Successful projects begin with project planning. You have explored project planning, constructing a WBS, creating a schedule, assigning resources, and estimating costs, and this all helps create the foundational information the project manager and stakeholders need. Microsoft Project Professional makes creating and managing a project reasonable. Accountants use accounting software. Project planners and managers use project management software.

As an IT professional, you will work on numerous projects. Regardless of whether you are a project manager or a project team member, you need to know how to plan a project and your work. Further, planning projects is an activity you will see again during your capstone experience. Now is the time to demonstrate you can plan a project.

For your final assignment, you will construct a project plan for an agile IT project.

Assignment Instructions For the final project, you will be synthesizing the information from the course materials and your learning throughout the term. project plan using Project Professional that integrates several aspects of project management, including:

• Project scope management
• Project schedule management
• Project cost management
• Project human resource management

You are free to develop any information systems project for the final assignment. Note that an IT project is focused on developing and implementing a hardware and/or software solution and follows a systems development life cycle (SDLC) model. Some examples include:

• Installing or upgrading a customer relationship management (CRM) system
• Installing or upgrading an enterprise resource management (ERP) system
• Installing or upgrading a database system
• Creating an Intranet or Internet website
• Improving a supply chain management system
• Updating or extending a computer network
• Improving network security
• Migrating computer systems to the cloud
• Creating a disaster recovery capability
• Along with many, many more

The project you choose has budget, timeline, and resource constraints.

1. Budget a minimum of $50,000 and no more than $2,000,000
2. Timeline minimum of 8 weeks and no more than 52 weeks
3. Resources a minimum of six named resources

Your project plan will use the hybrid project management approach and follow the format provided in the Unit 4 and Unit 5 Project Professional tutorials. The Level 1 WBS tasks include:

1. Initiating
2. Planning
3. Backlog
4. Sprints (3 minimum sprints)
5. Closing

Each sprint should be 2 weeks in duration and begin with sprint planning, include a sprint retrospective, and end with a Sprint Complete milestone.

Initiating, Planning, and Closing must each have a minimum of three tasks and may have more.

You may complete the project individually or as a team with one other student in the class. If you choose to complete the project with another classmate, only one of you should submit the project plan to the Dropbox. Also, use the comments area of the Dropbox to list the names of both students who completed the project.

Assignment Requirements Your project plan must consist of the following elements:

1. The WBS is organized with the following Level 1 tasks: Initiating, Planning, Backlog, Sprints, Closing.
2. WBS is created as a task hierarchy with Level 0, 1, and 2 tasks at a minimum (this is the Task Name column in Project Professional). This is related to scope management.
3. Task duration and sequencing (show when tasks start, their duration, and their relationship with other tasks). This is related to time management.
4. A minimum of six human resources are used on the project.
5. Resources added to each task, and cost is associated with each resource (use the Resource Sheet to define resources and their costs). This is related to human resource management.
6. Costs are shown for each activity in the Gantt chart (add the "cost" column to your Gantt chart display costs are based on the resources you have added to each task). This is related to cost management planning.
7. Story points are shown for each feature in the backlog and in sprints.
8. Sprints are 2 weeks in duration and a minimum of 3 sprints are shown.
9. Each sprint contains activities for 55 to 65 story points (assume 1 story point represents 1 day of work by one person on the sprint team).
10. The backlog for the project contains a minimum of 20 features.
11. A minimum of one milestone is included for each Level 1 activity and each sprint in the WBS (remember milestones have no duration).
12. Critical tasks on the critical path are highlighted in red (do not do this manually: have Project determine this).
13. All activities are marked as complete through the first feature of the third sprint.