Overview
Background:
Your team has been brought in on a very ambitious program in an international bank’s treasury services line of business. The aim of the program is to align all systems across three divisions of the business into a single platform. With a multi-million dollar budget, this program is very high priority to the functional leaders of each of the three divisions, as well as, the global business director. This also means a lot of visibility, tight deadlines and a pressing need for control over quality of delivery. Because this is in a regulated industry, there is also a high priority for ensuring that the execution of the project aligns with compliance requirements. The project has a three year span with eights release phases.
All of the involved divisions work around the globe with some of the key stakeholders situated globally. For this project, a project manager will be appointed for leading the development of the new platform within each of the three divisions for a total of three project managers. The global business director is acting as the executive sponsor for this project. One project manager is based in Charlotte, NC, while the other two are located in the Bay area of California. It is necessary that each of the project managers work closely with the other project managers for ensuring aligned schedules and deployment, as there are three separate development streams that must coincide with the other.
Although the three functional divisions are based in the United States, the company has offices in London, and a couple key stakeholders from London will be heavily involved in the project. There is even talk about the need for one of the project managers to make a monthly trip to London. Additionally, the new platform will actually be developed by a team in India, which will require each of the three project managers to coordinate development schedules with the India team, as the India team will be completing the programming for the entire platform that will encompass all three divisions. Travel to India will most likely be required, but most of the work will be managed remotely.
Current Issue(s):
Your cross-functional team has been brought together by the global business director to develop an approach for managing this project. Three of you will be appointed as a project manager once you complete your assignment, and the actual work of the larger project will be initiated.
The global business director is primarily interested in you informing what technologies and communication tools should be used to manage and track the work of this project. Your charge is to develop a plan for managing and coordinating the work of the project using as seamless a solution as possible. He is aware of a range of tools that are available, but wants to be certain that the approach chosen will work for all three functional divisions. He wants to see the following items in a report by next week:
- A stated approach to how the project managers will work together (regular status reports, meeting times, addressing conflict, need for onsite meetings).
- A recommendation and rationale for the tools to be used to meet virtually, share project documentation, and track project work at the functional level and at the program level. This analysis should also consider how the project teams will coordinate with the international stakeholders, as well as the sponsor.
- Estimate of costs associated with deploying the technologies you recommend
- What steps do you recommend with moving forward with beginning the project and deploying the virtual team
Grading Notes:
In grading the assignment, I will be looking at the following items:
- Quality of writing (grammar and clarity)
- Design of report
- It should not be formatted as an academic report, but as a business proposal
- Do not double-space or use in-text citations (use footnotes where appropriate for citations purposes)
- Use section headers, titles, bullet points, tables, and the like where appropriate
- Use 12 point Times New Roman font with 1” margin on all sides
- Paper should be no less than 3 pages but no more than 5 pages in length
- Completeness – does it address all the issues listed above?
- Contextualization – does it consider the various factors of the case in a serious and realistic manner?
- Practicality – does it provide a realistic solution and clear, action-oriented recommendation
- Concreteness – does it deal in specifics, rather than generalities?
Only reports that are very well-written, align with the criteria given above in an excellent manner, and read as though they are written as a professional report will be candidates to receive an ‘A’. Reports that do not fully address all of the points given above or fail to meet a formatting standard will automatically lose the opportunity to receive an ‘A’.