Milestone One: Conflict Resolution Plan

Introduction 

In the implementation of any project, several problems are experienced at different stages. It is the duty of the project manager to ensure the each one of them is addressed. Some of the common project management problems include conflict among team members, budget issues, and delays in project delivery, among others (Yang, Huang, & Wu, 2011). In this review, an analysis of the project progress will be conducted illustrating the situation at different stages. 

Team Dynamics 

Medical Informatics is an established company in the health sector. They have embarked on a project to develop a new product. For this to be implemented, the company has to expand its clinical data warehouse to accommodate the third party data feeds from vendors. The expansion will provide a mechanism for reporting on various details concerning the new product. John was appointed as the project manager. Having worked with the company for 23 years, he is familiar with the company operations. The project team is comprised of people from different departments who have experience in product development. 

The team is structured in such a way that each member has their own role. They report to the project manager who in turn reports to the project sponsor. The project team is comprised of programmers, legal experts and, workers from the users department. The team has extensive knowledge in systems and applications. However, John left the team for personal reasons after they had delivered module 2 part of the project. At this point, the team is at the performing stage. Conflict within the team is due to conflicting roles between the team members and the fact that some of the members have double roles in the company. This has caused extreme pressure within the team. The team is mainly lacking leadership skills to harmonize the roles of the members.

Conflict Resolution and Dynamics 

Currently, the project team is facing a number of problems which have caused the project to stall. First, the team lacks proper leadership since the exit of John the previous project manager. Second, the team is poorly motivated due to the lack of leadership. Third, the project is behind schedule due to delays experienced in some of the activities. There is need to solve these problems for the project to get back on schedule. The team needs directing on the way forward. The team has the right quality of members and therefore requires someone to guide them on the way to execute their duties. The most appropriate strategy is to ensure that a leader is selected for the team. He/she will help to steer the team to the right direction. Another strategy that can be applied is the retraining of the employees to ensure that there have enough skills to handle the stalled tasks. Motivation of the team members could also play a huge part in boosting the morale of the already demotivated team to improve their performance. 

Motivation and Confidence 

Team motivation yields positive results in team management (Gehring, 2007). The project manager can instill confidence in the team by properly executing his role as a leader. First, the project manager can act charismatically and act as an inspiring figure in the team. This will give the members confidence in his leadership. Secondly, motivation and confidence can be attained through training of members to ensure that they have enough skills to handle the tasks at hand. The project manager can also set team goals which must be achieved within a certain period of time. Rewards can be given to teams that manage to reach the set goals. Constant communication with the team also motivates them to work harder to meet the project goals. A motivated team will deliver quality results which meet the project objectives. 

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Conclusion 

The project team is at a very critical stage in project development. There are several challenges facing the project including budget overshoot, delays and lack of leadership. If an able project manager is installed, the team will get back to performance and meet the project objectives.

Milestone Two: Medical Informatics Wellness Project Status Evaluation

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.

Table 1: Budget Tracking

In addition to the PM leaving and the project over-budget of 20%, there are issues of scope creep, performance issues, schedule delays, unrealistic estimates, inexperience developers, communication problems, absence of testing strategies, and ineffective activities regarding project management.

Project Analysis

There were several additional features that were coming up from users other than the set of scope set prior to the project initiation. The frequent changing of minds for introducing functions beyond the agreed-upon scope leads to delays and possibility to spend more cash. The problem is not adding features and functionalities on the project but whether the scope expansions are approved or not so that the users can agree upon additional costs and time.

Today, the project is 75% complete but has never been tested. Due to poor testing strategies, the initial testing showed slow performance of modules. The cause was inefficient coding which lacked sufficient bugging of the product, causing frequent crashes of at least once a week. The programmers were inexperienced especially with the VB programming a condition which led to slow progress, and scheduled delays. Finally, the poor coordination of roles and communication in the project causes role conflictions and some members even experience pressures when handling two positions simultaneously within the organization.

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.

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

In the project plan, the tasks are updated on a weekly basis. Moreover, the actual hours on particular tasks should be set to enable the project team to work within the scope. The resources/departments should estimate the work percentage completed for every task and the hours taken to complete the tasks. The resource needs to be formally and each week should be regarded as the reporting week for both project and non-project tasks, for instance, system maintenance.

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. A well-defined WBS, designed to meet up with the needs of the project as per the scope, budget and time will help to overcome the problems of the past.

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 done promptly. Also, the new project plan should not rely on previous projects, but rather be scheduled and planned independently. The PM should identify short term goals, baselines changes (dates), and actions to ensure a long-term success. Each resource must be clearly allocated and the issues of logging, communication, risk plan, testing strategy, and implementation plan should be well informed.

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Milestone Three: Project’s Objectives, Strategy and Communication Plan

Project Objectives

The expanded Clinical Data Warehouse (CDW) projects at Medical Informatics Health Services Company is aimed at enabling the receipt of feed from third party vendors and also include reports and analytics of the downstream employer groups. The product should be ready for launching by December 21 2017. The following objectives must be accomplished before the launch date. 

• Integration of a wellness vendor reporting capability (retrievable in the forms of CSV, PDF, and XLS) into the existing system situated behind the intranet using SQL Server and Teradata.
• Development of a CDW using MS Visual Studio programming language and Structured Query Language (SQL). 

The objectives will be achieved through the use of Teradata databases to store the clinical data necessary for the population of new reports; deployment of MS SQL Servers to control access to the clinical database; selection of the required parameters for the production of each report, and deployment of SQL Server reporting services to produce reports based on the selected criteria to retrieve information from the database.

The report focuses on the objectives, strategies, and communication techniques that should be employed to ensure that the problems that have been encountered before (in phase 1) are dealt with effectively. They should also help to ensure that the project progresses smoothly until its launch on December 21, 2017. Besides timely delivery, the project operations must be maintained within the budget. It is also important that communication meetings are scheduled so that the issues encountered in phase 1 do not interfere with the completion of the project.

Project Strategy

The main problems experienced in the project include difficulties in scheduling and cost budgeting. The project has already surpassed the original budget and is now standing at 20% more. To deal with these problems, the project tasks must be well defined using the Gantt chart. The right Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) must be used to plan the project timeline (Larson & Gray, 2013). The period between the predecessor and successor activities should be long enough to enable proper planning. Tasks involved in the project should not overlap to allow the completion of each task at a time. The existence of large time lapses in between activities minimizes the probability of completing a project in time (Larson & Gray, 2013). Since the previous project manager left, his position has remained vacant. The role should be taken up by a qualified and experienced person with the necessary qualifications. A qualified assistant can also be selected to co-work with the manager.

The project strength is dependent on the list of tasks to be performed as well as the goals and objectives. The tasks, goals, and objectives are very clear. The time and budget to complete the tasks are clearly indicated. There is time scheduled for project planning, interviews, and communication that engages stakeholders. However, the main weakness encountered was as a result of the failure of the project manager to properly schedule each task. He also failed to allocate resources for each task. Moreover, scheduling developers/programmers to develop software using a language unknown to them was a problem. Every task in a project requires adequate resources to deliver quality results (Larson & Gray, 2013). The project charter is capable of defining the requirements of every task and ensuring that every activity is allocated resources able to handle it till its completion.

Changing the layout of the project schedule is an opportunity to bring the project back on track. Training the programmers on the new programming language will be used to ensure progress. Completion of the project before the scheduled date would save a lot of resources for the company (Larson & Gray, 2013). Threats to the external environment include client requirements changes that also affect the project plans, possibility of computer hardware and software crash, and time off. Finally, the fact that the project must be brought back to course is yet another threat. Accuracy in scheduling and budgeting can be achieved by crowdsourcing of information from several people with knowledge and experience on previous projects (Kerzner, 2013). Different views from various ranges of experiences help in eliminating extreme time and cost estimate errors. It was suggested that funding should be stopped when an overshoot of 20% was reached. This is a control mechanism to avoid overuse of resources. 

Since the project has been delayed for some time, a strategy to bring is back to schedule is underway. The first step is to minimize period gaps between tasks. The action may not save money but a lot of time will be recovered. The identification of risks and opportunity will help in coming up with solutions that ensure that neither hardware nor software fails during this crucial project. According to Kerzner (2013), correct scheduling ensures that time-offs, vacations, and sick leaves, are included in the Gantt scheduling chart.

The forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning stages are essential to ensure agreement during project developments (Larson & Gray, 2013). The disagreements and failures are likely to occur if these steps are not exercised in any project that involves a team. Support and teamwork were required in the case of CDW development. It is unfortunate that not all these steps were practiced among the project management team thus far. Upon the completion of this project, the payback period should not exceed 30 days. If the completion is as per the budget, then the period is enough to also include the scheduled profits. Payback period is a necessary determinant as to whether to or not to go on with the project. The model applied in project selection was numeric as it is labor intensive. The rate of work multiplied by the period taken gives the total cost (Larson & Gray, 2013). The customer charges cover the cost of the project including the profit. The project must stay within time and budget for maximum profitability. Otherwise, the infiltration of the identified issues will cut into the company profits.

Communication Plan

The communication should be to the management, resources, customers, users, and any other stakeholder (Binder, 2009). Everyone must be involved in project progress communication, whether bad or good. To embark on track, the communication and meetings should encompass the remaining process. The project manager and the project team will communicate first with the customer’s management team to ensure they are on the same page to commence the work. The team members will give daily progress reports to the project manager to fast track the entire process. Customers must also be given status updates every fortnight to assure them that the project will be completed on time. Any issue will be addressed before mentioning it to the stakeholders. Each step requires management and interviews signatures before moving on. The MS project sheet with the latest milestones will be availed for access through a cloud-based application such as Dropbox.

Conclusion 

The objectives, strategic plan, and communication are important aspects of the project’s success. Project charters enable managers to define the exact tasks that need to be completed. MS Project sheets (Gantt charts) clearly define tasks, timelines, resources, budget, and communications involved. Project milestones require stakeholders’ interviews and signatures for approval to move on to the next phase.

Milestone Four: Project’s Scope, Cost and Quality Planning

The implementation of any successful project requires clear scope, cost control, and quality planning. The tasks completed so far show that the scope is almost complete. However, the project timeline and budget have not been put in place. More attention needs to be given to the budget ceiling and the expected quality of the work. While it is important to ensure that the budget remains within the projections, the final product, must meet the quality threshold to help the company gain a competitive edge. In this project, scope planning involves managing and strategizing on the expected risks before they occur. Larsen and Gray (2013) define risk as an uncertain condition or event that has consequences on the project objectives. Every project plan has a certain level of risks that may be difficult to overcome at the time of planning. 

Scope Planning

The project involves building a quality system that accepts vendors’ information, stores it in a database, and informs customers on any changes to the plan. Details on change of plans must be traced and distributed to every member of the project team. The infrastructure required for the accomplishment of the project includes the following components: Database servers (Teradata 14 database and MS SQL Server 2008 R2), reporting servers (SSRS deployment), and development tools (SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Server Business Intelligent Development Studio, and MS Visual Studio 2008 Shell). The system requires a table of members so that both the vendors and members are connected via the database. The protocols should also be identified to determine who should be notified. 

Various individuals will be given responsibility to different tasks within the project. The roles allocated to each one of them are outlined below. 

• Business Owner and Information System (IS) Manager: The business owner and IS manager are entirely involved in the project from its initiation to its deployment. The duo has already committed ten days to creating and approving the project charter as well as the budget. They are also expected to meet at the end of the project to come up with methods of supporting the system.
• The Project Manager (PM): The project manager is involved in creating achievable project plans (particular tasks and activities). He or she must remain informed by regularly communicating with all the parties involved in the project. Instead of being a doer, the PM needs to take a leadership role to ensure the project is completed in time as well as within the projected budget (Binder, 2009).
• The Stakeholders: They are involved once a project contract is completed and approved. They are also the ones responsible for approvals.
• Database Administrator (DBA), Business Analyst, and Developer: This group of experts is heavily involved in the physical creation of the database. During this process, it is the work of the PM to ensure that all the resources are working on the right task and within the provided time constraints.
• Quality Assurance, Architect members, and the Report Developer: They are concerned with testing the model/systems for bugs and proposing necessary actions.
• The Project Manager IS Manager and Business Owner: These individuals are responsible for system management and maintenance after the system is tested, approved and is live.

Table 2: Issues and Corrective Action

Cost Planning and Control

The role of the project manager is to manage costs and control the period spent on every task. Tasks must be controlled within hours and the PM must therefore ensure that every member of the project team complete their work in time. Such efficiency will ensure timely initiation of the next task. Prudent managers will perform cost-benefit analysis to evaluate all the costs involved and the expected revenue after the project has been completed (Kerzner, 2013). The cost incurred stands at $230,000 with a number of tasks remaining to be done. Quality and competitiveness are the top priorities in the project. The main issue that must be taken into consideration is the economic benefit of the project after it has been completed and deployed. After completion, the project will save the employee the time wasted in gathering policy changes, looking for appropriate plan members, and manually updating them on any new developments.

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) has been estimated as $460,000. The amount includes labor, server space, and updates on regular company procedures and processes in five years. The system will also require regular maintenance and updates on a monthly basis, and undoubtedly, the requests for various changes will come up. The cost of support and maintenance is an estimate after spending a total of $530,000 in system development. If everything works as planned, the cost will be far less than in the budget. The project will be valued based on reduction of the time to review changes from vendors, and alerting appropriate members. Cost saving due to the system use can also be obtained by comparing the amount of money that would be spent hiring employees to do the manual processes against the cost incurred with the new system (Larsen and Gray, 2013). The cost of TCO is expected to be recovered within five years. Working with the system will be a little easier as it will boost the employees’ morale as their work will be more simplified.

Table 3: Resource allocation

Quality Planning

Table 4: Activity Table

For this project, quality must be considered before the cost. The key performance indicators (KPI) of the quality project will be measured through communication between the project manager, project team, and external stakeholders (Binder, 2009). Keeping the system on track is also another performance indicator for the project. The PM needs to measure how employees (DBAs, Business Analysts, and Developers) pay attention to details, finish tasks allotted in time, and with the greatest quality. Any negative reviews in these KPIs will call for quick action by the PM so that the project demands are not compromised. For this project, it would be worth a wait rather than launching a product that has poor in quality. Any change must be communicated to the stakeholders and actions to recover time of completing a quality task planned. Considering all the above criteria is a sufficient measure of the system’s quality.

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Milestone Five: Project Schedule, Risk Planning and Risk Report

Conflict Resolution Plan

The implementation of the Medical Informatics project had a number of challenges that were addressed in this paper. The common issues were on budget, time management, resource allocation, and team management among others. The project progress and situation at various stages were analyzed.

Team Dynamics 

The team manning the clinical data warehouse project comprised of programmers, legal experts and, workers from the users department. The main task was to expand its clinical data warehouse to accommodate the third party data feeds from vendors. The expansion will provide a mechanism for reporting on various details concerning the new product. The initially appointed project manager was John. However, John left the team for personal reasons after they had delivered module 2 part of the project. At this point, the team is at the performing stage. Conflict within the team is due to conflicting roles between the team members and the fact that some of the members have double roles in the company. This has caused extreme pressure within the team. The team is mainly lacking leadership skills to harmonize the roles of the members. 

Conflict Resolution and Dynamics 

It is reported that the project team faces a number of problems which affects its stability. First, the team lacks proper leadership since the exit of John the previous project manager. Second, the team is poorly motivated due to the lack of leadership. Third, the project is behind schedule due to delays experienced in some of the activities. There is need to solve these problems for the project to get back on schedule. The team needs direction on the way forward. The team has the right quality of members and therefore requires someone to guide them on the way to execute their duties. The most appropriate strategy is to ensure that a leader is selected for the team to steer the team to the right direction. Retraining of the employees is also seen as important to ensure that there have enough skills to handle the stalled tasks.

Motivation and Confidence 

The project manager can instill confidence in the team by properly executing his role as a leader. First, the project manager can act charismatically and act as an inspiring figure in the team. This will give the members confidence in his leadership. Secondly, motivation and confidence can be attained through training of members to ensure that they have enough skills to handle the tasks at hand. The project manager can also set team goals which must be achieved within a certain period of time. Rewards can be given to teams that manage to reach the set goals. Constant communication with the team also motivates them to work harder to meet the project goals. A motivated team will deliver quality results which meet the project objectives. 

Project Evaluation

Status Evaluation

Currently, the Medical Informatics health service company is developing a project regarding a new product development. The project aim is to 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. Moreover, the work is aimed at developing new activity reports to inform the values of these products. The project faces 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 project also had a likely over-budget of 20%, scope creep, performance issues, schedule delays, unrealistic estimates, inexperience developers, communication problems, absence of testing strategies, and ineffective activities regarding project management.

Project Analysis

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

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.

Corrective Action

The suggested corrective actions to ensure the project’s success include; coming up with a well-defined Gantt charts, and WBS, designed to meet up with the needs of the project as per the scope, budget and time will help to overcome the problems of the past. The new project plan should not rely on previous projects, but rather be scheduled and planned independently. The PM should identify short term goals, baselines changes (dates), and actions to ensure a long-term success.

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Project Charter 

Project Objectives

The expanded Clinical Data Warehouse (CDW) projects at Medical Informatics Health Services Company is aimed at enabling the receipt of feed from third party vendors and also include reports and analytics of the downstream employer groups.

Project Strategy

To deal with these problems, the project tasks must be well defined using the Gantt chart. The right Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) must be used to plan the project timeline. The period between the predecessor and successor activities should be long enough to enable proper planning. Tasks involved in the project should not overlap to allow the completion of each task at a time. The project charter is capable of defining the requirements of every task and ensuring that every activity is allocated resources able to handle it till its completion. Since the project has been delayed for some time, a strategy to bring is back to schedule is underway. The first step is to minimize period gaps between tasks. The action may not save money but a lot of time will be recovered.

Communication Plan

The project aims at consistent communication involving management, customers, users, and stakeholders in order to ensure agreement and bring the project back on track. The communications must involve progress reports, status updates, and the milestone plans. Meetings are to be held every fortnight.

Project’s Planning and Control 

Scope Planning

The project involves building a quality system that accepts vendors’ information, stores it in a database, and informs customers on any changes to the plan. Details on change of plans must be traced and distributed to every member of the project team. Various individuals will be given responsibility to different tasks within the project.

Cost Planning and Control

The role of the project manager is to manage costs and control the period spent on every task. Tasks must be controlled within hours and the PM must therefore ensure that every member of the project team complete their work in time. Such efficiency will ensure timely initiation of the next task. Prudent managers will perform cost-benefit analysis to evaluate all the costs involved and the expected revenue after the project has been complete. The cost incurred stands at $230,000 with a number of tasks remaining to be done. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) has been estimated as $460,000. The amount includes labor, server space, and updates on regular company procedures and processes in five years. The system will also require regular maintenance and updates on a monthly basis, and undoubtedly, the requests for various changes will come up.

Gannt Chart

Figure 1: Gannt Chart

Quality Planning

The key performance indicators (KPI) of the quality project will be measured through communication between the project manager, project team, and external stakeholders. The project team will need to pay attention to details, finish tasks allotted in time, and with the greatest quality. Any negative reviews in these KPIs will call for quick action by the PM so that the project demands are not compromised. For this project, it would be worth a wait rather than launching a product that has poor in quality. Any change must be communicated to the stakeholders and actions to recover time of completing a quality task planned.