Project Management Assignment: Developing A Project Charter For My Florida Regional MLS

Question

Task: Task Summary
You are required to select a case study based on the concept of project management and use it to develop a 2,000-word Project Charter, describing the entire project in a short, succinct, and professional document.

Context of project management assignment
Project leadership is about inspiring the project team to do their best from the outset. This requires a combination of verbal and written communication skills and a range of applied leadership skills. One of the foundational documents that helps “kick off” a project is the Project Charter. The Project Charter describes the entire project in a short, succinct, and presentable document that can be shared with project staff or other stakeholders and aims to commence the project in earnest. The Project Charter helps to clarify the project context, the project team roles, and the goals of the project.

Instructions
You will be given a project case study to use in order to develop your Project Charter. Though all students will receive the same case study, it is expected that each student will think about the project from their own perspective as an up-and-coming project manager in order to formulate a unique Project Charter. Use your own style based on your critical thinking of what it means for you to lead a project. You may use one of the templates provided in the learning resources or develop your own format.

Please follow the instructions below:
1. Read the case study provided by your lecturer. This will form the basis for your Project Charter, because you will assume that you are the project manager for this project.
2. After reading the case study, begin to develop your project charter. This needs to be a 2,000- word report (+/- 10%) and must use a minimum of six (6) references (academic literature and industry publications—please consider the case study as a 7th reference). Please ensure all references are cited in-text.
3. The Project Charter must include the following headings and should be written as if you are presenting it to the project team that will build this project. You are the project manager. The contents of your Charter should include:
a. Background of the project
b. Reasons for the project
c. Project objectives
d. Proposed project management approach or methodology/methodologies
e. Constraints, limitations, and risks
f. Leadership structure (project manager and his or her senior aides: list their roles and explain what each does in the project. You need
to cite four (4) roles)
g. Project risks and their mitigation
h. Project stakeholders and how to interact with them
i. The vision of the project and the type of project team culture you wish to promote in your team
j. Reference list

Answer

Background of the Project Explored in the Project Management Assignment
The project is one of the regional multiple listing service providers named My Florida Regional MLS (MFRMLS). It provides its services to central Florida and the west coast of the state. The company provides multiple listing services to around fifty thousand subscribers consisting of brokers and real estate agents across fourteen stakeholders’ associations. The company is considered the largest multiple listing service provider in the world. Patrick Williamson is the one who leads the team of the project managers that the company My Florida Regional MLS holds. In the project, an ePropertyWatch is needed to be developed and hence all of its plans and launching processes are mentioned. The time given for the project is about 83.75 hours. In the following project charter, some of the leverage technologies of the company My Florida Regional MLS has been mentioned to improve the effectiveness of the project management of this company.

Reasons for the Project
The project will contribute to increasing the overall revenues of the company and assuring that new project development will improve customer satisfaction. The basic reason for the project is to develop the property Watch so that the client can get complete information about the particular area before hiring the area.

Project’s Objectives
The company My Florida Regional MLS is about to launch an eProperty Watch using its technologies with the numerous employees and project managers it has. The secondary objective of the project is to develop an ePropertyWatch according to the developed plan. The service is offered by CoreLogic as a free service to My Florida Regional MLS. The objective of the project is to assign each project manager with different activities regarding the development of the service. Following is the project’s timeline:

Project Management Methodology
In the following project, the manager is focused to develop a plan to launch the ePropertyWatch in the provided time. Since there is limited time given and the project is large, the whole project is to be divided into several phases and to be assigned to different project managers according to their skill (Alizdeh & Saeidi, 2020). Hence, the methodology adopted in the following project is the agile methodology. Large and complex projects can be managed easily and smoothly without disrupting the project progress. As the project needs constant collaboration, so using agile methodology is best for it. Agile methodology has been chosen for the project as it is characterized by building services with the use of short cycles of work that helps in rapid service. The project needs to be done in time and hence the project is being breakdown into several phases (Loiro et al., 2019). Agile is also best suited for the project because of the values it holds with it. The several values of the agile methodology are customer collaboration, responding quickly to the change if any alteration is made in the plan.

Constraints, limitations, and risk
Every project is associated with some limitations and risks that needed to be figured out for the successful completion of the project. If the risk is not mitigated and project constraints are not solved out then it will work as a barrier and hurdle in completing the project successfully (Mishra, 2020). In the given project too, there are some constraints, limitations, and risks involved that need to be found out to find the solution. Constraints in any project indicate if there are any restrictions associated with the project that is creating a hurdle to accomplish the project.

Constraints- The timeline of the project will be +-40 days, the budget of the project will be +-$60,000, the quality of the product developed will be of high standard meeting or exceeding the minimum expectations of the customers. Limitations- One of the limitations of the project is that flexible schedules. Not having a fixed schedule creates hurdles in delivering the project in time. Lack of information regarding what the need in the eProperty Watch is a limitation as it will be difficult for the manager to develop such a product. The project will be delivered within the time and budget baseline developed in the case. Risk- Primary risks are timeline and budget escalation those need to be considered with proper and effective planning. Risk of the project refers to an uncertain event that occurs during the project (Tereso et al., 2019). The project manager needed to pay attention to not take any other task before delivering the previous task. If more than one task will be taken into consideration then the staff will be unable to handle all the tasks at a time.

Leadership structure
The project can't be handled by a single project manager and hence there are so many staffs and managers are involved in any project to deliver it on time. In the project, the project manager is said to arrange the leadership structure (Allen et al., 2018). Following is the overview of the leadership structure:

Project manager- The manager of the project is responsible for the successful completion of the project. A project manager is considered the head of the project and supervises all activities.

The roles of the project manager are given below:

• Makes a plan for the project.
• Recruits staff for the project.
• Determining the approach to utilize the project.
• Giving tasks to members of the staff.
• Communicating with senior management.
• Making a schedule for the project and defining each phase (Adewumi et al., 2019).
• Determining the approach used on the project.
• Captaining and administrating the project team.
• Managing results according to the schedule

Project sponsors- They are members of the upper administration and have a stake in the result of the project (Hidalgo, 2019). The sponsor of the project works with the manager of the project.

The roles of the project sponsor are mentioned below:

• Making main commerce resolution for the project.
• Make sure the accessibility of resources.
• Approving the budget of the project.
• Removing obstacles that happen throughout the life cycle of the project.

Business analyst- The business analyst decides the requirements and solutions to make the administration better.

The roles of the Business analyst are mentioned below:

• Helping in deciding the project
  
• Gathering needs from units of business or users.
• Documenting business and industrial needs.
• Checking solutions to certify objectives.

Project team member- They are the entity that works on one or more than one step of the project.

Responsibilities of project team members:

• Contributing to comprehensive project objectives
• Finishing own deliverables
• Adding expertise
• Working with the client to meet and establish.
• Documenting the steps.

Project risk and their mitigation
Project risk is an issue that may occur over the channel of project administration. Some major project risks that occur in launching the e-property watch and their mitigation are as follows:

Requirement creeps- This is also known as scope creep or kitchen sink syndrome. It points at the uncontrollable growth and changes in the scope of the project. If the client makes a sudden change in the plan then this risk can be seen. This occurs when:

• The arguments were not well determined from the outset of the project.
• There is a force either from the project management team or from the client to take on work that was not scheduled in the original project schedule.

The problem with requirement creep is that sometimes leads to the failure of the project. Few management tricks to avoid such situations are:

• To avoid requirement creep, ensure that customer knows precisely their requirements and has attached all the needs documented. Make a project chart written set for the client determining the product delivery outcome and time required of the team.
• Being liable for the needs of the client may lead to requirement creep, but ensure to tell the customer about the added expenses and timeline of the project.

Budget creep- It is related to requirement creep. Making changes in the scope of the project can affect expenses that can result in budget overrun. If the client makes changes in the requirement then the budget also gets fluctuated. Less planning often affects the budget. Budget creep can be mitigated by the following points:

• To mitigate against budget creep, management should study the project expenses very carefully and show the finalized budget to the client.

• Making lucidity around the e-property project can also avoid budget overruns.

Absence of clarity- Since e-property watch is based on clarity of a particular location, forecast, neighbors, etc. So being clear is very important and also their requirements should be cleared (Pardo-Calvache et al., 2019). The following risk can be mitigated by using the following tricks:

• Investigating carefully about the area
• Good communication skills lead to mitigating this risk
• Listening carefully to the stakeholders since they supply input.
• Asking questions leads to a clear picture of the needed final service and its goals.

Poor scheduling- Poor planning about the project schedule can lead to risk in the completion of service. Scheduling includes making a document, and a description bout the timeline of the project and the administrative resources needed to complete every task (San et al., 2018). The project plan must be viewed by each member of the team before starting making the e-Property Watch so it will be simple to understand. Following are the tips to plan the project effectively:

• Detailed scheduling is important to make a project plan. If the project is scheduled well then, many project roadmap equipment that can be helpful to be on track.

Performance risk- If this risk occurs then the project will break down to produce outcomes consistent like forecast with project characteristics. Performance risk can also make budget risk or plan risk when the work of technology or team results in added duration and cost of the project. Performance risk can be improved by applying the following tips:

• A project manager should define the goal to use the project to avoid performance risk
• Performance risk can be prevented by making the main business solution for the project.
• Preventing obstacles that occur in the performance life cycle of the project.

Project stakeholders
Stakeholders are supreme since they provide input and support in commerce. They are inner and outer people that are attentive in an organization or project. They can be an employee of a company to the first-time client. Some examples of stakeholders are employees, owners, stockholders, partners, government, etc.

A few ways to interact with stakeholders are:

Meeting: The most common way for communicating with stakeholders is meeting. A meeting can be online or offline. Increasing online methods of communication makes sure transparency, activates the consumption of information by a client.

Newsletter: It is a good way to include stakeholders that are not involved in the management of the project directly.

Report of project summary: These reports are sent to stakeholders to make sure that management has control over the project.

Conference call scheduling: Conference calls are generally scheduled when there is an issue that requires a solution immediately.

Lunch meetings: This is an important interacting category where the management can show their certain idea to stakeholders. This is an informal meeting category and it is as effective as the official meetings.

The vision of the project
The vision of this project is to develop an eProperty Watch offered by CoreLogic as a free service to the company. The vision for developing this product is to provide complete information about the particular area that the client wants to hire. The vision of the project is to apply all the schedules while launching the e-property Watch and deliver the project by managing it effectively. Hence, the main vision of the project is to deliver the service on time and manage the project effectively and efficiently.

Reference
Adewumi, A., Iroham, C., Audu, D., Misra, S., & Ahuja, R. (2019, December). Developing a Multi-modal Listing Service for Real Estate Agency Practice in Nigeria. In International Conference on Innovations in Bio-Inspired Computing and Applications (pp. 352-360). Springer, Cham.
Alizdeh, S., & Saeidi, S. (2020). Fuzzy project scheduling with a critical path including risk and resource constraints using linear programming. International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, 16(1), 4-17.
Allen, M. T., Dare, W. H., & Li, L. (2018). MLS information sharing intensity and housing market outcomes. The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, 57(2), 297-313.
Hidalgo, E. S. (2019). Adapting the Scrum framework for agile project management in science: a case study of a distributed research initiative. Heliyon, 5(3), e01447.
Loiro, C., Castro, H., Ávila, P., Cruz-Cunha, M. M., Putnik, G. D., & Ferreira, L. (2019). Agile project management: A communicational workflow proposal. Project management assignment Procedia Computer Science, 164, 485-490.
Mishra, A. K. (2020). The implication of Theory of Constraints in Project Management. International Journal of Advanced Trends in Engineering and Technology (IJATET), 5(1), 1-13.
Pardo-Calvache, C. J., Chilito-Gómez, P. R., Viveros-Meneses, D. E., & Pino, F. J. (2019). Scrum+: A scaled Scrum for the agile global software development project management with multiple models. Revista Facultad de Ingeniería Universidad de Antioquia, (93), 105-116.

San Cristóbal, J. R., Carral, L., Diaz, E., Fraguela, J. A., & Iglesias, G. (2018). Complexity and project management: A general overview. Complexity, 2018.
Tereso, A., Ribeiro, P., Fernandes, G., Loureiro, I., & Ferreira, M. (2019). Project management practices in private organizations. Project Management Journal, 50(1), 6-22.