Summative Assessment Design and Develop a Project Plan
Introduction
The focus of report is to design and develop a project plan for a new software solution which is ‘Modern Employee Management (MEM)’ which can be applicable for the business operations in the area of Human Resource.
Business/ organizational objectives
- To enhances the ability and effectiveness of HR members in employee management.
- To provide security to employee data and information
- To facilitates the electronic data storage
- To avoid redundant data entry
The goal of the project is to successfully implement the new software solution in Human resources for efficient employee management. The objectives will be:
- To ensure that end users (HR personnel) provide inputs in the design of MEM software solution.
- To complete the project within set time and budget (Fernandes et al., 2013)
- To develop a software solution that facilitates sharing information, accessing employee data/ records, update employee information, leave management, payrolling, viewing paycheck and tax filings, and managing trainings.
The key project stakeholders for the project of developing and implementing Modern Employee Management’ software in HR application will include:
- Project owners
- Project sponsors
- Project manger
- HR manager
- HR personnel
- Project Team members including system analyst, system coder/ designer and system developer
- IS audit professional
- IT Technicians
Role in planning and delivering the project
Undertaking the role of project manager, the role in planning will be to appoint team members, plan for goals, objectives, resources required, budget, and risks. In delivering role, the project manager ensures that project is being manager and delivered as per the intended project plan, time and within budget.
The project manager will receive feedback and issues from team members to take actions, supervises the team members and shape the project direction to achieve project goals and objectives and prepare project documentations and approval reports.
It will also be ensures that flow of communication is continuous among the stakeholders which will also included project evaluation and feedback is provided to each team member achievements and/or for improvements.
Ensuring project meets organizational objectives
With the help of monitoring, project manager can be ensured that the project goals have been achieved (Binder, 2016). In this way, there are some steps that are defined below in order to ensure the project success within the organization:
Step1. Designing an efficient plan for monitoring
Step2. Designing effective report management mechanism
Step3. Recommendations for project improvement
Step4. Ensuring guidelines and recommendations are followed accordingly
Resources required and sourcing
Financial resources – cash/ funds from project owner and sponsor
Technical resources – IT hardware and software from approved supplier/ vendors
Human resources – All key project stakeholders from in-house staff (trained and flexible staff)
Facilities and other data/design tools – IT room in company premises, internet, MS Excel, and MS project
Consulting team members during planning and implementation of project
It is important to consult with team during these two important project phases as it will be effective to develop ownership among the team members as their inputs are inviting in the planning of the project and also their concerns are heard and met in the execution phase in the project lifecycle.
Thus, consulting needs to be done to keep the team members involves, motivated and focused. The consulting will take place through meeting for planning, and weekly meeting once the project initiates for purposes such as discussion on feedback received, monitoring outcomes discussion for assigned role and tasks and seek opinion during review of team and individual roles.
Monitoring the quality of outcomes
The quality will be monitored under the quality management plan. The software solution will be inspected against the quality requirement and checklist, quality standards and quality assurance for the employee management system. Thus, verification activities will be employed for monitoring quality outcomes (Meredith and Mantel Jr, 2011). This will also be useful in identification of quality issues and non-compliances.
Ensuring to meet project timelines
This can be ensured by:
By delegating right project member with right roles and right tasks
Developing key performance indicators and indentifying critical success factors (Mir and Pinnington, 2014)
Identify reason for not meeting set timeline (Meredith and Mantel Jr, 2011)
Address issues by fast decision making
Implement action for improvement
Work breakdown structure (WBS): This tool will be used to define the project tasks and breakdown the larger tasks into sub-tasks so that the each sub-task becomes manageable. This tool will be helpful for the planning and execution of the project in an efficient and systematic way (Fernandes et al., 2013).
Gantt chart: This tool will be used to track the project task and sub-tasks and the progress in achieving the project milestones. It will also be helpful in determining the interdependencies between the tasks (Binder, 2016) and the resources required to each activity.
Delegation is important as it highlight good project management practice (Joslin and Müller, 2015) which is needed to lead the team members and guide their efforts to meet the project goals and objectives within set deadlines.
The tasks will be delegated considering the strength and abilities of the project team members. In delegating task, clear and specific instruction will be given, work will be allocated based on work load on each member, individual and team goals will be set and a time frame will be provided to get the task done.
Risk management cannot be ignored by any organization that wants to succeed. In this way, there are some steps that are considered under the risk management and contingency plan that will be helpful to overcome the health and safety hazards (Heldman, 2018). These steps are defined below:
Step 1: Identify the Risk
Step 2: Analyze the risk
Step 3: Evaluate or Rank the Risk
Step 4: Treat the Risk
Step 5: Monitor and Review the risk
Along with this risk management and contingency plan, project manager can cater any type of health and safety issues.
Methods to clarify the roles, responsibilities and lines of authority
In order to clarify the roles, responsibilities and lines of authority, the knowledge, experience and previous results will be considered in this project. All these will be communicated t all members properly to clarify these roles and responsibilities.
There should not be any confusion regarding the roles and responsibilities as there should be proper communication over this to the project members (Marchewka, 2014).
The individuals who have been successful in the execution of the projects in past will be preferred due to their success in project execution. Apart from this, the skills and knowledge of the team members will be assessed that will help to allocate particular role and responsibility to each individual.
The experience level and skills level will determine the allocation of the line of authority. The experienced and skilled members will be allocated with the senior position while the individuals who are less experienced and less skilled will be at the lower position in the line of authority.
So, it can be stated that skills, knowledge, experience and ability to handle the complex tasks will decide how the roles, responsibilities and lines of authority will be clarified during this project (Harrison & Lock, 2017). In addition, feedback will be taken from the members regarding their roles and responsibilities. It will be helpful to know whether they know their role or not.
Budget preparation and its use as a communication and monitoring tool
A project budget is the total sum of money allocated for the particular purpose of the project for a specific period of time. The goal of budget management is to control project costs within the approved budget and deliver the expected project goals. The budget would be prepared on zero-base budgeting method.
This method is crucial to decide the budget for each activity or resource from the scratch. It means all expenses will be justified for each new period (Harrison & Lock, 2017). It starts from zero base and all the costs for each activity or resource are decided based on the needs for the upcoming period regardless previous budget.
This method of budgeting will be beneficial to reduce the cost of project by avoiding the increase or decrease to a prior period’s budget. The budget will be used as a communication tool as it will help to convey the associated costs of the each activity to the project member.
It will be useful to share ideas about the project with the project team members. This prepared budget can be used to communicate with the shareholders and investors in order to tell them that what the actual estimation for completion of project (Napier et al., 2009).
It can be used as monitoring tool in this project as it provides the set standards for the cost of each activity in project. So it will be effective to monitor whether the project activity has been accomplished within the budget limitations.
Data collection, record keeping and reporting processes applied to the project
It is important in the project to collect data, keep records and report the processes. In this project, status reports will be prepared along with the completion of the project activities.
Status report will be helpful to determine the existing status of the project activity and monitor the activity to complete it within time limitations. Data will be reported in the records that will help to guide the team members to execute the project tasks and sub tasks on time.
At the same time, records will be created, maintained and stored. Proper compliance procedures and security measures will be adopted to avoid misusing of records. In addition, records will be stored and retrieved digitally in the system with password and login access (Marchewka, 2014).
In reporting process, the roles and responsibilities will be allocated to the dedicated people who can categorize the records and maintain and support the record management.
Legislation applicable to the project and its compliance
This project is related to the software development so there are several laws and legislation that need to be considered in this project. It is required to consider security aspects in relation to this project.
The most related law will be encryption law as there may be threat to the data security in the encryption of transferred data. At the same time, the threats and attacks may be possible against the data stored and transferred as laws such as computer misuse act needs to be included in this project.
Apart from this, other laws such as intellectual property laws to avoid any copyright issue in software, data protect act, criminal IT law, law of confidence and electronic communication act will be considered in the software development project.
In order to ensure the compliance with these laws, a legal expert will be hired who will assist the team to comply with all these laws (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017). He will be knowledgeable of all these laws and legislation to support the team to consider all the laws while developing software within the organization.
- Design phase documents with specifications (Joslin and Müller, 2015)
- Implement software developmental activities
- Online data entry system
- Test reports for the developed system for HR operational efficiency
- A new software solution for employee management
- Dynamic and improved HR business operations
Review Project Outcomes/ Processes
Project Reviews are useful from many perspectives. The real benefit from Project Reviews is the opportunity to step back and tack a deeper look into the system. During the throes of delivery when a problem is observed, the inclination is to fix things quickly without a thorough examination of what is really happening (Turner, 2016). In this concern, eight steps are determined below for reviewing the project outcomes and processes:
- Scope / Objective of Review
- Preparation
- Sponsor Interview
- Project Manager Interview
- Stakeholder Interviews
- Analysis
- Draft Conclusion
- Publish Final Review
This project plan described the goals, objective, stakeholders, resources, role, budget, quality monitors, delegation, deliverables, and other project details for an software solution “Modern Employee Management’ applicable to improve the HR business operations in managing the organizational members.
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