Read the Case Study below and develop a project charter as a document that formally authorizes the existence of the project and provides the project manager with the authority to apply organizational resources to project activities.

Case Study

CarreFull Group has grown to become one of the local leading distribution groups. The group currently operates four main grocery store formats: hypermarkets, supermarkets, discount and convenience stores. The group currently has about 15 stores, mainly company operated though there are ongoing talks to incorporate franchises in the neighbouring countries. Besides selling directly to the public, it also provides bulk purchases and offers discounted pricing to other general stores and international distributors servicing small accounts.

Five months ago, CarreFull launched a web site providing basic information about the company and having weekly in-store products promotion advertised online. This is Phase One of its web development effort. The site was created and the personal assistant to the CEO maintain it by editing or adding products, price, promotion period, other relevant information and the picture of the products. The site does not currently support online commerce and is not connected to any of the company databases. The site currently supports 500 concurrent users without impact on performance, but these users are not submitting data to the web site, so the processing load of the site is very low. The site works well because it is simple for users to find product promotion information, but it does not perform any other activity for the users.

CarreFull' VP of Operations, Julie Roberta, has commissioned Phase Two of the web development effort to set up some form of e-commerce. Competitors in the market have launched web e-commerce sites and stolen some market share from CareFull brand. She has decided the best person to run this effort is KS Lee, a recent hire with experience setting up an e-commerce web site for a distributor of IT products. The CEO, John Carrefull, had spoken to her and want to be directly involved in overseeing the project, as will the VP of Sales, Rich Saling. She will also need to make sure that Bob Fitts, the Director of Information Technology, is deeply involved and supportive of the project.

The project taskforce is charged with delivering an e-commerce system within 150 days, which will allow customers to select products, check prices, order online, and check order and shipment status. The budget for this project has been estimated at $700,000. However, a Firm Fixed Price contract worth $300,000 was signed recently with MCS Consultancy Services, who will design and implement the hardware and infrastructure upgrade. The increase in revenue is expected to be $3M.

The workflow of the standard system is as follows:

1. Currently, only business partners have an account to place an order with the company. Many visit the web site to learn about the products and promotions, but no order can be placed through the site. They must call the customer service order processing phone line to place an order.
2. When customer service agents receive the calls, they locate the business partner in the product and sales database, and enter in the entire information specific to the order. The customer services agents cannot confirm inventory or shipping on the product and sales database system, so they call shipping/inventory to confirm product availability and shipping.
3. The shipping/inventory representative determines product availability from a printed Inventory Report. The report is printed out each evening after the prior day's orders are entered into the inventory and shipping database system; therefore, it does not reflect the orders of the current workday. The shipping/inventory representative confirms inventory and shipping schedules to the customer service agent.
4. The customer service agents close the orders with the business partner, and enter the sales into their system. At the close of business each day, customer service prints out a summary report of the day's orders and sends the report over to the shipping/inventory department.
5. The administrative assistant in shipping enters this ordering data in the inventory and shipping database system, and then prints out the updated Inventory Report to be used the next day.
6. Retail customers may browse and check out the products and promotions online. They may then visit any one of the 15 stores to make a purchase.

General Goals for the Phase Two E-commerce Site CarreFull wants to build an e-commerce site as a channel to sell product to their customers. Any visitor to the site can browse the product lines, but customers will need to have a registered account to place an order. CarreFull wants to keep the ease and simplicity of product information while offering customers an opportunity to order online.

CarreFull also hopes to realize a good return-on-investment for the web technologies. The current system has several inefficiencies between performing product searches on the site, order processing on the phone, and inventory shipment processing. All three systems are separate from each other, and they are not able to pass information between the site and ordering processing, or between order processing and inventory shipping. If order info could be entered by customers at the site directly, it would streamline ordering, inventory management and shipping.

Business Partners and Customers All Business Partners and customers have broadband connections to the Internet, but may have different versions of web browsers. Since current orders can only be called in via tollfree 800-number, many of them may not be on the web site during the call. They often forget the product they were checking or miss out on some products, causing confusion and increased service time for order processing. CarreFull has engaged the services of MCS Consultancy Services to execute an analysis of the existing infrastructure and implement an architecture and hardware solution robust enough to support 150% of the new forecasted customer load.

The number of business partners and customers are expected to double in 1 year, though the size of the average order will be about the same.

After reading and understanding the Case Study above, you should be able to develop a project charter which contains elements of the project charter as follow:

Project Identification

Project Name:_______________________

Date:_________________________

Project Manager:_____________________

Project Sponsor:________________

Project Description

Project Background:

Project Objective:

Critical Success Factors:

Required Resources:

Constraints:

Project Authority: