List and explain three main reasons for undertaking information systems projects

Question

List and explain three main reasons for undertaking information systems projects.

Describe five reasons for success and five reasons for failure of IT projects. What can be done to avoid such failures?

What is Scrum? List and describe two roles of scrum.

Based on your experience, describe how leadership and power can be used to influence project team members.

What are the major processes involved in managing project communication?

What is Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)? Explain two major principles with examples.

Provide five reasons why team building is important in project management. What are three ways successful teams are build.

What is Quality Assurance (QA)? What is the role of the Software Quality Assurance (SQA) team during implementation and why SQA is important?    

Define resources. Discuss the differences between human and capital resources and give three examples each.

Explain the key differences be

Explanation / Answer

1. Project management is a carefully planned and organized effort to accomplish a
specific (and usually) one-time effort, for example, construct a building or implement a
new computer system. Project management includes developing a project plan, which
includes defining project goals and objectives, specifying tasks or how goals will be
achieved, what resources are need, and associating budgets and timelines for
completion. It also includes implementing the project plan, along with careful controls
to stay on the "critical path", that is, to ensure the plan is being managed according to
plan. Project management usually follows major phases (with various titles for these
phases), including feasibility study, project planning, implementation, evaluation and
support/maintenance.

2. Five reasons for success of IT projects
1. Agree on the project goals. Make sure there is agreement with management, project sponsors, and other stakeholders on the purpose and goals of the project. What problem will the project solve? What is the desired end result? What need will the project fill? Goals should be specific and measurable. Clear measurable goals will help define the project scope.
2. Develop clearly defined plans with assigned responsibilities and accountabilities. Developing a plan is more than just entering the tasks into a software application like Microsoft project. All the deliverables need to be defined along with the necessary tasks to produce them and any associated risks. Responsibilities should be assigned to the tasks and deliverables with appropriate due dates and accountabilities. The planning process should also include risk management activities and communication requirements. Developing the project schedule is only a part of the planning process.
3. Manage the project scope effectively. The project scope is defined in the goal setting, and planning stages of a project. It would be nice if the scope never changed, but the real world says that scopes change. The project manager must always be on the alert for changes to the scope and effectively manage those changes. Are the changes really necessary for project success or just nice to haves? What affect will the changes have on the budget and the schedule? Has everyone agreed that the change must be done? How are the changes tracked? Managing the scope is one of the more challenging parts of managing projects.
4. Cultivate constant effective communications. Determine the communication channels needed to inform the relevant stakeholders of the progress of the project. Management and project sponsors may want regular status reports or only the highlights and the exceptions. Suppliers, clients and/or customers may need statements of work, contracts, and progress reviews. The project team will need task assignments and regular briefings. The frequency and types of communication for each channel should be defined and managed. Incorporate this communication plan into the project plan and then communicate, communicate, communicate! Many projects fail because of poor communications.
5. Make sure you have management support. This ties back to agreeing on clear project goals. Management must agree that the project is important, will add value to the business, or solve a pressing problem. If management does not see the value of the project, they will be reluctant to support it. If management support is missing, people and funding resources may not be available for the project. If an organization has a multitude of projects, management support may be limited to only those key to the business success. Lack of management support is a major reason for project failures.

Five reasons for failure of IT projects
1.Senior managers think that project management is a software tool
When you discuss project management with some managers, they initially think you are trying to implement a tool that allows you to be a better project manager. Actually, if it were a tool, you might have more luck convincing them to do it. Even though some aspects of project management, like the creation and management of the workplan, may utilize a tool, that is not where the value of project management is. Instead, project management is about skills and discipline. It's about applying proactive processes and best practices. It's about using common and understood templates. Don't get me wrong--tools have their place. However, software tools are not the answer.

2. Organizations don't value the upfront investment of time
Many people consider themselves to be "doers." Organizations can be that way as well. If you're going to be good at project management, you have to understand that the upfront planning process has value. You need to know that if you plan the project well (in other words, if you know what you're doing before you start), you'll be able to manage the work more effectively. I have seen organizations that say they want to apply good project management, but then are unwilling to invest the time required. No one wants to take the time to plan. Instead, everyone wants to start executing immediately and then redo all the work later to get it right.

3. You may have been burned in the past
A common criticism of project management methodology is that it is cumbersome, paper intensive, and takes too much focus away from the work at hand. Sometimes this is a legitimate concern, caused by not scaling the methodology appropriately to the size of your project. However, project management was not the problem. The problem was a misguided attempt at implementation of project management. If you implement project management methodology right, the results will be outstanding.

4. Your organization is not committed
Many organizations say they want good project management, but do the actions back up the words? For instance, the first time you try to define the work, does everyone say "just get going"? If you try to enforce scope change management, does your manager say "just do the work"? Does your sponsor say you are wasting time identifying risks? This disconnect is very common. The words say one thing, but the actions say another.

5.Organizations don't know how to implement culture change
Most organizations don't know how to manage culture change in general and project management in particular. You can't just train people and turn them loose. You can't just buy MS Project and turn people loose. You have to have a long-term, multi-faceted approach to managing culture change. It takes hard work and resources. Most organizations aren't committed to focus on the culture change long-term, and they don't want to spend any resources to do it. Is it any wonder then, that six months later, project management deployment ends up in the trash pile of culture change initiatives that have all failed in the past?
3. Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development methodology for managing product development. It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

A key principle of scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called "requirements churn"), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, scrum adopts an empirical approach

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