Assignment 4: Communication and Risk

Assignment 4: Communication and Risk

Due Week 8 and worth 75 points

In this assignment you are to submit the PowerPoint Presentation for the term paper. This is the first part

of your term paper submission. Part A is a persuasive PowerPoint presentation of up to 15 slides that you

will present to the Executive Committee of Fiction Corporation. Use the Notes Section of PowerPoint to

give a brief overview of each slide.

The PowerPoint presentation must include the following:

1.     Introduction: project name, a brief description of the project, and deliverables of the project

2.     Project organization: organizational charts and project responsibilities.

3.     Management and technical approaches: management objectives, Project controls, Projectstaffing, Technical processes.

4.     Work to perform: major work packages and deliverables.

5.     Project schedule: summary schedule.

6.     Project budget: summary budget.

7.     Use at least two (2) quality resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar Websites

do not qualify as quality resources.

Note: You will be graded on the quality of your slides, the logic/organization of the slides, your language

skills, and your writing skills.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

• Describe the knowledge and processes areas of project management in accordance to the

Project Management Institute Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®) Guide.

• Evaluate the different cost management factors in an IT project management context.

• Identify how project management improves the success of information technology projects.

• Use technology and information resources to research issues in IT project management.

• Write clearly and concisely about issues in IT project management using proper writing

mechanics and technical style conventions.

Grading for this assignment will be based on answer quality, logic / organization of the paper, and

language and writing skills, using the following rubric.

Background

You are a small project management consulting company called Big-Proj that is looking for that big break.

You are one of ten (1 of 10) project managers in your organization. Recently, you made a persuasive and high-level presentation of your company’s approach to managing projects on time and on schedule inaccordance with the PMBOK®. Leads are pouring in. It looks like business is about to pick up.

Your small but experienced team of ten (10) PMP-certified project managers have managed a wide rangeof small capital projects, namely wiring closets, wireless, data center moves, network upgrades, and ERPdeployments. You have been selected to initiate, plan, execute, monitor, and control and close a datacenter move in a 30-day period.

Overview

Fiction Corporation is a large national retail chain of 10,000 employees and 500 retail outlets. Fiction is moving its primary data center operation to a new headquarters building several miles away. The company wishes to upgrade its network and correct any security flaws in its infrastructure as part of this move. The Fiction CEO has informed you that the capital budget cannot exceed $500,000 and must not interrupt business operations. What follows is a brief overview that will serve as your foundation in developing the network design.

The data in the center supports remote retail locations, an off-site 100-seat call center and 3 remotewarehousing operations 24 hours a day. Any significant downtime to its production systems would impact Fiction Corporation’s operations and profitability. From the data processing viewpoint, the move includes

2 large UPS, 4 RS/6000 AIX application servers, 10 virtualized servers, and 20 PC servers.

The network consists of approximately 500 remote location retail stores connected via frame relay (with

ISDN backup) to 10 routers at the data center running a common LAN shared by the entire organization.

The retail operations also run WLANs that are on their own subnet. You will have a T1 link and ISDN as its backup. Network managers also need to monitor the status of remote systems. The SNMP management system must be able to detect and report failure of the remote system or its communications link and the status of individual applications.

The company wishes a seamless migration that minimizes impact to its customers and employees. Any gaps in this background will require you to make sound technical and persuasive assumptions that satisfy the customer’s goals that are within the budget guidelines.

You were selected in part due to your detailed analysis and agreement to an implementation cost that will not exceed $500,000. Your network migration plan will be in accordance to the PMBOK® process areas and will use standard project management software to manage the budget and associated tasks. Key to the success of this plan is adherence to the scope, time, and cost baseline.

Technically, the client must ensure the availability of a T1 link between the remote sites to support remote bridging and development of configurations for all the remote routers.

Students may have to create fictitious assumptions and details in support of this assignment.