Question

Question 4: Scenario: You are undertaking a project to upgrade the booking system for a large hairdressing franchise. There are 175 salons across Australia and New Zealand, 2400 staff and associated existing computers to consider. You have only 9 months to complete the actual upgrade but you can start preliminary activities up to 6 months before. a) Identify 4 stakeholders and indicate the influence they have on the project. b) List 4 assumptions you have to make, and why. c) Identify and list 4 potential risks for this project. Ensure one of your risks is a positive risk. d) Identify two verification and two validation activities you could implement as part of your Quality Management Plan. e) Identify and discuss which implementation approach you would use for this project and why.

Answer 1

The four stakeholders in this project are:-
1) The staffs who are working in these salons and needs to be trained on the new system.
2) The vendor who was responsible for supplying items for the upgrade.
3) The IT consultants who would have deployed the earlier system and those who would be working on the new system
4) Customers who also need to be trained on the new system

The assumptions that needs to be made are:-
1) The old system would be working till the new system is rolled out.
2) No disruption in operations while transitioning
3) All staffs can be trained to work on new system
4) There is no resource crunch

The risks of the project are:-
1) The project could be completed ahead of time and hence the customers may need to be onboarded to the new system earlier.
2) The project may overshoot its budgeted cost
3) There could be a potential incompatibility in software and the underlying hardware which might be a constraint in the upgrade project
4) Another risk could be that staffs could not be trained at the same pace as originally planned.

Two verification activites are:-
1) Verification to ensure that all resources in terms of people and tools are present as per schedule
2) Another activity is to ensure that hardware system is as per configuration specified for upgrade project

Two validation activities are:
1) Customer interface for booking remains seamless as before
2) Revenue generation from newer systems are same as older system

A proper approach to complete the project would be to follow the critical project management technique which can be used to track the project and focus on activities which are on the critical path. Any delays in the critical chain tasks need to be eliminated through resource allocation and careful planning and co-ordination.