Table of Contents
Status Evaluation
The Medical Informatics health service company currently has a project regarding a new product development. The organization is planning that the project would expand the clinical data warehouse (CDW) so that it can accept the data feeds from the third-party wellness vendors, and include the analytics and reporting processes of the downstream employer group (Larson & Gray, 2013). Moreover, the work is aimed at developing new activity reports to inform the values of these products. The following matters should be retained in mind during deployment; the competitive business environment, and the presence of similar competitive products. The appointed project manager is also reported to have left the role due to personal reasons.
The project was set to complete on December 21, 2017, after an official kick-off of May 5, 2017. The first follow up a meeting to review the project plans was August 5, 2017. It is; however, unlikely for the project to end as scheduled due to various internal and external factors affecting the project management. The current project team seemed overconfident and believed that the current project shares a lot with the previous successful project that they carried out. The issues that currently encompass the project target are overwhelming and may be the reasons for the resigning of John, the appointed project manager to oversee the project.
| Budget Tracking 8 Budget Tracking | |||||
| Task/Phase | Planned Cost (Baseline) | Actual Cost to Date | Remaining Cost | Estimate at Completion | Percent Variance |
| Wellness Vendor | 441,650 | 230,892 | 210,758 | 529,980 | 20% |
Project Analysis
Since the project team believes they have been involved in the past similar projects, they think they are aware of all that a project entails, making them assume many steps entailed in the project from initiation till adjourning. While the tasks and the phases were detailed, the resources were never allocated to the tasks, with an assumption that the departments knew their specific roles and the tasks related to them. Moreover, the dependencies were omitted from the plan, with a claim that they made the processes too complex. Therefore, the dependencies in the project are handled by the project manager and individual team member.
In the project plan, the tasks are updated on a weekly basis. However, the actual hours on particular tasks are not included and are deemed unnecessary. The resources/departments only estimate the work percentage completed for every task. The resource availability was not formally handled. Each week is regarded as the reporting week for both project and non-project tasks like system maintenance.
The beginning of the project was fairly well since all teams worked together. The programming began almost immediately because the team understood the system and were able to incorporate the required change. Issues were identified by the users as per their requirements and were documented. Both the programmers and users resolved the requirements. The programmers, however, had problems with the correct version of the requirements to work on. As time went on, the reports showed poor progress because users constantly changed their minds regarding the product requirements. The programmers also had to satisfy the changing requirements of the users. The project manager instated that the users’ requirements have to be arrived at since they system deployment was basically for their use, even if it had to sacrifice extra hours of work. Besides, the technical issues also delayed the new development environment from time to time.
Forecasting
If the issues in this project persist, then there may be very drastic consequence in the project performance. So far, there is a probability that the project will be delayed, and over budgeted by approximately 20%. Due to the delay, the total vendor cost of the project which is 75% of the total costs needed for the project completion. The performance may not be as was expected due to the consequence of delay. The new product implementation/launching date and time are also going to delay. Due to delay, there is a possibility that the training for software use, deployment, marketing, and internal use will delay. The system is also said to have continued crash, once in every week, and still, the daily changes request to enhance the products output. Therefore, the future performance can be very disturbing. Lastly, the uncertainty by the legal team to submit the documents before the live date may lead to a performance delay until further notice.
Impact of the past
The delay by the legal team, the leaving of John, the project manager, the delayed programming due to technical hitches, the regular change of requests, the overdependence of old tricks in the new project, poor resource allocation, not fully trained skills on the required programming, and lack of planning and proper scheduling are some of the pasts that have negative impacts on the project deployment (Kerzner, 2013). Some of the risks in project delivery include; other departments not having sufficient resources for the project.
Corrective Action
To catch up with the delivery date, caused by the changes in the user needs, the team can work overtime to catch up with the dates. Second, it is important to make all the plans within the project schedules, including holidays in case of any (Kerzner, 2013). Where the policy documents and testing may delay, it is significant that the affected department agrees on tasks with others. All these are the team manager’s role. Therefore, the replacement of John Current, the outgoing project manager should be replaced promptly. Also, the new project plan should not rely on previous projects, but rather be scheduled and planned independently.
- Kerzner, H. (2013). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.
- Larson, E. W., & Gray, C. (2013). Project Management: The Managerial Process with MS Project. McGraw-Hill.