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