Assignment Requirements
Information Systems – College of Business
BCO 6656 – IT Project Management, Semester 1/2014
Assignment 3-1 (Project Monitoring and Control) – Pegasus Trucks
Project Meeting 1 (- held in lecture on 30th April)
This assignment consists of four parts:
Please read carefully and do each part in a separate file sheet as it will be submitted into 4 stages:
Part 1 : (worth 25% of total marks)
Before commencing this part of the assignment you should download the solution Pegasus.mpp from WebCT. You should now use this for assignment. It is extremely important that you ensure that your project has its baseline set (- this should have been done in the downloaded version, but check it just to be sure). You should not re-set the baseline after you have done any of the updating as you will need it for the final report.
The Case Study:
Every week the management team from ISIS meets to discuss progress of all projects. These meetings are held at 7.00pm on Wednesdays. You will be given a report at the lecture of what was discussed.
The Director of ISIS requires you to update all tasks mentioned in the meeting report up to 7.00pm on the date of the meeting (– i.e. 30th April, 7th May etc.) and to make any required changes to the project schedule. To do this, as required, first change Task Durations and Start Times (use Advanced Tab in Task Information and set to Must Start On …), then choose Update Project to 7.00pm on the meeting day.
You should also then check for any over-allocation of resources and correct this if necessary.
Requirments:
In this monitoring task the Director requests copies of the following reports/charts for the next management meeting. These must be submitted in print format (hard copy and not e-mail) at your lecture the following week.
- Tracking Gantt Chart using a Microsoft project
- Summary Report
- Budget Report showing any changes in cost
- Report on Slipping Tasks
- Report on Over allocated Resources
- (There is no need to submit a copy of your MS-Project file.)
The next 3 parts will follow on from this one so it is important that you keep a copy of your project files. Note that the baseline should be set only once (- before commencing any part of assignment 3) and that this should already have been done. Do not set the baseline again each week or you will not be able to complete the final report in the last part of the assignment.
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ISIS Management Report for Pegasus Trucks – 30th April at 7.00pm
The project started on time at 9:00am on Tuesday 22nd April as scheduled (Task 3) with the negotiation and purchasing of the Daedalus minicomputer, the ERP system, mobile phones and robots. This all went without a hitch and was completed on time at 5.00pm on Wednesday 23rd April.
Bill the Builder commenced work on building the computer room as scheduled at 9.00am on Monday 28th April. Building work, however, was completed just a little late at 5.00pm on Tuesday 29th April.
Due to the late completion of another job, Cable Layers could not commenced work till 9.00am on Tuesday 29th April. Their work took 2 hours longer than anticipated (i.e. a total of 7 hours) due to a peculiarity in the construction of Pegasus’ premises. They thus finished work at 4.00pm on Tuesday 29th April.
Delivery of the Daedalus minicomputer was originally scheduled for 4.00pm on Tuesday 29th April, but due to the late completion of the building work could not be performed until 9.00am on Wednesday 30th April. This led to a subsequent delay in commencing its installation.
This morning (Wednesday 30th) Dr Zeus indicated that he required an important change to the project with the addition of some extra work on the design of a new web page for the company. He would like it to be attractively designed and informative in order to attract potential customers. He considered that in addition to the IT aspects of this, ISIS should engage the services of a well know graphic artist he knew, Fred Rembrandt, who has been designing the art work for advertisements and web pages for the last 10 years. His work was well respected.
As a first step you immediately check with Fred whether he is available for the job. He indicates that he has no current tasks that could not be postponed, and could commence work on Monday 5th May. He will require 2 days to complete the art work and will charge $3,000, but stresses that this does not include actually building the site (- HTML etc.), and that you will need to get someone else to do this. ISIS has their own Web Page Designer (who it charges out at $75 per hour) and you estimate that she could complete the job in 3 days after the art work is complete. The graphic design work would be completely independent of other project work and the web page construction could be done at the same time as other tasks and commence at any time after the ERP system has been installed and there is no other real stress on Pegasus’ computer facilities.
Before going any further, however you need to analyse the impact of this change in both time and cost terms. What do you do next? How do you handle this? After consideration and discussion with the ISIS Director during the day (Wednesday) you tell Dr Zeus that this can be done, but at an addition cost of around $5,250. He agrees and so you include this in your updated project plan. To make sure that this is clear to all stakeholders you write a note to Dr Zeus explaining what will be done and the cost of doing this. (You should include this note in you assignment submission.)
Apart from Dr Zeus’s request the project got off to a pretty good start, and the scheduled project completion date remains unchanged.
Required for 3-1: Reports etc. for Meeting 1. Due 7th May 2014 (No extensions of time.)
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