Planning

Question 1

What are the 4 main steps when it comes to the planning stage?

Answer 1

1) Identify an opportunity
2) Analyse Feasibility
3) Develop a workplan
4) Staff the project

Question 1

When identifying an opportunity, where do these ideas come from?

Answer 1

• Internal Idea: Someone within the organisation identifies a business need
• External Idea: Someone external (a customer) has a business need.

Question 2

What do we get from Identifying an opportunity in the planning phase?

Answer 2

Output of description of the problem and very general proposed solution

Question 3

Give 2 things we need to consider when analysing the feasibility?

Answer 3

1) Technical feasibility
- How familiar are we?
2) Economic feasibility
- Dev costs
- Running costs
- Return on investment (ROI)
3) Organisation feasibility
- Is this strategically aligned with the business?

Question 4

When Developing a workplan, what do we need to include?

Answer 4

1) All tasks that have been identified need to develop a system to meet the business need. Bigger tasks can be broken down into smaller tasks
2) Estimation of time and effort of tasks
- Could just use a % for effort.
3) Who the task is assigned to
4) Start date / Finish date

Question 5

What kind of graph is appropriate when developing a workplan?
And why?

Answer 5

Gantt chart;
- Has a critical path, which is a sequence of tasks determining minimum time need to complete a project (shown in red)

Question 6

What does a staffing plan include?

Answer 6

• Describes the number and kind of people who will work on the project
• Describes the reporting structure, objectives and rules

Question 7

What could happen when more staff members are assigned to a project?

Answer 7

• More staff, means it’s harder to co-ordinate.
• Communication complexity grows dramatically as the number of staff increases,

Question 8

How to make communication better within a team?

Answer 8

• Create a reporting structure
• Communication can be kept effective with each smaller team.

Question 9

When assigning roles, what’s the most important consideration?

Answer 9

• Technical skills and interpersonal skills are key
• Motivation influences people’s performance

Question 10

What are some don’ts why assigning team members their roles?

Answer 10

• Assign unrealistic deadlines
• Ignore good efforts
• Create a low-quality product
• Make an important decision without the team’s input

Question 11

Give 4 ways to handle potential conflict within a team

Answer 11

• Clearly define team roles, so team members can be held accountable for their tasks
• Clearly defining plans for the project
• Develop detailed operating procedures and communicate these to the team members.
• Forecast other priorities and their possible impact on the project
• Record minutes of meetings and distribute to everyone after
• Make everyone away of the tools within the team being used.