IT project managers are often called to manage new projects, or to assume leadership over troubled projects. In this course, you will have the opportunity to resolve conflict within project teams for a fictitious project, determine strategies to improve the outcome of the project, and deliver a comprehensive project plan that will allow you to develop the skills necessary to become a successful IT project manager. For your final project, you will analyze a case that portrays a troubled information technology project, a project team experiencing conflict, and specific financial and timeline requirements. From this analysis you will develop a comprehensive project plan to attend to the team and communication issues and the project status issues. Throughout this course, we will refer to this fictitious project as the Medical Informatics case study.

Developing the comprehensive project plan will allow you the opportunity to apply the leadership, communication, and collaboration strategies you have learned during this course to a real-world situation. IT projects, like any other projects, can go off course for a variety of reasons, causing stress and strife in project teams. In addition, this assessment will allow you the opportunity to integrate the various strategies, practices, and concepts you have learned into a new project plan to get the failed project back on track. Your plan should carry the project through completion, and will contain all of the necessary sub-plans (i.e., scope plan, communication plan, schedule plan), tasks, information, and visual elements to ensure project success.

The project is supported by five milestones, which will be submitted at various points throughout the course to scaffold learning and ensure quality final submissions. These milestones will be submitted in Modules Two, Three, Five, Six, and Seven. The final submission will occur in Module Nine.

This assessment will address the following course outcomes:

• Recommend suitable leadership strategies for resolving conflict, developing cohesive information technology project teams, and delivering high-performance results and improved business value
• Utilize appropriate analytical techniques for forecasting information technology project success and realizing the value of prospective technology projects
• Assess the extent to which various artifacts and strategies from technology projects impact actual project outcome and feasibility
• Create actionable information technology project solutions and deliverables for ensuring and monitoring project success
• Determine the extent of corrective actions necessary for the success of information technology projects through the application of project management software tools

Prompt

To ensure the IT project can continue on and meet success, you will recommend strategies for managing conflict, communication, and strengthening the team; evaluate the current state of the project; determine the extent to which corrective action must be taken; and address project planning and controls. You will create several artifacts during this course, such as Gantt charts, a work breakdown schedule, and a communications plan. These elements will be used to inform your final project. They should be included in the appendix of your project plan.

This project will be completed in stages called milestones. Each milestone you complete in this course will be used to build to the submission of your final project. Each milestone has a specific set of guidelines, with a separate document for each. Milestones should be completed in a draft format. Your instructor will provide feedback to you on all of the milestones, and you should use this feedback to create a final, polished project plan for your final submission. Many of the milestones will be done in outline or table form, but you should think of these as rough drafts or sketches that will contribute to your final project. Also, you should submit and retain any supporting documents, often referred to as "artifacts" in this document. These may include, but are not limited to, Gantt charts, work breakdown schedules, and/or a communication plan.

Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:

1. Conflict Resolution Plan
   1. Team Dynamics: Analyze the team structure, dynamics, and conflict. Things to consider include:
      1. The roles and titles, reporting structure, and history of the team
      2. Stage of the five-stage team development model this team is in (forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning)
      3. Cause of conflict
      4. Skills the team is lacking based on their roles
   2. Conflict Resolution Leadership: Recommend appropriate leadership strategies to resolve the conflict within the team. Consider the following:
      1. Leadership style for current stage of the team development (guiding, coaching, structuring, directing)
      2. How to determine appropriate skills (soft and hard) for each role
      3. A strategy to employ to resolve the conflict (assertiveness, accommodation, avoidance, or compromise)
   3. Motivation and Confidence: Recommend strategies for motivating and strengthening that will allow you to develop a cohesive information technology team that will deliver high-performance results and add business value. Provide support for your recommendations.
2. Project Evaluation
   1. Status Evaluation: Evaluate the project status to determine the current state of and issues with the project. You may need to evaluate the existing deliverable and tracking for the project, such as Gantt charts, to provide an accurate representation of the project's state.
   2. Project Analysis: Examine the existing artifacts and determine current and potential problems that need to be addressed with them immediately. What information should be gathered to determine current variance and maintain control of project? You might consider these ideas in your analysis:
      1. The impact of scope creep
      2. The significance of the baseline
      3. The impacts of baseline changes
      4. The estimated vs. actual costs
   3. Forecasting: Assuming the project issues persist, provide a detailed prediction of future performance in terms of timeliness and costs. The following ideas could be considered:
      1. Assumptions that guide the forecasting
      2. Projected end date of the project (schedule variance)
      3. Cost to complete the project (cost variance)
      4. Forecasted overrun at completion (estimates at completion)
   4. Impact of the Past: To what extent, based on your project evaluation and analyses, did the past deliverables, strategies, and lack of effective project management influence the failure of the project?
   5. Corrective Actions: To what extent will corrective actions be required to avoid project failure? Include supportive detail from your project evaluation and relevant resources. Things to consider include:
      1. Immediate actions necessary to rescue the project
      2. Target dates to rescue the project
      3. Necessary steps to ensure the long-term success of the project
3. Project Charter
   1. Project Objectives: Determine new project objectives based on an examination of company goals, needs, the project analysis, and corrective action requirements.
   2. Project Strategy: Establish a general project strategy that will outline the overall path to the new project objectives and lead to successful completion, based on organizational and feasibility considerations. As you are developing your strategy, consider aspects such as:
      1. The existing problem (description, impact, who is affected, cost of ignoring the problem)
      2. The strengths and weaknesses of the internal environment
      3. The opportunities and threats in the external environment
      4. The best solution to the problem (feasibility study, alternatives)
      5. The project payback period
      6. The selection model
   3. Project Communications Planning: Document who to keep informed about the project and how to keep them informed. Ideas to consider may include:
      1. Who needs project information to make decisions and/or contribute to project progress (stakeholder analysis)
      2. When the information will be provided
      3. The information that is pertinent to stakeholders who contribute to the project's progress (scope changes, action items, deliverables issues)
      4. Where the information resides
      5. How the information will be collected
4. Project Planning and Controls
   1. Project Scope Planning: Establish the project scope plan and controls. What are the business requirements? What are the system requirements (software and hardware)? In establishing your project scope plan, you might consider these aspects:
      1. Requirements (requirements traceability matrix)
      2. Existing work breakdown structure
      3. Person responsible for each requirement (responsibility assignment matrix)
   2. Project Schedule Planning: Develop a comprehensive project schedule plan outlining completion dates, tasks, and relevant milestones. You should include all relevant artifacts that pertain to scheduling aspects of the project plan. In your project schedule plan, you could consider:
      1. Tasks that must be completed before others may begin
      2. Tasks that can be done at the same time
      3. Durations of each task
      4. Planned vs. actual dates
   3. Project Cost Planning and Control: Establish a cost control plan with strategies to help maintain prospective value of the new project with respect to expected expenditures and added business values. As you are developing your cost control plan, you could consider aspects such as these:
      1. The cost-benefit analysis
      2. The TCO
      3. Budgeted vs. actual costs
      4. The earned value of the project
   4. Project Risk Planning: Craft a plan for identifying and monitoring risk. In your plan, you could consider:
      1. The amount of uncertainty in the project and how to deal with it
      2. The threats of greatest concern
      3. How each threat should be dealt with
   5. Risk Control: Determine corrective actions and controls to deal with uncertainty and its impact on the project, based on your risk plan. Ideas to consider may include:
      1. Appropriate quantification of the risks (probability vs. impact)
      2. Contingency funding or time buffers in place to handle threats
   6. Project Quality Planning: Craft a plan for ensuring quality of the project outcomes that identifies acceptable performance standards and recommended recovery strategy. Ideas to consider may include:
      1. Key performance indicators of quality
      2. Important factors in defining quality
      3. How to measure quality