You are three months into the Indigo HR project. You have acquired and assembled your project team and they are busy collecting and documenting requirements for the Request for Proposal (RFP) for your company, ABC Inc.'s, new Human Resources system. For the most part, your project schedule is on track. You have prepared your project management plans and are currently executing them, even though some of the subsidiary plans have not been 100% finalized and approved. Once the project got going, things seemed to move so quickly that you felt you had to begin executing your plans before you had the chance to finalize them. You meet every week on Monday mornings with your project team to review what was completed the previous week and to make sure that everyone is on the same page for what activities are planned for the upcoming week. The schedule is reviewed, risks and issues are discussed and documented, and mitigation and/or action plans are developed accordingly. As well, change requests are raised, reviewed and impacted, as required. Attendance at these project status meetings is mandatory and your team complies and regularly attends. You use the weekly project status meetings to collect information to update your project schedule and to your bi-weekly project status report that you communicate to the project sponsor, Wayne MacIntosh, and to the executive champion, Barry Sandler. You present this bi-weekly project status report at your bi-weekly project status meetings that you hold with Wayne and Barry. Wayne is consistently diligent in his review of the information presented. He asks questions, requests further information and includes your status information in his updates to the president. He is very detail-oriented and notices the slightest of errors. For this reason, you focus on providing accurate and high quality updates. You ensure that if you need to follow up on a request that you get the information to Wayne quickly. Barry is often busy and is either distracted during the status meetings or fails to attend. You often need to follow up with Barry one-on-one after you meet with Wayne. You have met monthly with the Human Resources department to keep them informed of the project's activities and status, and to provide the employees an opportunity to ask questions or voice any concerns that they may have. You plan to continue these monthly HR department meetings for the duration of the project. So far, you have not received any questions or comments, during these meetings, which cause you to be concerned. However, you issued an anonymous survey to all the HR employees of ABC Inc. and are in the process of compiling the survey results. An initial analysis indicates that, in general, there is an underlying fear that the new system is going to replace some of their jobs. If this is the case, you are afraid that the employees will hold back on the requirements they provide to your business analysts and limit the requirements they do provide to replicate the current processes and system functionality that is available with the current system. If they proceed ,   your organization will miss out on opportunities to streamline your business processes and to enable the reallocation of resources to higher priority organizational activities. You have yet to send out the anonymous survey to all ABC Inc. employees and plan to so this coming week. You wonder what responses and feedback you will receive from employees external to the Human Resources department. Caroline Dempster has visited the project site a few times, to your knowledge, and chats with Andrea Buckley. You are unsure of the nature of their conversations and understand that the two employees are friends, but you have some concern about the impact of Caroline's presence and influence on your project team's productivity. The design and implementation of the project's SharePoint site is almost complete. On this site, the project team will post all of their working documents so that there is full visibility into the requirements and the procurement documents as they are being developed. Project status reports and the project schedule will be posted to ensure that everyone on the team has access to accurate and current information. Risks and issues, along with plans and status will be posted for the project team to review and to which to refer. All change requests with their documented impact and current status (i.e. pending, approved, rejected, on hold) will also be posted. By your estimation, the site will be fully functional within five working days. Webpages are currently in design for the Indigo HR website component of the ABC Inc. website. Most of the content has been created and will be ready to launch at the first Town Hall meeting. The plan is to have the website provide information regarding the strategic objectives of the Indigo HR project, regular project updates, fun facts and FAQs, and general insight into the activities and results of the project as it progresses. ABC Inc. holds quarterly town hall meetings which are informal gatherings to which all ABC Inc. employees are invited. At the town hall meetings, ABC Inc. executives share current information about ABC Inc. products, market performance, changes within the organization and any special projects that are underway. Typically, there is a social component to the town hall meetings where employees benefit from refreshments, light snacks and free time to network and socialize. You are scheduled to provide regular updates to the employees at each of the quarterly town hall meetings. Both Wayne and Barry have committed to you that they will help present Indigo HR's progress. The next town hall is scheduled in two weeks. You will be providing quarterly project status updates to the Board of Governors in the form of a presentation at the Board meetings. You are on the agenda at the next Board of Governors meeting, which is in three weeks, to provide a project status update of Indigo HR's project activities to date. Your project is a recurring agenda item quarterly. At the end of each project stage, i.e. detailed planning, execution, deployment, the Project Management Office will conduct a Project Gate Review meeting whereby you will present the project status and supporting information regarding current schedule, scope and cost, how well the project is aligned with the originating project objectives and business case, what are the outstanding risks and risk mitigation plans, and the commitment levels of resources (people and funding) for the remaining project stage(s). Based on the information you present, the project sponsor, as advised by the executive champion, will decide whether or not to approve the project advancing to the next project stage. The first Project Gate Review meeting for Indigo HR is scheduled after the proposals have been evaluated and is currently scheduled six months from now. Preparation for this meeting will occur in the weeks leading up to the Gate Review.

 Questions

 1. What project communications best practices are you employing on the Indigo HR project? 

2. To whom and how is the project performance status communicated? 

3. What role does the project sponsor play in enhancing the project communications management?

 4. What would you do in response to the results from the Human Resources department survey? 5. How would you use theories of motivation and change management to manage the stakeholders of this project?

 6. What are the lessons learned so far from this case?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

1 Project communications best practices employed on the Indigo HR project include a Regular project status meetings Conducting weekly status meetings with the project team to review completed activiti... View the full answer