Assignment 3 & 5
Due date: Assignment 3 Due Date 25 Sep 2015
Assignment 5 Due Date 02 Nov 2015
Value: 35% (each)
Description: Business Report
Email submission will NOT be accepted in any circumstance.
The assignment should be packaged as one single pdf file and then submitted via the link provided on the course page.
Submission
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Both assignment 3 & 5 are individual submissions. You are asked to submit the assignment simply though the link provided.
You are encouraged to discuss the assignment solution path with others to improve your understanding and clarify requirements but you should develop the solution to the assignment on your own.
Assignment 3 (35 % marks) (Due Date 25 Sep 2015)
Critical Analysis
Congratulations! You have just been hired as the Information Technology Project Manager of a successful multinational services provider with offices in cities across the globe. The company specialises in providing services to individual in logistics aspects such as taxi services, train ticket booking, air ticket booking etc. They use IT infrastructure to conduct their daily operations, and charge a fee for their services. !
So far, the company is mainly operating on a web platform, with a call centre model to meet client needs. However, after careful deliberations, the board felt that a smartphone based application, using GPS interface is crucial to sustain in the competitive world.
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This has prompted the management to carefully review their IT strategies, workforce capability, workforce capacity, IT infrastructure etc so that they can offer a seamless service to their clientele across the globe. The clientele is quite mobile, and often undertake travel between many countries.
In order for the company to sustain and grow further, the CEO made you responsible to provide a set of documentations along with a management report highlighting the smartphone based app to meet the organisational needs. In order to produce this report, the CEO expects you to undertake independent research to present a high quality report that covers various IT project planning elements, as described in the course.
You are required to research the background for a project to implement and manage smartphone based client management system. You will consider current organisational aspect, and then recommend a way forward as to how this can be accomplished, through a management report, to the CEO.
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As this domain is new to the CEO, he is not able to provide too many details and expect you to conduct whatever research is required in arriving at the report.
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The scope of this assignment is restricted to the following key aspects:
1.! Make necessary assumption about your company and articulate this into a scoping document
(1 page)
2.! Provide a Summary report on existing capability and capacity assessment, and discuss how these can address the problem on hand (1 page)
3.! Provide a summary on expanding your IT unit to meet the problem on hand (1 page)
4.! Provide an initial estimated cost & resource structure with appropriate justifications (using a project management software) to meet the organisational needs within the scope of this problem (cost structure 1 page, resource structure 1 page, justification 1 page)
5.! Develop a time sheet with key project aspects such as milestones, slack etc to indicate how long will it take to deploy the project (2 page)
6.! Attach the comprehensive report for points 2 and 3 as appendices (5 pages each)
In addition to the above six key aspects, your submission should include the following:
1.! An executive summary sent to the CEO (1 page)
2.! A self confessed document stating the procedure and outcome of plagiarism check (1 page). Please note that there is no need to attach the plagiarism check report, the CEO is keen to see how this is accomplished.
3.! List of references used (2 pages)
NOTE: The assignment should be a maximum of 22 pages. Any page after the first 8 pages of the key submission (the six points) will be disregarded for reading of content. The appendices will be used to verify quality of information that you used.
The above components are presented to the CEO, therefore need to be precise, succinct and meaningful. For the purpose of the assignment, you can choose an organisation of your choice, and provide details of this organisation in the scope (a separate section – not more than 10,000 characters with space), and then build the assignment.
Please note that there is no need to attach a plagiarism report. However, the markers will be instructed to verify that the content is original. If discrepancies are found, your work will be marked with zero, and you will be referred to the faculty for ‘academic misconduct’. Therefore, you are encouraged to check your written document for any potential plagiarism or collusion issues.
Any delays in submission MUST be accompanied with proper approval documentation, despite the course leader approving this. So please attach the approval to this assignment as markers may not have access to delay approvals. If the approval documentation is not found, late penalty, as per university rules, will be levied.
Assignments MUST be submitted in the link provided. If they are not submitted via the link, then it is assumed that submission was not made. If the assignments were submitted in other locations, it is very difficult to track them, as the course team have no access to other locations.
Assignment 5 (35 % Marks) (Due Date 02 Nov 2015)
The CEO of the organisation (as specified in Assignment 3) read through your submitted document and felt that there is some merit in pursuing the options suggested by you. Through your report (Assignment 3), the CEO understood that smartphone based app consists of many issues to consider, policies to be developed or modified at organisational level, and new investments to be made to manage data security.
The CEO appreciated the contents of the report (Assignment 3) and made a number of suggestions to improving the report so that it aligns with his organisation. Your markers will give this in the feedback form. You need to provide a one-page document stating how the feedback was addressed in this assignment report. See point 1 below under ‘Submission Components’.
The CEO wanted you to explore the options provided by you in depth so that ‘smartphone app’ can be managed in his organisation as an IT project, initially as a pilot project. The CIO provided a time total limit of 9 months (in the form of a pilot project) to explore the suggestions provided by you in Assignment 2, and asked you to provide an implementation strategy within 30 days. The 9 months include the 30 days.
The CEO is very interested in three specific aspects, namely – Information technology infrastructure required to implement the pilot project, a comprehensive project plan and project tracking strategies. Some of these aspects are covered in the course, and you are expected to conduct independent research on other aspects.
In this assignment component, you are required to research a solution path for:
1.! An IT project implementation strategy for the project as a pilot;
2.! A comprehensive analysis of information technology infrastructure required to conduct the pilot project;
3.! Strategies to tracking project progress for the pilot project;
4.! Key measurement criteria to provide evidence to achieving on time & on budget project completion; and
5.! How smartphone based IT projects can be managed in the future so that the organisation can
develop appropriate strategies for expansion.
The scope of this assignment is restricted to the following submission components:
1.! Provide a report as how you addressed the feedback provided for your initial report (Assignment 3) – 1 page
2.! With this refinement (as in point 1 immediately above), analyse and discuss your solution path for the 5 points stated above (2 pages)
3.! Provide a infrastructure, resource and cost analysis to implement the pilot project. The cost analysis will have at least three cost models (best, medium, worst case scenarios)
4.! Provide a detailed justification to the costs considered in the cost models and state why you chose those cost elements, and how they align with your solution path for the pilot project (2 pages)
5.! Provide a report of not more than five pages covering the 5 points in the above section. This
report should have been thoroughly researched, articulated and presented at an acceptable level (3 pages).
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The above components are presented to the CEO, therefore need to be precise, succinct and meaningful. The CEO also asked for your initial report and the feedback packaged as an appendix and attached so that s/he can recollect the salient points of the report you submitted and the feedback given to you. This should be in the appendix, in pdf format.
The assignment should be thoroughly researched, with evidence provided through references. The CEO is keen to see a well-argued case, highlighting insights as to the key aspects, and would like to see strong points arguing your case as to the infrastructure requirements and strategies for project tracking.
The report is provided to the CIO of the organisation and needs to be top class in presentation. You have absolute freedom in all other aspects. Please note that there is no need to attach a plagiarism report. However, the markers will be instructed to verify that the content is original. If discrepancies are found, your work will be marked with zero, and you will be referred to the faculty for ‘academic misconduct’. Therefore, you are encouraged to check your written document for any potential plagiarism or collusion issues.
Any delays in submission MUST be accompanied with proper approval documentation, despite the course leader approving this. So please attach the approval to this assignment as markers may not have access to delay approvals. If the approval documentation is not found, late penalty, as per university rules, will be levied.
Assignments MUST be submitted via the link provided. If they are not submitted via the link, then it is assumed that submission was not made. If the assignments were submitted in other locations, it is very difficult to track them, as the course team have no access to other locations, and the course team can’t assume responsibility.
NOTE:
You are not required to submit the plagiarism report for the journal. However, you are strongly recommended to check the journals using a plagiarism application (this can be any application that detects plagiarism) and keep the report safely. If the report is found to contain ‘similarities’ then you will be awarded with a ‘zero’ and automatically referred to the Faculty for further action.
Special Instructions
•! You need to upload your essay in pdf file through the link available on the course web site.
•! Remember, you need to do TWO reviews, mark the work of other students submitted through peer review system, once you have submitted your own assessment item.
•! There is no need to submit this through TURNITIN, but you are still required to have your assessment plagiarism and collusion free.
Marking criteria for Assignment 3 & 5