CHAPTER 11: PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management.

The triple constraint involves making tradeoffs between scope, time and cost for a project. 
The 3 variables are interdependent- you can't change one without changing the others.

• Increased Scope  = increased time +  increased cost
• Tight Time = increased costs + reduced scope
• Tight Budget = increased time + reduced scope.

Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning

The PERT Chart:
(Program Evaluation and Review Technique) is a graphical network model that depicts a projects tasks and the relationships between those tasks. 

A typical PERT chart

A dependency- is a logical relationship that exists between the project tasks, or between a project task and a milestone. 
A critical path- a path from start to finish that passes through all the tasks that are critical to completing the project in the shortest amount of time. 




The Gantt Chart
A simple bar chart that depicts project tasks against a calendar. 

Click here for the IT Gantt Chart website 

The tasks are listed vertically, and the projects time frame is listed horizontally 

Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success

• Managing people
• Managing communications
• Managing change

Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed

Why projects fail:	Why projects succeed:
Failure to align project with organizational objectives Poor scope Unrealistic expectation Lack of executive sponsorship Inability to move beyond individual and personality conflicts Politics	Project sponsorship at executive level Good project charter String project management The right mix of team players Good decision making Good communication Team members are working toward common goals

CHAPTER 9: Customer Relationship Management & Business Intelligence

What is your understanding of CRM?


CRM (Customer relationship management) involves managing all aspects of a customer’s relationship with an organisation to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organisation's profitability.

CRM allows an organisation to gain insights into customers shopping and buying behaviours. It also helps companies make their interactions with customers seem friendlier through individualism 

Other benefits of CRM are said to:

• Provide better customer service
• Improve call centre efficiency 
• Cross-sell products more effectively 
• Helps sales staff close deals faster
• Simplifies Marketing and Sales processes
• Discovers new customers
• Increases customer revenues 

Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational CRM	Analytical CRM
Supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers	Supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers

The primary difference between operational CRM and analytical CRM is the direct interaction between the organisation and its customers.

Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments

CRM example video

Marketing	Sales	Customer Service
List Generator: Compiles customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns	Sales Management: Automate each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales representatives co-ordinate and organize all of their accounts. Includes calendars to help plan customer meetings, alarms for important tasks etc	Contact centre: Where customer service representatives answer customer inquiries and respond to problems through a number of different customer touch points
Campaign Management: Guides users through marketing campaigns	Contact Management: Maintains customer contact information and identifies prospective customers for future sales. Includes maintaining organizational charts, detailed customer notes, and supplemental sales information.	Web-based self-service: Allow customers to use the web to find answers to their questions or solutions to their problems
Cross Selling: Selling additional products or services And Up Selling: Increasing the value of the sale	Opportunity Management: Target sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales. Determine potential customers and competitors and define selling efforts, including budgets and schedules.	Call scripting: Access organizational databases that track similar issues or questions and automatically generate the details for the CSR who can then relay them to the customer

Indian Call Centre- click here for video 

How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?

Sales departments had 2 primary reasons for tracking customer sales information electronically

• Sales representatives were struggling with the overwhelming amount of customer account information they were required to maintain and track 
• Companies were struggling with the issue that much of their vital customer and sales information remained in the heads of their sales representatives. 

Sales force automation is a system that automatically tracks all of the steps in the sales process, focusing on increasing customer satisfaction, building customer relationships and improving product sales by tracking all sales information. 

Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

BI refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to and analyse data and information to support decision-making efforts. 

BI includes simple MS Excel Pivot tables to highly sophisticated software that fetches data from the different front and back office systems. 

MS Excel Pivot Table

Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem

The Problem: Data Rich: Information Poor.
Companies have a lot of data, however they are not able to benefit from levering this information and turning it into useful data for analytical and strategic decision making.

The Solution: Business Intelligence. 
In every organisation, employees make hundreds of decisions each day. They can range from whether to give customer X a discount, whether to start producing part Y, whether to launch another direct mail campaign, whether to order additional materials, etc. 


These decisions are sometimes based on facts, but mostly based on experience, accumulated knowledge, and rule of thumb. That poses a problem because experience, knowledge, and rule of thumb can take years to develop.
Some employees never acquire them. Those who do may still fall prey to decision traps or biases in judgment. 


Improving the quality of business decisions has a direct impact on costs and revenue. For instance, giving a customer a discount may or may not help the bottom line, depending on the profitability of the client over the duration of the relationship. 


To improve the quality of business decisions, managers can provide existing staff with BI systems and tools that can assist them in making better, more informed decisions. The result creates an agile intelligent enterprise

What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?

Data mining is the process of analysing data to extract information not covered by the raw data alone. It is the application of statistical techniques to find patterns and relationships among data and to classify and predict.

• Can begin at a summary information level (coarse granularity) and Progress through increasing levels of detail (drilling down)
• or the other way around (drilling up)

Two possible outcomes of Data Mining:


Cluster Analysis:
A technique used to divide an information set into mutually exclusive groups such that the members of each group are as close together as possible to one another and the different groups are as far apart as possible. 
It is frequently used to segment customer information for customer relationship management systems to help organisations identify customers with similar behavioural traits, such as cluster of best customers or one-time customers. 

Statistical Analysis:
Performs such functions as information correlations, distributions, calculations, variance analysis, just to name a few. 

CHAPTER 8: Operations Management and Supply Chain

Define the term operations management

Operations management describes all the activities mangers do to help companies in the manufacturing of goods and services. Operations management (OM) is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources (including human resources) into goods and services. Operations management is responsible for managing the core processes used to manufacture goods and produce services.

Explain operations management’s role in business

OM is responsible for managing the core processes used to manufacture goods and produce service

• Forecasting
• Capacity planning 
• Scheduling 
• Maning inventory 
• Assuring quality 
• Motivating and training employees
• Locating facilities 

Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology

Managers can use IT to heavily influence OM decisions including productivity, costs, flexibility, quality, and customer satisfaction. 


One of the greatest benefits of IT on OM is in making operational decisions as operations management exerts considerable influence over the degree to which the goals and objectives of the organisation are realised. Most OM decisions involve many possible alternatives that can have varying impacts on revenues and expenses. OM information systems are critical for managers to be able to make well-informed decisions.

Explain supply chain management and its role in a business

Supply Chain Management involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximise total supply chain effectiveness and profitability 

List and describe the five components of a typical supply chain


A supply chain is a network of organizations and facilities that transforms raw materials into products delivered to customers.


The components of a typical supply chain include:

Plan:
A company must have a plan for managing all the resources that go towards meeting customer demand for products and services. A big piece of planning is developing a set of metrics to monitor the supply chain so that it is efficient, costs less and delivers high quality and value to customers 


Source:
Companies must carefully choose reliable suppliers that will deliver goods and services required for making products. Companies must also develop a set of pricing, delivery, and payment processes with suppliers and create metrics for monitoring and improving the relationships 


Make:
Companies manufacture the products or services. This can include scheduling the activities necessary for the production, testing, packaging, and preparing for delivery. 


Deliver/ Logistics:
The set of processes that plans for and controls the efficient and effective transportation and storage of supplies from suppliers to customers. 
During this step, companies must be able to receive orders from customers, fulfil the orders via a network of warehouses, pick transportation companies to deliver the products and implement a billing and invoicing system to facilitate payments


Return:
Companies must create a network for receiving defective and excess products and support customers who have problems with delivered products. 

Define the relationship between information technology and the supply chain


STRATEGIC IMPACT 


Planning and control supply chain integration 
Examples: supply chain planning, collaborative product development, integrated demand and supply management 


Information Integration 
Examples: inventory visibility, performance metrics, event monitoring, business intelligence, scorecards, dashboards


Business process integration 
Examples: collaborative logistics, commerce websites, vendor-managed inventory, private exchanges 


OPERATIONAL IMPACT 


All these integrations move through the plan, source, make, deliver and return processes. 

CHAPTER 7: Networks, Telecommunications

Explain the business benefits of using wireless technology.

Wireless Technology- is any type of electrical or electronic operation that is accomplished without the use of a 'hard wired' connection. 

Benefits:

• Universal Access to information and applications 
• The automation of business processes
• User convenience, timelines and ability to conduct business 24/7, 365 days a year- allowing information to be accessed almost anytime, anywhere. 

Describe the business benefits associated with VoIP

VoIP uses TCP/IP technology to transmit voice calls over internet technology. This includes phone calls, faxes, voice mail, e-mail and Web conferences over digital networks.

TCP/IP-  transmission control protocol/ Internet Protocol- which provides the technical
foundation for the public internet as well as for large numbers of the private internet. 

Benefits:
VoIP offers businesses significant cost savings, productivity gains and service enhancements as it:

Runs over the existing computer network

The calls over the internet do not attract Telecommunications charges.

Customers can port their numbers between carriers

Example of VoIP. Click here for more details.

Compare LANs and WANs

Local area networks (LANs)	Wide area networks (WANs)
Connect computers that reside in a single geographic location on the premises of the company that operates the LAN. It is used for sharing resources like files, printers, games or other applications.  A LAN connects to other LANs and to the internet or wide area network,	Connect computers at different geographic sites. WANs spa a large geographical area, such as state, province or country.  WANs also often connect multiple smaller networks such as LANs.

Describe RFID and how it can be used to help make a supply chain more effective.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) 

• Tags that use radio waves to transmit data
• RFIDs are heavily used in Inventory tracking, and will eventually replace barcodes
• Passive RFID
• No internal power. Can pick up the very faint signal from an antenna, power up just enough to transmit data back to antenna. 
• RFDI's are used in 
• Passports
• Transportation (e-tags)
• etc
• Helps supply chains by:
• cutting costs by requiring fewer workers for scanning items
• Can supply more and more accurate information for the supply chain 
• Makes inefficient business processes more transparent 
• Manufacturers improve supply-chain planning and execution by incorporating RFID technologies. 
• By placing RFID tags on cases and pallets shipped from manufacturers to distribution centres, companies would be able to keep close tabs on their shipments. In turn, that would allow distribution centres and its suppliers to streamline their supply chains and ultimately ensure shelves were always fully stocked

Identify the advantages and disadvantage of deploying mobile technology

• Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) - Good upload rates, uses existing telephone lines, but speeds vary depending on distance from telephone company's central office and slower downloads than less expensive alternatives. 

• Cable - uses existing cable infrastructure, low-cost equipment, but shared connections can overload system, slowing upload times. 

• TI/T3 Dedicated Line - uses existing phone wiring, but performance drops significantly with range and susceptible to crosstalk. 

• Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) - fast data speeds, infrastructure has long life expectancy, low maintenance, low power costs, but not widely available and significant deployment cost (for company). 

• Fixed Wireless - typically inexpensive to install, no underground digging, but weather, topography, buildings, and electronics can cause interference. 

• Satellite - nearly universal coverage, available in otherwise inaccessible area, but expensive service/equipment and upload/download delays.