Weekly 12 Questions - Project Managment

Weekly 12 Questions - Project Managment Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management. The triple constraint involves making tradeoffs between scope, time and cost for a project. It is inevitable in a project life cycle that there will be changes to the scope, time or cost of the project. These three variables are interdependent: You cannot change one without changing the others. Project management is the science of making intelligent trade-offs among time, cost, and scope. This is the overall importance of the triple constraint in project management. Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning Two primary diagrams used in project planning are PERT and Gantt charts. PERT chart is a graphical network model that depicts a project’s tasks and the relationships between dependency and critical path. While a Gantt chart is a simple bar chart that depicts project tasks against a calendar. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project. Terminal elements and summary elements comprise the work breakdown structure of the project. Some Gantt charts also show the dependency relationships between activities. Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success -managing people - managing communication - managing change Managing people is one of the hardest and most critical efforts a project manager undertakes. Resolving conflicts within the team and balancing the needs of the project with the personal and professional needs of the team are two of the challenges facing project managers. Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed. There are various elements allowing projects to both fail and succeed. Many businesses IT projects fail because firms create unrealistic expectations. Another reason in which projects fail is because of poor scope. This means that firms may set unrealistic time frames for a project to be completed. On the other hand, projects commonly succeed if the project is headed by a good leader and is performed using a good mix of team players who can share their expertise. Additionally, projects succeed in many cases due to good communication which is inevitable in any team work. Watch : > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLrnJc2Tz44

Week Ten - Weekly Questions-Customer Relationship Management & Business Intelligence

Week Ten - Weekly Questions

Customer Relationship Management & Business Intelligence

1. What is your understanding of CRM?
   Customer relationship management (CRM) – involves managing all aspects of a customer’s relationship with an organisation to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organisation's profitability. CRM helps companies make their interactions with customers seem friendlier through individualisation. Therefore I believe CRM is a broadly recognized strategy for managing and developing a company’s interactions with customers and sales prospects.

For further knowledge on CRM visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3LEnCyaa5I

2. Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational CRM supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers while Analytical CRM supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers. Therefore the primary difference between operational and analytical CRM is the direct interaction between the organisation and its customers.

3. Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments

CRM metrics include: sales metrics, service metrics, marketing metrics

Marketing Metrics include: number of marketing campaigns, new customer retention rates, number of responses by marketing campaign, number of purchases by marketing campaign, revenue generated by marketing campaign, and customer retention rate. While, Sales Metrics include: number of prospective customers, number of new customers, number of retained customers, number of open leads, number of sales calls, amount of new revenue, amount of recurring revenue, and number of proposals given.

4. How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?

The overall goals of CRM are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service. When an implementation is effective, people, processes, and technology work in synergy to increase profitability, and reduce operational costs therefore increasing the companies success. The sales force automation (SFA) system provides an array of capabilities to streamline all phases of the sales process, minimizing the time that sales representatives need to spend on manual data entry and administration. This allows them to successfully pursue more clients in a shorter amount of time than would otherwise be possible. Also, SFA also consists of a contact management system for tracking and recording every stage in the sales process for each prospective client, from initial contact to final disposition. Many SFA applications also include insights into opportunities, territories, sales forecasts and workflow automation, quote generation, and product knowledge.

5. Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

Business intelligence (BI) refers applications and technologies used to gather, provide access to, and analyse data and information to support decision-making efforts. BI is valuable to the business as it can tell them things like:

—Determine who are the best and worst customers thereby gaining insight into where it needs to concentrate more for its future sales.

—Identify exceptional sales people.

—Determine whether or not campaigns have been successful.

—Determine in which activity they are making or losing money

6. Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem

Companies can have a lot of data, however they are not able to benefit from levering this information and turning it into useful data for analytical and strategic decision making. The issue most organisations are facing today is that it is next to impossible to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, let alone their enemies, because the enormous amount of organisational data is inaccessible to all but the IT department. The problem: data rich, information poor. The best solution to this is to shorten the latencies so that the time frame for opportunistic influences on customers, suppliers, and others is faster, more interactive, and better positioned.

7. What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?
   

Data mining is the application of statistical techniques to find patterns and relationships among data and to classify and predict. Data mining represents a convergence of disciplines. Data-mining techniques emerged from statistics and mathematics and from artificial intelligence and machine-learning fields in computer science. Common forms of data-mining analysis capabilities include: cluster analysis, association detection, and statistical analysis. Cluster analysis is a technique used to divide an information set into mutually exclusive groups such that the members of each group are as close together as possible to one another and the different groups are as far apart as possible. CRM systems depend on cluster analysis to segment customer information and identify behavioural traits. Association detection reveals the degree to which variables are related and the nature and frequency of these relationships in the information

Week Nine - Operations Management and Supply Chain

Week Nine Weekly Questions

1. Define the term operations management :

Operations management (OM) is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources (including human resources) into goods and services.

2.. Explain operations management’s role in business :

Operations management is responsible for managing the core processes used to manufacture goods and produce services. Its role is to simply manage the many operations that convert inputs into outputs. OMs role in business includes many interrelated activities, such as forecasting, capacity planning, scheduling, managing inventories, assuring quality, and motivating employees, deciding where to locate facilities and more. (Business information driven systems, Baltzan)

3. Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology :

The correlation between operations management (OM) and information technology is the fact that I.T heavily influences OM decisions including productivity, costs, flexibility, quality and customer satisfaction. The connection they have is that I.T’s benefits are considerably felt by OM and therefore help OM to set its goals and objectives for the organisation. (Business information driven systems, Baltzan).

4. Explain supply chain management and its role in a business

Supply chain management involves involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximise total supply chain effectiveness and profitability. Its role in the business is to:

- Plan

- Source

- Make

- Deliver

- return

5. List and describe the five components of a typical supply chain

Plan: a company must have a plan for managing all resources that go toward meeting customer demand for goods and services.

Source: companies must carefully choose reliable suppliers that will deliver goods and services required for making products.

Make: companies manufacture their goods or services-this is the most metric-intensive portion of the supply chain

Deliver: often referred to as logistics- the set of processed that plans for and controls the efficient and effective transportation and storage of supplies from suppliers to customers.

Return: .most problematic step of the supply chain. Companies create a network for receiving defective excess products and support customers who have any problems.

6. Define the relationship between information technology and the supply chain.

The relationship between is that Technology advances in the five SRM components have significantly improved companies’ forecasting and business operations. Also, Integrated Systems provide companies with greater visibility over the supply chain inventory levels and finally IT’s primary role is to create integrations or tight process and information linkages between functions within an organization.

Week 8: Networks and wireless

Chapter Seven - Weekly Questions

1. Explain the business benefits of using wireless technology.

- Voice over IP: Allows the internet to carry voice in digital format, call costs have dramatically decreased as the international calls are now internet connections.

- Networking business:

Virtual private network (VPN) - a way to use the public telecommunication infrastructure (e.g. Internet) to provide secure access to an organisation’s network

Valued-added network (VAN) - a private network, provided by a third party, for exchanging information through a high capacity connection

- increasing the speed of business: terms such as bandwidth, hertz and baud are used to describe transmission speeds, whereas a measure such as bits transmitted per second would be more understandable.

- securing business networks: networks are a tempting target for mischief and fraud. An organization has to be concerned about proper identification of users and authorization of network access, the control of access and the protection of data integrity.

2. Describe the business benefits associated with VoIP

VOIP will benefit businesses in a number of ways ...

· cheaper telephony and lower operating costs

· many features at low cost

· easier to make changes

· easier to relocate

· can enable collaboration tools for an increasingly decentralised work force

· convergence provides lower cost WAN connectivity.

(http://www.alltel.com.au/voipbenefits.html

3. Compare LANs and WANs:

Local area networks (LANs) connect computers that reside in a single geographic location on the premises of the company that operates the LAN. A LAN in turn often connects to other LANs and to the Internet or Wide area network. While a Wide area networks (WANs) – connect computers at different geographic sites.

4. Describe RFID and how it can be used to help make a supply chain more effective.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies use active or passive tags in the form of chips or smart labels that can store unique identifiers and relay this information to electronic readers. It makes the supply chain as it reduces costs immensely

VIEW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zj7txoDxbE FOR GREATER INFORMATION.

5. Identify the advantages and disadvantage of deploying mobile technology

- Ubiquity – anywhere / anytime – technology cheap

- Convenience – Access quickly without a PC

- Instant Connectivity – No boot up, nothing technical

- Customisation – personalised information depending on location / tasted / preferences

Data bases and Data warehouses

Week 7 Questions

1. List, describe, and provide an example of each of the five characteristics of high quality information.

· Accuracy: the extent to which something is accurate e.g. are names spelled correctly?

· Completeness: are values in database compete e.g. is the address fully complete include postcode etc.

· Consistency: are certain types of information in agreement with each other? E.g. total felids equalling true total of individual fields.

· Uniqueness: does information only appear once? E.g. are there any duplicate customers?

· Timelessness: is information current e.g. is it updated on a weekly basis.

2. Define the relationship between a database and a database management system.

A database maintains information about various types of objects, event, people and places. While a database management system (DBMS) is a computer program used to manage and query a database.

3. Describe the advantages an organisation can gain by using a database.

Increased flexibility- good databases can handle changes quickly and easily.

Increase scalability and performance- databases today scale to exceptional levels, allowing all types of users and programs to perform information=processing and information searching tasks.

Reduced information redundancy- this can be achieved by recording each piece of information in only one place in the database.

Increased information integrity- the specification and enforcement of integrity constraints produce higher quality information.

Increased information security- provide security features including; passwords, access levels and access controls.

4. Define the fundamental concepts of the relational database model.

A relational database is a collection of tables from which data can be accessed in many different ways without having to reorganize the database tables.

Database fundamentals include:

· Entities and attributes- an entity in the relational database model is a person, place, thing, transaction or event about which information is stored. While attributes are characteristics or properties of an entity class.

· Keys and relationships- a primary key is a field that uniquely identifies a given entity in a table. While a foreign key is a primary key of one table that appears as an attribute in another table and acts to provide a logical relationship between the 2 tables.

5. Describe the benefits of a data-driven website.

- Allows the reader to make changes anytime and develop it easily.

- Does not require a programmer to make updates

- Enables the site to grow faster then would be possible with a static site.

- Minimisers human error

- Cuts down production and updating costs

- Efficient at keeping volumes of information intact

- Improved stability

6. Describe the roles and purposes of data warehouses and data marts in an organisation

A data warehouse is a logical collection of information that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks. The main purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate information throughout an organisation into s single repository in such a way that employees can make decisions and undertake business analysis activities. A data mart contains a subset of data warehouse information.

Week Six - Enterprise Architectures

Chapter 5 - Weekly Questions

Weekly Questions

1. What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and how do they relate to each other?

Information architecture is a general plan of how I.T is to be used by or within an organisation which is useful for planning. It identifies where and how important information, such as customer records, is maintained and secured. While information infrastructure is the actual implementation of the hardware, software and telecommunications equipment. Therefore they differ and relate because the architecture is the plan while infrastructure is the implementation of the PLAN.

2. Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture

An organisation can implement a solid information architecture by implementing the following:

- Backup and recovery: a backup is an exact copy of systems information. While a recovery is the ability to get a system up and running in the event of a systems crash or failure. A business should choose a backup and recovery strategy that is in line with its business goals.

- Disaster Recovery: this can be a plan that is a detailed process for recovering information in the event of a catastrophic disaster. While the costs will be high during the first few hours of disaster, they will get lower.

- Information security: this can be fulfilled by managing user access and also adopting up-to-date antivirus software and patches.

3. List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.

- Flexibility: An organisation must not only think for today but also have a vision for the future. This is done by making the organisation flexible so it can adapt to changing working conditions.

- Scalability: this refers to how well a system can adapt to increased demands.

- Reliability: this ensures that all systems are functioning correctly and providing accurate information. If a system is accurate then it is safe to say that it is reliable as well.

- Availability: addresses how often users can use and access the system. Many businesses have to however come down for maintenance, upgrades or fixes.

- Performance: this measures how quickly a system performs a certain process or transaction. This ensures efficiency, adaptability and effectiveness.

4. Describe the business value in deploying a service oriented architecture

Service orientated architecture is a business-driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services. This adds value to a business as it helps it be innovative by ensuring that IT can adapt quickly, easily and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. It also helps increase flexibility, strengthen I.T architecture and help create connections among information sources.

5. What is an event?

An event is an electronic message indicating that something has happened; it detects threats and opportunities and alerts those who can act on the information. Pioneered by telecommunication and financial services companies, this involves using IT systems to monitor a business process for events that matter—a stock-out in the warehouse or an especially large charge on a consumer’s credit card—and automatically alert the people best equipped to handle the issue.

6. What is a service?

A service contains a set of related commands that can be re-used, it is more like a software product than they are a coding project. Early forms of services were defined at too low a level in the architecture to interest the business, such as simple “print” and “save” services. The new services are being defined at a higher level; they describe such things as “credit check,” “customer information,” and “process payment.” These services describe a valuable business process.

7. What emerging technologies can companies can use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?

Companies can use the following to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively:

- Virtualisation

- Grid computing.