need to be clearly identified through physically partitioning the individual information into set groups. Statistical analysis assesses the data trends through the assistance of a regression analysis and statistics. Statistical analysis gives opportunity to workers in an organisation a large variety of statistical capabilities in order to construct things such as statistical models, the examination of model’s assumptions and validity and the comparison and contrasting the number of models to identify which is the better alternative for an issue within an organisation.


Reference

Baltzan, Phillips, Lynch, Blakey. 2010. Business Driven Information Systems. McGraw Hill. Sydney, Australia.

An example of a Cluster Analysis
http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=8243747997517258236&postID=89069071603267511
Execution - M.H. 2010. Data Miming Techniques - Propensity Modelling (Cluster Analysis). http://www.executionmih.com/data-mining/propensity-cluster-association-patterns.php

Week 9 - Operations Management and Supply Chain

1. Define the term operations management

 Operations management (OM) is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform  resources (including human resources) into ggods and services.

2. Explain operations managements role in business

Operations management is responsible for managing the core processes used to manufacture goods and produce services.

The scope of OM across the organisation include many activities, including:

• Forecasting
• Capacity Planning
• Scheduling
• Managing Inventory
• Assuring Quality
• Motivating and training employees
• Locating facilities

3. Describe the correlation bewteen operations management and information technology (IT)

The use of IT can heavily influence OM decisions including productivity, costs, flexibility, quality and customer satisfaction. One of the greatest benefits of IT on OM is in making managerial decisions because OM exerts considerable influence over the degree to which the goals and objectives of the organisation are realised. OM information systems are critical for managers to be able to make well informaed decisions

4.  Explain supply chain management and its role in a business

Supply chain management involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximise total supply chain effectiveness and profitability.
Example of supply chain management

5. List and describe the five components of a typical supply chain

1. Plan - Have a plan for managing all the resources that go towards meeting customers demand for product and services. Biggest part of planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain so that its effecient, cost less and delievers high quality goods.
2. Source - Choosing reliable suppliers to deliever goods. Also to develop a set of pricing, delievery, and payment processeswith suppliers to monitor and improve relationships
3. Make - Where companies manufacture there product. This can include scheduling, testing, packaging and preparing for delievery. It helps measure quality levels, production output and worker productivity.
4. Deliver - commonly reffered to as Logistics. This is where companies must be able to recieve orders from customers, fulfill orders and implement billing and invoicing system for payments
5. Return - Most problematic step in supply chain. Companies must create network for recieving defective and excess products and support customers who have problems with delievered products.

6. Define the relationship between information technology and the supply chain

As companies evolove the roles of supply chain participants are changing. It is now common for suppliers to be involved in product development and for distributors to act as consultants in brand marketing. Information technology's primary role in supply chain management is creating the intergrations or tight process and information linkages between functions withiin a firm - such as marketing, sales, finance, manufacturing and distribution. Information technology intergrates planning, decision making processes, business operating processes and information sharing for business performance management. Considerable evidence shows that this type of supply chain integration results in superior supply chain capabilities and profits.

Refrence

Baltzan, Phillips, Lynch, Blakey. 2010. Business Driven Information Systems. McGraw Hill. Sydney, Australia.