Week 12 Project Management

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Getting Started in Project Management

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

The triple constraint involves the three interdependent variables associated with project management and the project management lifestyle. These include, time, scope and cost. They are interdependent as you cannot change one without the other changing. For example, tightening costs has the effect of increased time but reduced costs.

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

A Gantt Chart-. It is a simple bar chart that depicts project tasks against a calendar. It shows the projected future plan of business activities in chronological order. They are detailed plans that take into account relevant business components aimed to achieve business goals efficiently and effectively.

PERT- a graphical network model that depicts a project’s tasks and the relationships between those tasks shows several possible paths business activities can follow. Importantly there is a ‘critical path’ shown. This shows the path that is more effective for the business.

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

·         Managing People

·         Managing Communities

·         Managing Change

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

Fail- Unrealistic expectations for the business AND a strong lack of project management.

                Success- The correct mix of team players AND good communication.


Sources: 

http://projectmanagementplanplus.info/result. 


http://geekandpoke.typepad.com

Week 10 CRM

What is your understanding of CRM?

CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. It is an enterprise wide effort to acquire and retain customers. It recognizes the importance of customers to overall business success and therefore attempts to manage these ‘customer relationships’ effectively. 

 Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational- supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers

Analytical- supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers.

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

1. List generator – compiles customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns
2. Campaign management system – guides users through marketing campaigns
3. Cross-selling and up-selling
1. Cross-selling – selling additional products or services
2. Up-selling – increasing the value of the sale 

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.

Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

Business intelligence refers to applications and technologies for consolidating, analyzing, and providing access to vast amounts of data to help users make better business and strategic decisions. The decision making process is vital to business success. So any tools such as ‘business intelligence’ can help in making better, more informed decisions based on the analyzing components of such an instrument

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

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.

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

Data mining derives its name from searching for valuable business information in a large database, data warehouse, or data mart. The first outcome a company could get from data mining is;

1. Predicts trends/ behaviours
2. Identifying previously unknown patterns.

 
 Sources: 

http://willscullypower.wordpress.com/tag/data-mining/

http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~zaiane

CHECK THIS VIDEO OUT!!! What is Data Mining?

Week 9 Operations Management

1.       Define the term operations management

Operations management is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources into goods and services.

2.       Explain operations management’s role in business

}  Has many roles such as Forecasting

}  Capacity planning

}  Scheduling

}  Managing inventory

}  Assuring quality

}  Motivating and training employees

}  Locating facilities 

3.       Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology

Information Technology is used in Operations Management to identify and improve business processes. It aims to automate processes where possible.

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. Customers order from retailers, who in turn order from distributors, who in turn order from manufacturers, who in turn order from suppliers.

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

1. Plan- planning from raw materials to retailers.
2. Source- identify those involved in the chain.
3. Make- produce the good/ service.
4. Deliver- provide good/ service to consumer
5. Return- return any dead-stock to supplier

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

IT has helped businesses forecast and plan the logistics involved in the management of a supply chain. There is greater visibility of business procedures with the use of IT integrated systems.

Source: http://tutor2u.net/business/production/pom_introduction.htm

Week 8 Wireless

1.       Explain the business benefits of using wireless technology.

Untethered connectivity, anytime, anywhere, has fueled a major market and technology disruption, which has permeated almost every consumer market worldwide. The domino effect of the success of wireless technology has resulted in a unique opportunity for innovation and creativity in technology, marketing, and business strategy.

2.       Describe the business benefits associated with VoIP

       Allows the internet to carry voice in digital format, call costs have dramatically decreased as the international calls  are now internet connections. VOIP enables phone calls, faxes, voice mail, e-mail and Web conferences over digital networks. VOIP also saves money.

3.       Compare LANs and WANs

Local area networks (LANs)  connect computers that reside in a single geographic location on the premises of the company that operates the LAN.

Wide area networks (WANs) – connect computers at different geographic sites.

4.       Describe RFID and how it can be used to help make a supply chain more effective.

RFID Tags that use radio waves to transmit data. Heavily used in Inventory tracking, they will eventually replace barcodes. They deliver accurate data very quickly and very cheaply.  Supply chain efficiency can be increased using RFID because of the immediate transmission of data expecially used in transport nationally and between countries.

5.       Identify the advantages and disadvantage of deploying mobile technology.

Advantages:

• Better information
• Improved efficiency
• Improved communication
• Faster product delivery
• Reduced connection costs

Disadvantages:

• Radio interference
• Path interference
• Weather and accidental damage
• Through-put 

Source: http://www.mtwo.com.au/wirelessnetwork.html 

Week 7 Databases

1. List, describe, and provide an example of each of the five characteristics of high quality information.

Accuracy: preventing data entry errors with strictly entering accurate data.

Completeness: if data is incomplete then it's useless since it wouldn't represent an accurate whole image of reality.

Consistency: crucial part of the database approach as same data will be shared through the different departments.

Uniqueness: data has to be unique and pass the data integrity test.

Timeliness: data has to be updated to consistently be reliable.

2. Define the relationship between a database and a database management system.

A collection of interrelated data together with a set of programs to access the data, also called database system, or simply database. The primary goal of such a system is to provide an environment that is both convenient and efficient to use in retrieving and storing information.

3. Describe the advantages an organisation can gain by using a database.

Relational databases minimise errors in several ways. Reduces information redundancy and increases information integrity (quality)

Combines datasets easily and efficiently

Reveal new features of the data: Increased flexibility, Increased information security and Increased scalability and performance. 

4. Define the fundamental concepts of the relational database model.

A database can be understood as a collection of related files. How those files are related depends on the model used. Early models included the hierarchical model , and the network model .

The relational database model was a huge step forward, as it allowed files to be related by means of a common field. In order to relate any two files, they simply need to have a common field, which makes the model extremely flexible.

5. Describe the benefits of a data-driven website.

The first and major benefit is that changing the content of the website can be done without specialized knowledge or expertise.

The second benefit is the level of speed when the website manager makes changes.

Thirdly, data-driven websites inherently have a great deal of scalability.

The fourth advantage includes reduced error rate.

6. Describe the roles and purposes of data warehouses and data marts in an organisation

The purpose of the Data Warehouse in the overall Data Warehousing Architecture is to integrate corporate data.  It contains the "single version of truth" for the organization that has been carefully constructed from data stored in disparate internal and external operational databases.
The amount of data in the Data Warehouse is massive.  Data is stored at a very granular level of detail.  For example, every "sale" that has ever occurred in the organization is recorded and related to dimensions of interest.  This allows data to be sliced and diced, summed and grouped in unimaginable ways.  

Source: http://www.creelprint.com/index.php/history/database-management/

Week 6 Architecture/ Infrastructure

1. What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and how do they relate to each other?

Information architecture- a general plan of how IT is to be used by/within an organisation – useful for planning

Information infrastructure- the actual implementation that will provide for effective Information Systems, including the hardware, software, services and people involved

They differ as infrastructure is the physical and tangible components of IT while architecture is the plan and the projected future uses of IT components. They relate as architecture is the general design of the infrastructure.

2. Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture.
1. A strong information security plan
2. Managing user access
3. Up-to-date antivirus software and patches

3. List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture. 

·         Reliability- high accuracy

·         Scalability- meeting growth needs

·         Flexibility- able to adapt and meet changing needs

·         Availability- 99.999% uptime

·         Performance- how quickly it performs a task

4. Describe the business value in deploying a service oriented architecture 

Service Orientated Architecture ensures IT systems can adapt quickly, easily, and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. A SOA allows enterprises to plug in new services or upgrade existing services in a granular fashion.

5. What is an event? 

It is an electronic message indicating that something has happened, it detect threats and opportunities and alerts those who can act on the information

6. What is a service?

Contains a set of related commands that can be re-used, it is more like a software product than they are a coding project.

7. What emerging technologies can companies can use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?

·         Interoperatibility

·         Group Coupling

·         Virtualisation

·         Grid computing

Source: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Information_infrastructure