This is Assignment 1 for Unit 9 IT Project Management. IT meets all the distinction Criteria allowing for an overall Distinction Grade. IT Project Management has 3 Assignments in total and this is one of them. Please check out my page for Assignment 2 and 3 which will be sold separately.
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Unit 9 - Assignment 1
IT project management
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Introduction
Organisations have been using methodologies close to a century now and as time has gone
on and advances in technology have been made more methodologies have been created for
specific sectors/reasons in hopes of reaching a desired outcome both faster and efficiently.
Older methodologies such as prince 2 can be considered to be quite paper driven and
tasking compared to other methodologies such as agile or rad. Prince 2 is more old
fashioned and requires authorisation to move onto the next task meaning everything has to
be done carefully and properly as going back to previous tasks and be a real chore while
methodologies such as agile and rad are much more flexible as they allow multiple iterations
of the project and mistakes can be fixed without significantly affecting the projects timeframe.
In this report I will be discussing and evaluating 3 projects with 3 different methodologies and
discussing what went well in these projects and what they could have done better by
comparing the projects with one another.
Heathrow airport case study - Agile
https://www.apm.org.uk/media/1195/it-project-of-the-year-2015-heathrow-airport-ltd.pdf
The heathrow airport case study is about how back in 2015 heathrow airport managed to
create a new system that can handle baggage at a fast pace while being safe, reliable and
tough. This IT project was successful in completing its goal and won the award for best IT
project of that year. The four terminals in Heathrow airport need to be able to handle around
110 million bags a year which means a fast, efficient and reliable system is required. The
main focus of this project was to develop such a system for terminal 3 and 5 as they cope
with a third of heathrow's connections and terminal 3 in 2014 alone handled over 10 million
baggage. The methodology used in this project was agile and here's why. In the case study
it mentioned that a leadership team was established and met on a weekly basis to track
progress. We know that regular meetings are a characteristic of agile but they are also a
characteristic of RAD (Rapid Application Development) so how can we be sure that it is
agile? That is because the agile methodology is used for medium and long term projects
while RAD is used for short term projects. But this isn't the only reason it also says in the
case study that there were 9 project managers and they had to be agile enough to respond
to critical issues.This alone completely dismisses prince2 as a possible methodology and the
most reasonable one would be alige. In this project there were 9 project managers who met
on a weekly basis this alone shows the size and complexity of the project. Other job roles
include: security, legal, safety, commercial and performance operations IT solution
architects. In this project the stakeholders were brought into the project team to ensure the
solution met their needs. The stakeholders were kept informed and engaged throughout
every stage of the project so they knew what they were getting themselves into. Some of the
stakeholders in this project were: the airlines, baggage handlers and Heathrow’s baggage
operations. These are the people that would use the new system regularly and as soon as it
was deployed so it was important to have them know what was going on during the systems
development.
, In a project there are functional and non-functional requirements. Functional requirements
are what is required inorder for the system to function as it is intended to while non-
functional requirements are more quality of life improvements these non-functional
requirements are not required for the system to function but rather can improve user
experience as an example. Some non-functional requirements could be Improvements to
speeds, cost and efficiency for the project or the system. The functional requirement for this
project was a database that could store all baggage data and a reporting tool to represent all
bagage data. The database is kind of a no-brainer as the airport will need to keep track of
the baggage they handle and if a bag was to go missing it can be located through the help of
the system. The reporting tool will also be of great benefit as it will help with navigating
through the database and finding specific information. In the case study it says an off site
test facility was installed where the planned technology was deployed and simulated. I
believe this to be a functional requirement and here's why. Heathrow airport is one of the
biggest airports in the UK and as stated before handles millions of baggage every year so it
cannot afford any issues or setbacks as heathrow airport the organisation itself will suffer
greatly. So being able to test and simulate scenarios that may happen within the airport to
see how the system holds up and see what improvements could be made before actually
deploying the system was a huge must because the system had to be close to perfect to
ensure close to 0 errors or issues arose when it came to live deployment. Another
requirement that is functional or non - functional is that an off site test facility was installed so
that the technology could be deployed and simulated. This can be seen as both functional
and non functional. Functional because they need to have an almost seamless transition
from the old system to the new one and keep any disruptions to a minimum and by allowing
staff to familiarise themselves with the new system/technology will assist them as they won't
have to learn and adapt on the job. A seamless transition is required as any disruptions in
heathrow could be highly damaging to them. This can also be non-functional because it
wasn't really necessary to familiarise the staff rather the main objective was to develop the
system and make sure it was ready for live deployment and was capable of performing its
role. Employees could have been given instructions on how to use the new system before it
was implemented and figured it out from there but with them being able to familiarise
themselves beforehand it was a smarter move that saved time and lowered the risk of
anything bad happening. The quality assurance for this project was the continuance testing
in the off site facility it was also stated that this saved months from the delivery programme.
Also keeping stakeholders informed and engaged with the project development ensuring it
met their needs also provided for quality assurance.
NHS case study - Prince2
https://www.apm.org.uk/resources/find-a-resource/case-studies/case-study-cumbria-nhs-
maternity-transformation-project/
The NHS case study is about the NHS switching from a paper based management system to
a digital system that offered to be much more efficient and reliable than the old system.
Records of expectant mothers would be digitised so that frontline staff would be aware of the
patient's medical records and could respond and act quickly if anything went wrong. This
new system would bring efficiency and safety to the maternity services as records would be
available at any moment and could provide crucial information for certain mothers. The
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