Reference no: EM132847566

Cloud Project Management

Scope Statement - In-house IT labs (vs. Cloud PM?)

PM (Project Management) in the cloud?

For almost three decades,6 I have heard about this new paradigm - BYOD,8 where we do not provide fixed labs instead students come to class with their own equipment and download wirelessly (or otherwise) what they require to conduct their learning. A more recent paradigm shift is the cloud whereby you IT outsource potentially whatever is not mission critical to the organisation.

Project success:

Our goal is to complete this project within 8 months for no more than $?. The main goal is improve the lab experience for students by providing better machines and an improved study experience.
Basic assignment steps

a. You are the internal PM. Consider your salary cost too.
b. MQ Computing wants to establish the aforementioned ground floor 4 RPD teaching labs.
c. You as PM have some knowledge of the potential for PM in the cloud. 7 10 Your superiors (the CIO etc.) also have some knowledge of the cloud and PM in the cloud is new, but they have heard of it.
d. MQ Computing has only an 8 month timeframe to have their labs ready.
e. MQ Computing has 1 PM (you), 6 Science IT staff (3rd floor 9WW), 2 office staff to help with admin. 8
f. You as PM can work out the budget - there is no correct answer here! What do you think it might cost over the 8 months?
• You have an idea of the number of machines you require and a broad understanding of some of the software you might want installed.
• You know the staff available to you and they are all professional (not academic) staff at MQ. Staff salaries for professional staff are here. 9
• Let us assume a PM is a Higher Education Worker (HEW) level 9
• Your science IT staff are HEW 7
• Your office staff are HEW 5
• One way to work the payments out might be to work out an hourly rate of pay and multiple by the number of days per week and weeks per month your staff might be allocated to the lab.
• Please note - there is no correct answer here, just how well you explain yourself and why.
• You can be creative and Google some costings. Just state (write) in your assignment where you derived these.
• The more thorough/convincing/plausible your explanation is - the better.

g. Consider, as with any workplace, the above staffing is only partially dedicated to achieving the end goal of lab establishment in 8 months. You decide what fraction of time is spent by staff on this initiative!
h. This project represents an intra-organisational view of PM.
• Having written the above - for the second question - can management gain some idea of the costs of hosting aspects of software (SaaS) or hardware (IaaS) in the cloud?

Assignment Algorithm

1. Implement the above project scope (basic assignment steps) into MS Project (or appropriate PM software). You are free to modify the WBSs as you see appropriate (15 marks). Please answer the following: -

• How long will your project take?
• How did you calculate this? (explain)
• Provide the critical path (e.g. figure 1 below) for your implementation.
• You may use the network diagram feature in MS Project (or equivalent) and modify/comment to illustrate your point, rather than redrawing from scratch.
• Provide a discussion of your approach - how did you arrive at your costings, timeframes, how staff were allocated and so on?
• Hint: higher grades tend to refer to sources of information 10

2. What do you foresee as potential cloud options? 11 Are there aspects of the above able to be implemented in the cloud - what are some of the potential options? Perhaps no cloud options exist and you choose to argue that way? What about BYOD - is this paradigm helpful? 12 Again, note footnote 13 below.

Attachment:- Cloud Project Management.rar