Project Management Plan For Time Inc

Question

Task: The Project is meant to help you apply what you learn in the course to a project that you will evaluate. You should identify a case project. You should choose any professional project (not personal, like planning a wedding) to study. This project may be at your current place of work, but it cannot be one where the company already has PM documents developed (this relies on your academic integrity).

Here are the deliverables that you will need to produce:
1. Select a project at your target company
2. Provide background of the case project
3. Develop Quality Management Plan including at least 5 total metrics (qualitative and/or
quantitative)
4. Develop Stakeholder Management Plan including conflict management plan.
In conjunction with the report detailed above, there is a second deliverable for the
Project plan exercise. The students are required to present and defend to their client (course
lecturer, or a guest lecturer) their project plan.the Project plan exercise. The students are required to present and defend to their client (course lecturer, or a guest lecturer) their project plan.

Answer

Introduction
The project management plan is one of the documents that present a rough framework and baseline for the operation of the project and management which needs to be followed to meet the project objective and fulfill the requirements. The chosen company here for the assignment on project management plan is Time Inc. Company, which has decided to implement Timesheet at all the software centres to keep track of the amount of time the employees are investing in a particular task. This assignment will hereby present a detailed background and purpose of the project and its project management plan. The quality management plan and the stakeholder management plan all are to be discussed. This will lead to many conflicts and problems which need to be mitigated. The Timesheet software that is to be implemented is believed to increase the efficiency of the employees and enhance the production level of the company. 

Background
The company Time Inc. is an American company which is located in New York City. It is an international firm with software centers in 15 countries in the world. The company has recently decided to bring about a mere change in the company and install the software. The steering committee of the company has decided to implement Timesheet software in all its centers. The committee wants to shed some light on the issue of how time is being utilized in various projects of the company. With the implementation of Timesheet, it will help to keep a track and record of a particular employee’s time investment on a particular project. The prime interest of the committee in executing the decision in this field is to capture metrics like resource optimization, cost of quality which also includes the poor quality and implant project management plan excellence within the sphere of the organization. Thus the organization is planning to make a purchase of the software that will provide a detailed insight into the projects and the centers, which will facilitate the supervision and enhancement of the productivity and efficiency of the employees. The overall budget of the company for this particular project is $2,500,000, and the goal is to gain project approval, implement the solution, identification of the software that needs to be implemented, ensure it is working well, and the benefits that the company is receiving from this. The company must have to look after the interest of the stakeholders, both internal and external for the good completion of the projects. Lastly, as per the project management plan, this project is believed to be completed within 8 months. The CIO of the company is quite eager to get started with the project and complete it at a kick of a start.

Quality management plan
Firstly, the quality management plan (QMP) assists in guiding the project manager and project personnel to execute quality assurance and quality management of the project. This ensures the quality of the project throughout the lifecycle of the project. Therefore in order to make this project a success, it is essential for the company to implement a quality management plan which will ensure the project's success (Kerzner, 2017). In today’s competitive world it is quite essential for a company’s quality management plan to identify the gaps and the issues that might arise. This also gives a determination to overcome the problems and set up collective plans and actions that need to be put into application for continuous improvement. A desegregated project management plan brings together all the departments of the company and the project under its quality management plan. Under laid are some of the quality management plans that are to be discussed. These are as follows:

1. Development of a quality baseline- A quality baseline must need to be followed by the company. For this project management plan, the project manager must gather information about the current issues and drawbacks of the company and which areas need changes. For the implementation of the software in the company, it is important to identify which software will best suit the purpose of the project and the company. Gathering information and feedback from the employees (O’Connor et al., 2016). The project manager needs to go through the previous audit reports and the changes that are expected to come after the project management plan of the software. This gives a quality baseline that is expected from the project.
2. Detailed analysis of the projected gap- very project of a company has gaps and o as this one. An analysis of the needs of the company with the baseline information needs to be done, which will help to identify the gaps in the project (Iyer and Banerjee, 2016). Collecting feedback from the team members who are engaged in this project of software implementation to further acknowledge the area of improvement and make the needful changes.
3. Discover what the company and the employees really expect- Though the employees have least interest and influence upon the project but just like the other stakeholders that will also be benefited from the project management plan. They have to be aware of the use of it and let them know about how this influences their working ability and helps increase their productivity level (Mirza and Ehsan, 2017). Asking for feedback about the changes that employees are expecting and especially the global head of the company is expecting. Some benchmarking with competitors has become important.
4. Identifying the weaknesses and gathering information about the quality data- This step of the quality management program needs to collect information about the quality management system that were previously being used and the one which the Time Inc company will now implement. Software that is to be identified should have to be the best suited for the company.
5. Implement quality ideas- lastly, to mitigate the gaps of the company and implement the correct software that is SCORO, the project team members need to do a quality improvement based on the findings of the gap. Discovering some brainstorming ideas for quality improvement and management and reporting it to the senior management for implementation.

Such kinds of quality management programs are very much risky and complex. At various stages of the project, it faces different problems which brings the project’s performance to stake and that is the main reason behind the project management plan. Here for this company Time Inc., the project manager along with his recruited assistance needs to at first identify the perfect timesheet software that needs to be implemented and is best suited for the company. But this also brings some issues along with it which might lead to serious issues. In order to avoid such things, it needs to be implemented. Each project is unique in its own way and that is the reason why the projects need to implement some common risk mitigation measures to avoid some kind of mishappening (Kerzner, 2019).

Can you discuss about the stakeholder project management plan including a conflict management plan?
For a project management plan to be a success, it is quite much important for the stakeholders to be active participants. The main reasons for the stakeholder’s management strategy are to eliminate the negative impacts all throughout the project and recognize the needs and wants of the stakeholders and document them. It has put forward all the key stakeholders and their influence on the project.

The strategies that the concerned company Time Inc. has taken into account to manage the stakeholders.  

• Stakeholder mapping: Stakeholder mapping means that each stakeholder’s interest and their influence and interest and the role they play (James, 2016). Detailed analysis must be carried out in order to identify factors like interest, demographics, expectations, and projects. Mapping the internal stakeholders provides a detailed analysis and idea of their expectations and the correct amount of resources that are needed by the company to meet their needs and demand along with conducting the project successfully.
• Search for opportunities: The company should always be in the search for opportunities to lower the risk factors that are associated with the stakeholders and the team members who most likely might cause any kind of disruption. Looking after the benefits, expectations, and the problems of the stakeholders are the foremost priorities of the company to make the project a success (Jowah, 2016).
• The key factor is the influence: Each of the stakeholders has a certain amount of dominance in their realm and with others. It has previously been shown in the strategy chart of the stakeholders that each of the mentioned stakeholders has a certain amount of influence and plays a vital role in the timesheet project. Therefore a chart has been presented that shows each of this stakeholder’s influence and the interest regarding the project management plan (Collins et al., 2019). It has been rated from high to low (Mampaey and Huisman, 2016). The project manager and the project management plan team leader play a huge role and have great influence, so they are rated as high. On the other hand, the team members and the employees of the company are rated as low since they have the least influence.
• Dynamic mitigation: A complete understanding of the stakeholders and their expectations must be conducted in order to understand what issues might be caused because of the disruption. It is the duty of the company to look after the stakeholder’s interests and benefits who are involved with the project.
• Triggering factors has to be identified: The company must look after the triggering factors that different project actions cause it to the stakeholders in various ways. The first action that comes is the identification of triggering actions. Actions must be taken in order to prevent hurdles in the future (Johnson, 2016). Conducting the estimation and adopting measures are the factors that must always be kept in mind.

(Table showing stakeholder management strategy)
(Source: crested by the learner)

Conclusion
Therefore, form conducting this study on project management plan on the chosen case study of Time Inc. Company it can be concluded that each of the projects are unique in its own way and needs to be analyzed to bring about changes in the quality management program, especially during the implementation of the concerned software. The main reasons for the stakeholder’s management strategy are to eliminate the negative impacts all throughout the project and recognize the needs and wants of the stakeholders and document them. Since the stakeholders play a vital role in the project the company must look into the interests of each of the stakeholders (Di Maddaloni and Davis, 2018). The report has presented a detailed analysis of project management plan and execution.

Reference
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Di Maddaloni, F. and Davis, K., 2018. Project manager's perception of the local communities' stakeholder in megaprojects. An empirical investigation in the UK. International journal of project management, 36(3), pp.542-565.

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

Kerzner, H., 2019. Using the project management maturity model: strategic planning for project management. John Wiley & Sons.

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Mirza, E. and Ehsan, N., 2017. Quantification of project execution complexity and its effect on performance of infrastructure development projects. Project management plan Engineering management journal, 29(2), pp.108-123.

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