Information System Development Case Study On It Project

Question

Task: In this Case Study students are required to read and discuss an article describing an Information System development project.
Your Case Study document should contain the following information and answers to questions:
• Brief description of problem and the aim of the IT project
• The proposed IT infrastructure
• An importance of the Project Manager role in the project success
• The Triple Constraint (scope, time and cost) in the project and how changing the constraints of one led to suffering of other two.
• Description of the difficulties and issues the Project Manager faced. Identify relations these
problems to the Project Management Knowledge areas:
Project Integration Management
Project Scope Management
Project Time Management
Project Cost Management
Project Quality Management
Project Human Resource Management
Project Communications Management
Project Risk Management
Project Stakeholder Management
Project Procurement Management
• Recommendations, proposed solutions and required potential actions

Answer

Brief description of problem and the aim of the IT project described in the information system development case study
While reviewing the project of developing information system in the company PEH, it has been understood that combination of ineffective and unfitting project management related problems is the core for lower rates of information system development in the company. The results have also outlined that funding, IT infrastructure, employees, project management, controlling and inspection were also contributing factors to the project implementation difficulties during the system development time (Lucky, Adegoke & Othman, 2014). On the other hand, it has been identified that systematic filling process was difficult to attain due to the huge level of information managed manually, which is, applying forms, cards and others. Around all data has been inputted by typing and kept in a contract filing process. The project management was facing problems, ineffective and lower level of productivity rates as an outcome of the previous manual and fundamental filing process usage. Main problems faced of the IT project development phrase could be categorized into funding, system structure, developing the prior system, capabilities, inspection and monitoring.

The main aim of this IT project mentioned in this information system development case study was to offer validation as well as more information on the core problems influencing on the process development in the company. The core informant outlined all the main problems confronted by the organization at the time of their first IS development phrase (Lucky, Adegoke & Othman, 2014). This research tries to outline the results of the field analysis and interview conducted on the problems and challenges of a system development project in the company.

• The proposed IT infrastructure explored in the information system development case study
From the information system development case study analysis, it has been identified that the implementation of a central database management system would help develop the ICT structure in this company with the integration of modified technologies as well as applications. The IT project also emphasized on PEH objective for setting up a University College by the year of 2015 is seen probable (Lucky, Adegoke & Othman, 2014). Additionally, it has been identified that a central database development needs the company requires to develop the IT department itself by having safe data centre to safe the information and the system through increasing their in-house networking processes (both LAN & WAN) as well as replacement of new computers for every department. Detail description of the IT infrastructure has been described below within this information system development case study;

Central database management system
A centralized database management infrastructure in the organization has been developed for the storing of all the data at a single location like as a mainframe computer. This has been sketched and developed from that location only and generally accessed applying internet connectivity like LAN or WAN. Therefore, secure networking systems were also necessary for LAN & WAN. It has been noticed that integrity as the bottom line of this system infrastructure has been developed as the entire database of the company is stored at a singular physical location (Agarwal & Sambamurthy, 2020). This fact cited in the present information system development case study outlines that this is easy to coordinate the information and this is as perfect and consistent as possible. Through this centralized database management, the data redundancy process will get minimal in the central database. All the important data of the company will be stored together along with not scattering around various locations. Therefore, this is easy to ensure that there is no redundant information available. On the other hand, as per the need identified in PEH, implementation and installation of DBMS will also allow the organization to enforce systems, which enable compliance and safety. The information base will be available for proper users as per the company policies (Omolara & Kuboye, 2018). The proposed DBMS system outlined in this information system development case study will also be responsible to manage the optimum performance of enquiring functions while making sure the safety, validity and consistency of the information and LAN & WAN systems updated.

information system development case study

Figure 1: Centralized database system connection with other departments in the company
(Source: Mohammed & Saleh, 2017)

information system development case study

Figure 2: DBMS system and related operations
(Source: Van Aken et al., 2017)

information system development case study

Figure 3: Architectural design of the centralized database management
(Source: Mohammed & Saleh, 2017)

• An importance of the Project Manager role in the project success
The project manager responsibilities in the project success can be categorized as per the project management stages. Detail description is listed below within this information system development case study;

Project manager roles	Description
Plan	As per the stated system development project in this information system development case study, the project manager in planning stage should define the scope as per increase a project plan and schedule. The project planning should contain effective processes and policies such as what should be done to install the centralized database management system, what system should be required and how the working process is going to be affected (Hodgson & Paton, 2016). In this regard, it could be said that keeping in mind the particular time and budget is important. On the other hand, the Project manager should plan the project stages determining the necessary resources present and needed in the company.
Organize	In this stage of information system development case study, the project manager needs to prepare a blueprint regarding how to execute the entire system management processes. The organization should be regarding assigning the roles to the team members, which will also include briefing members regarding technologies that will be implemented (Sadatrasool, Bozorgi-Amiri & Yousefi-Babadi, 2016). Generally, big IT projects involve outsourcing some requirements. Project manager here could investigate the services to be offered. This will help to develop the entire project in a structured way.
Leading	The project manager needs to make decisions in each stage of system development including its progress. Ensuring transparency regarding project progress is important for the project manager (Hodgson & Paton, 2016). This will help project team members and IT staff as identified in the company on understanding the benefits of the project.
Monitor	Monitoring could be done through integrated monitoring software control. Project operations measure, technological work evaluation and providing effective solutions if any type of risks occur during project implementation stage are one of the important roles here (Wu, Eom & Song, 2019). As this project illustrated in the information system development case study is connived to developing and centralized database management with proper security of the inhouse LAN and WAN networks, the project manager here needs to work with the IT security management team and develop effective monitoring on how the security infrastructure is going to work. This type of collaborating approach will help the project team members and previous IT team members to understand scope and needs for the system development.
Communication	The communication management responsibility should be carried out in a more systematic way including reporting on each change, risks identified and what are the solutions to the risks to all the members (Blaskovics, 2016). It could be helpful if the communication process takes the help of face-to-face communication through arranging meetings and if any disruption happens, then taking the help of the online communication process.
Managing risks	Firstly, as per the information system development case study analysis, the project manager needs to identify some of the obvious risks and uncertainties related to the project before the project implementation stages. This will help the project team to understand what are the types of risks going to happen during the project execution stage (Wu, Eom & Song, 2019). On the second level, during project progress and project execution stages uncertainties such as security issues, system administration risks, lack of manpower could come out at the forefront. Therefore, from the overall readings provided in this information system development case study, the project manager needs to prepare policies for controlling these types of risks. Risk mitigation will be helpful in project scope development and give the project a chance to bring the most effective process optimization in future.

Table 1: Project manager roles
(Source: Created by the Learner)

• The Triple Constraint (scope, time and cost) in the project
The triple constraints in the project are listed in the next segment of information system development case study:

Project Scope

The project scope of developing a centralized database system in the company could be defined in two respect; goal and needs of the project.

The main goal of this project is to develop a centralized database management system for better information storing and transferring around the departments (Lucky, Adegoke & Othman, 2014).

Needs of this project has been listed below;

· Suitable budget for producing the right system (including software and hardware for needs like processes, results and others)

· The central management 'buy-in' for proposing project (Lucky, Adegoke & Othman, 2014)

· Providing training to the employees

· Effective data to be inputted for processing

· Monitoring and inspection of hardware and software systems

· Data security management

Time

As per the evaluation done in this information system development case study, for the project implementation and result in achieving 1 year will be required.

Project Cost

The project cost depends on the software-hardware used and human resource to manage the data warehouse. It could be said that the cost of hardware installation would cost around $1000, software design and management would take $ 200 per computer in the organization and development per hour would be $100. Database maintenance would cost the company $150 each month. Therefore, the total cost of this project will be $7800; if we consider 20 computers and 10 hours in development.

Table 2: Triple constraint theory for the system development project in PEH
(Source: Created by the Learner)

How changing the constraints of one led to suffering of other two
From the project scope and time pointed out in the previous section of information system development case study, it could be said that changes in the scope or project scope creep will have a direct impact on the allocated time. The project manager probably needs to increase the time allocated for the completion of the project. For instance, if training for the employees has not been performed within the given time them the entire project completion time would delay (Hassan, Adeleke & DM, 2019). On the other hand, monitoring software and hardware functions could sometimes go beyond the budget, therefore scope has a direct impact on the cost factor also. In case of project time, scope and cost not always directly depend on the time; though, it could be said that proper time management is required for the objectives and responsibilities of the project manager and management team to be completed within one year as identified above.

Otherwise delay in any of the section’s management could compel the project manager and IT management team to extend the software implementation for the central database management in the company and information storing and management will also get delayed. On the other hand, it is also discussed in this section of information system development case study that improper time management usually increases the cost of the project in due time. The last factor in Triple constraint management is cost. It is necessary to assume and point out the exact costs of entire database management and software installation as per the market (Barbalho et al., 2017). There are various ways of declining the cost level by installing an effective system in the process. Generally, the project manager should try to work with the IT team for identifying what type of software and hardware will be most effective in this case and help in catering all the objectives of the organization. This way, selecting cost-effective software will help in strategic human resource management, investment in training and develop the benefits of this project.

• What are the difficulties and issues faced by the Project Manager in the context of information system development case study? Discuss.
A critical review build in this information system development case study shows that increasing IS at the company was not only and project management related problem, however, this also involves consumers' challenges where the employees (here user) keeps altering due to either retirement or transferring or other causes. The main challenges or difficulties faced by the project manager presented in this piece of information system development case study could be categorized into five parts, which are funding or budget-related issues, system infrastructure, developing prior systems, capabilities, inspection and monitoring issues.

There is always low money allocated to the IT and project management team from the total budget of the PERHEBAT. It has resulted in various limitations in running the developments. There is a purpose to move as well as modify to the latest tools however, could not attain this aim as of lack of funds (Lucky, Adegoke & Othman, 2014).
The infrastructure management has also posed challenges to the project manager as there is a requirement for procurement of hardware facilities prior and migration from previous to modified machines. It has been seen that needs for building a local network for communication were not also modified (Lucky, Adegoke & Othman, 2014).
The lack of a skilled workforce is one of the main problems of the project manager as without effective workforce management system installation and development could not be possible. On the other hand, training for the employees will also cause extra cost in the project.
The project management and monitoring face challenges during the inspection and monitoring phrase and when coming to the processing of an application to achieve the latest training by the applicants (Lucky, Adegoke & Othman, 2014). It is as all the data is kept manually as well as has to be recovered manually.

Identify relations of the problems to Project Management Knowledge areas

Project Management Knowledge areas	Discussion
Project Integration Management	Project integration done herein information system development case study includes creating a project charter, fundamental plans during the initial stage. The problems identified include monetary, skill management, infrastructure and monitoring issues (Javed & Liu, 2017). Therefore, it could be said that the project integration stage should focus on developing planning of roadmap of the system development with a stakeholder engagement plan properly.
Project Scope Management	The problems identified above specifically monetary and skill management would influence on scope management by declining the scope of system development. This means centralized database management, which is a deliverable as a part of the software and hardware planning will be affected by the low budget and skill of members (Siebenthal & Hopkins, 2016).
Project Time Management	Time management will directly get effected by the low budget and non-availability of skilful staff. It could be said that project delivery time will get extended and delays in project delivery will be accounted if these types of problems persist (Martens & Carvalho, 2017).
Project Cost Management	Generally, cost overrun is a common problem in a system development project on large scale; however, here low budget issues will impact on proper cost planning for each operation including software and hardware processes including the infrastructure management problems will also lead to overrun of cost planning (Tonchia, 2018).
Project Quality Management	The problems faced by the project manager discussed in the context of information system development case study directly relate to the quality management area. Project quality includes both process and output measurement. In this case, it could be said that both change requests and quality control measures in the project execution and monitoring, and controlling stage needs to be performed (Siebenthal & Hopkins, 2016).
Project Human Resource Management	Project human resource management directly relates to the problem of ineffective skill development of team members and staff in the company. This is will effect on the quality management of the project and even the scope of this system development project (Keegan, Ringhofer & Huemann, 2018). It could be said that human resource management is a part of project development deliverables and training for the staff should be planned in the project integration stage.
Project Communications Management	It could be seen from the problems identified in the context of information system development case study faced by the project manager that proper communication has not been performed between the project team, IT management team, stakeholders and top management of the company (Martens & Carvalho, 2017). In future, a proper communication plan should include the importance of communicating what the project will need and how these needs to be achieved.
Project Risk Management	The risk management area could be directly related to the lack of infrastructure development challenge identified previously. It could be said that risks should be identified along with the hardware procurement, communication development through a local network (Turner, 2016). It could be said that without risk mitigation strategies and risks registering any project will eventually face difficulties that will impact on profitability and effectiveness.
Project Stakeholder Management	Stakeholder management accounts for communicating with them in each project management stages. It should be remembered that without effective stakeholder engagement in project development stages, funding and skill management related issues will not be removed. Stakeholders should also be communicated about the project benefits for better transparency in the project (Kerzner, 2017).
Project Procurement Management	The lack of or requirement for procurement of hardware facilities pointing out how procurement management is necessary for IT and system development projects (Turner, 2016). It should be remembered that cost-effective, modified and less time-consuming procurement policies should be ensured prior project execution stage by the project manager.

Table 3: Relations of challenges faced and project knowledge area
(Source: Created by the Learner)

• Recommendations, proposed solutions and required potential actions
The recommendation part will be based on two different needs of the company in question. The first part of information system development case study will dictate how and what centralized data management and integration solution this company should invest on. The second part will show how the project manager could work on providing better management. Details of these parts are listed below within this information system development case study;

NAS application for data storage centralization could be selected by the IT team in this company. This application would offer both file network (involving iSCSI) and storage that is the core difference among networks connected Storage and storage area networks (Lai & Ma, 2017). The SAN will offer mostly storage that is block-based as well as leaves all the important files system concerns on the clients’ side.
On the other hand, PEH should understand their requirements, possibilities and important budget. Employees (users) should remember that operation ability in the organization's conditions is much more significant than speed. This company should focus on the skill development of current employees while NAS is more effective than iSCSI, this could be very efficient with proper training.
In the case of centralized database management provided in this information system development case study, data governance requires to be developed top-down at a systematic level. A pre-condition for centralizing information control should be performed as it is an effective information governance structure (Smallwood, 2019). On the other hand, information governance facilities information ownership as well as then ensuring this possible to effectively centralize data control activities.

The second level of recommendation on project management efficiencies are listed below;

Uniform understanding of the project explored in the information system development case study needs among the stakeholders needs to be done by the project manager. To do so, getting the stakeholders and discussing with them regarding project lacks and possibilities is the key here.
Another important step that the project manager needs to take is developing a risk response team among the project management team. This is considered as one of the effective practices of mitigating risks. This group must be comprised of skilled members from the IT and project management teams who have supported access to the plan, systems, control and monitor in the project (Meredith, Mantel Jr & Shafer, 2017).
One of the significant matters that the project manager could perform to develop the success rates is to apply effective scheduling and calculations. Technological operations have a chance to expand beyond the actual calculations, leading to budget mismanagement and delivery postponements. This does not help that employees included in time plan and calculating project managers-frequently do not know the real technological matters included (Fleming & Koppelman, 2016). Additionally, it is also stated in this information system development case study that enabling transparent project management in the communication process will also help group members to face the entire procedure, which will lead them to the decision, and not just the decisions in itself.

References
Agarwal, R., & Sambamurthy, V. (2020). HOWthan SHOULD 20 years CONTEMPORARY of experience and FIRMS insights, organize this question their IT continues to function? Despite dominating more the attention and interest of CIOs and senior business executives. Information system development case study During the 1970s and 1980s, firms alternated between centralized models (where authority for the majority of IT decisions was located in the corporate IT group) and decentralized models (where the authority for most IT decisions was located in the divisional or functional IT units). During... Strategic Information Management: Theory and Practice.

Barbalho, S. C. M., de Carvalho, V. G., da Silva, G. L., & de Toledo, J. C. (2017). Analyzing the impact of the functions of Project Management Offices on triple constraints performance of new product projects. Product: Management & Development, 14(2), 85-94.

Blaskovics, B. (2016). The impact of project manager on project success—The case of ICT sector. Society and Economy. In Central and Eastern Europe ? Journal of the Corvinus University of Budapest, 38(2), 261-281.

Fleming, Q. W., & Koppelman, J. M. (2016, December). Earned value project management. Project Management Institute.

Hassan, A. K., Adeleke, A. Q., & DM, T. (2019). THE Effects of Project Triple Constraint on Malaysia Building Projects. Social Science and Humanities Journal, 1222-1238.

Hodgson, D. E., & Paton, S. (2016). Understanding the professional project manager: Cosmopolitans, locals and identity work. International Journal of Project Management, 34(2), 352-364.

Javed, S. A., & Liu, S. (2017, August). Evaluation of project management knowledge areas using grey incidence model and AHP. In 2017 International Conference on Grey Systems and Intelligent Services (GSIS) (pp. 120-120). IEEE.

Keegan, A., Ringhofer, C., & Huemann, M. (2018). Human resource management and project based organizing: Fertile ground, missed opportunities and prospects for closer connections. Information system development case study International Journal of Project Management, 36(1), 121-133.

Kerzner, H. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Lai, A. S. Y., & Ma, A. M. S. (2017). Designing Network-Attached Storage Architecture for Small and Medium Enterprise Applications. In Advances in Computer Science and Ubiquitous Computing (pp. 274-279). Springer, Singapore.

Lucky, E. O. I., Adegoke, O., & Othman, N. (2014). Project management challenges and difficulties: A case study of information system development. International Postgraduate Business Journal, 6(1), 99-133.

Martens, M. L., & Carvalho, M. M. (2017). Key factors of sustainability in project management context: A survey exploring the project managers' perspective. International Journal of Project Management, 35(6), 1084-1102.

Meredith, J. R., Mantel Jr, S. J., & Shafer, S. M. (2017). Project management: a managerial approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Mohammed, A., & Saleh, B. M. (2017). Centralized Database: A Prerequisite for Security and Sustainable Development in Nigeria.

Omolara, E. G., & Kuboye, O. S. A. B. (2018). Development of Multilevel Distributed Database Architecture for Solving (GSM) Centralized Database Accessing Problem in Nigeria. Development, 9(5).

Sadatrasool, M., Bozorgi-Amiri, A., & Yousefi-Babadi, A. (2016). Project manager selection based on project manager competency model: PCA–MCDM Approach. Journal of Project Management, 1(1), 7-20.

Siebenthal, C. S., & Hopkins, K. L. (2016). Project Managment (No. SAND2016-6643PE). Sandia National Lab.(SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States).

Smallwood, R. F. (2019). Information governance: Concepts, strategies and best practices. John Wiley & Sons.

Tonchia, S. (2018). Project Cost Management and Finance. In Industrial Project Management (pp. 153-170). Information system development case study Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Turner, R. (2016). Gower handbook of project management. Routledge.

Van Aken, D., Pavlo, A., Gordon, G. J., & Zhang, B. (2017, May). Automatic database management system tuning through large-scale machine learning. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data (pp. 1009-1024).

Wu, W. W., Eom, M. T., & Song, J. (2019). Spheres of It Project Complexity and It Project Manager Archetypes and Roles: A Case Study. Information Systems Management, 36(4), 323-335.

Tags: information system case study project management it management

NEXT SAMPLE