PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLAN Base on the business case below (attachment file), develop a project management plan. The project management plan is a stand-alone document that the Project Sponsor will use

PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLAN

Base on the business case below, develop a project management plan.

The project management plan is a stand-alone document that the Project Sponsor will use to assist in obtaining Project Stakeholder sign-off. Amongst other things, it should present management plans related to ten knowledge areas and project process groups, such as executing, monitoring and controlling and closing the project.

Because the advancement of your project could really depend on this plan, you’ll want to make sure that it is as succinct, accurate, informed, and of course, as professionally presented as possible.

1. Project Feasibility

   1. Discuss the feasibility of the project.

      1. Include a detailed and defined SWOT analysis

      2. How likely is it to penetrate the market?

   2. Known constraints - (Identify at least 5 constraints about the product / service)

1. Project Stakeholders’ Management:

   1. Describe the specific target(s) / users of your project, including:

      • Who would use it?

      • What would they use it for?

      • How would they use it?

2. Describe the additional internal and external stakeholders within the project

3. Provide a stakeholder register for the project.

CDU marketplace

Connecting CDU students – Business Case.

Executive Summary 4

Products/Services 4

Mission Statement/ Purposes 4

Quantitative Analysis 5

Weighted Scoring Model 5

Expected benefits. 7

Project Concept 8

Objectives 8

SWOT Analysis 8

Stakeholders 9

Possible Assumptions 10

Constraints 11

Costs 12

Start-Up Expenses 12

Determining Costs 12

Major Risks 14

Identify Risks 14

Managing Risks 14

Timescale 16

References 18

The project’s product is an online platform which advertises goods and services mainly for Charles Darwin University (CDU) students. The goods and services can be advertised by fellow students or by local NT businesses, typically at discounted price.

Services on the platform can includes: jobs, accommodations, information on networking events, etc.

Product on the platform can includes: household appliances, vehicles, textbooks, second-hand products, etc.

Provide an intermediate platform for all stakeholders to connect with each other on different demands, needs and create a better online experience for students in general when study at Darwin.

The two most popular methods for project selection is NPV Analysis and Weighted Scoring Model. With NPV Analysis, it is less subjective and depends more on projected statistical information on the cash flow and assumptions on discount rate to determine the potential project. However, deciding a correct cash flow and discount rate can be challenge especially in an instability time like this (COVID-19 pandemic). As a result, Weighted Scoring Model is a better choice as it consider more about the stakeholders’ satisfaction and business priority strategies.

The purpose of the website is to create a place where students, local businesses, governments and university staffs can meet and share opportunities with each other. There are some alternative projects which can serve the same purpose as our project. For instance, instead of building an online presence with a website, we can organise a connect event where all of our target customers can meet each other. Another choice is to integrate a sub community on integrated platform such as Facebook, Gumtree, Flatmates and CDU platform.

We will concentrate on comparing these three choices of our approach. We chose four main categories including costs, deploy time, quality of final product, and future uses as our criteria in choosing between different projects. Our costs involve the total upfront costs that we have to pay before commencing the project and will be one of our important criteria considering limited resources from our project sponsors. Deploy time is also a considering factors, however, it will not be our main concern as it can varies a lot between different these types of projects. Another essential element is the quality and quantity of our final product, it will largely determine the future uses, which is another criterion, and affect our future revenues. The future uses concern with whether future benefits for this project and whether this can develop into a larger scale project.

The score for each criterion will based on the 100 point scale. Higher score is more desirable.

Cost: The existing platform integration requires fewer human resources compared to the other two options. Some of the parties require little to no subscription to use their platform. Build a website requires hardware as well as salaries for developers and IT managers, an organised event also require an event team with event coordinators and suppliers of food, venue, and equipment.

Deploy time: Defined as the time needed for the project to be fully deployed and start making profits. The existing platform requires less time as most of the necessary infrastructures are exist within the platform. Building an event or website requires the majority of time of the planning process. With website, project team also need to conduct the build and test step before deploying.

Quality and quantity: As the and cost required the most, building a website can provide a quality final product to customers. Long development time also ensure that the website can handle large traffic when compared with the event, which is only limited based on the venue or the platform, which is also affect based on the current infrastructures.

Future uses: The website can be remained online as long as the server which host it still active while the events option is more of a one-off project with little future uses and the existing platform can be faced with fierce competition in a short time.

Most of the expected benefits comes after the project has been deployed. It will solve the main problem identified and provide a place where students and businesses, buyers and sellers can connect with each other on different fields with different product and services.

For the financial benefits, one of the features planned along with the website is the pricing system and payment platform. All users will have access to different types of offers based on their account type. As the website gain popularity, higher revenue can be generated based on this sale.

For the mental and health-being benefits, it provide students with an extra source of information from accommodation, jobs and products selling all in one place. With businesses, it provide them another channel to communicate with students and prospective employee and more understand about their wishes.

This project outlined two main objectives, one is for short-term and the other one is for long-term:

Short-term goal:

• Increase the popularity among Darwin community in general and CDU Students.

Long-term goal:

• Provide an easy way to communicate between students, businesses and locals.

SWOT Analysis

Below is the list of general stakeholders, both internal and external which have direct or indirect influence on the project:

Direct and indirect competitors for the project were identified based on past data and market condition. With the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, online marketplace can be a dominant type of market in the upcoming time and new future competitors can enter the market and make competition harsher. This assumption can affect the cash flow of the project.

With the amount invested in hardware in the beginning, we assumed that it is sufficient for the size of the website. The server which server the website assets should have the uptime at least 99.5% per year. The projection data based on the approximately 22 hours of servers downtime annually.

The salaries accounted for a large amount of project costs each year. We estimate the staff salaries based on the average salary data for respective position within Australia and that there are no employee turnover during the project lifetime.

We assumed with the IT team resources, the website is ready to be deployed in 4 months’ time and it can take 2 months’ time to gather customers’ feedback and make adjustments. After 6 months, it will start to generate revenue and after 3 years, the project staffs can delegate to the web maintenance staffs.

Limited amount of funding available and development time can affect the final outcome of the project. Furthermore, the varied costs such as supplier price of hardware, salary negotiation for staffs can make cost management challenge. However, after the initial period, the funding constraint can be supported by the income generated by the project.

The project depends on the angel investors funds to operate so investors’ idea can have a weight in project stakeholder meetings. Constraints such as the visual design of the site can affect the creativity of the staff.

Scope of the website will be decided upfront with relevant stakeholders and clearly communicated through the project team. This can make some challenge to the IT team who used to the Agile development methods, which split development process into iterative cycles and deliver products in multiple deliverables. To accommodate with both, the project will only define the general scope of the project, updates and patches will still be delivered after the website deployed for the specific amount of time.

Hardware: As the project does not use third party services or platform, we have to purchase the equipment for the back end infrastructure. The estimate costs for the server as well as the computers for working and other office stationery are estimated to be about A$20,000.

Utilities (Electricity, Internet): Like any other software products, websites requires a constant running server to host its assets, which can consume electricity and Internet. The costs of working computers during the project is also accounted here. The estimated cost will be A$5,000 throughout the duration of the project.

Repair & Maintenance: Technology devices requires repair and maintenance from time to time in order to function properly. The estimate cost is about A$1,000.

Insurance: Technology devices are expensive to repair and insurance must be considered as part of the start-up expenses in order to reducing repair cost. The estimated insurance is about A$500 for A$20,000 cost of hardware. This is included both hardware and software insurance.

Salaries: A good software project team includes several positions from project manager to developers and designers. Salaries cost does not necessary incur at the beginning of the project but also need to be considered to be in the project cost in general.

Miscellaneous fee: includes licences for the required software, taxes, legal and consultation fees, etc. This is estimated to be about A$1,000.

As it based on future forecast, the cost and time constraint of the project can be changed based on different market conditions. The business case statistics on cost based on the current price of hardware and salaries, this subjects to changes in the future and can be significantly different when the COVID pandemic stops.

As our products is run on web platform and exposed to the online network, cyber attacks can be an issue that the IT managers and developers needs to consider. The likelihood of this risks is based on the type of the website. In the case of the CDU Marketplace, transaction based logic and customers’ information are some of the most sensitive info and should be kept confidential.

The project charter needs to be done carefully as it authorize the project manager to use the necessary resources to complete the project. Estimated cost and budget allocation needs to be considered. Along with allocated budget is the timeline for the project. The risks will be incorporated when calculating both factors.

Web applications and websites suffer from various cybersecurity issues especially online attacks from the Internet. There are some unique issues which is related to the website we are developing: (Kalman, 2021)

1. SQL Injection – Injection flaws: this problem arises when our code does not properly check for the user input which then add into our database. Attackers can inject commands into these user-input required fields, resulting in loss of data, control or hijacking other users’ browsers. The damage caused is significant as our website contains sensitive information such as credit cards details or users’ passwords. Prevention methods include adding filtering function in our code and considering whether to use the secured framework filtering functions as these are maintained and updated regularly by other skilled developers.

1. Authentication processes: Authentication is hard even with seasoned developers. There are various sub processes where attackers can exploit such as the encryption process or the timeout function for each session. The easiest way to prevent this problem is again to rely on the framework as it takes time to correctly implement our own authentication architecture. Another option is to use the third party authentication such as Facebook, Google or GitHub Authentication API, in this way, the process is handled by a third party and developers can mainly focus on integrating the API into our exist system.

1. Cross-site request forgery (CSRF): this vulnerability allows attackers to mislead users’ browsers and make it perform actions that users do not intend to perform. This often arises when the site lacks a CSRF token as a validation tool and rely solely on the session cookie for identifying user requests. The solution to prevent this kind of problem is to include a hidden token which is inaccessible for any third party apps or websites and the code have to always verify this token before making requests.

Figure 1: CSRF (What is CSRF (Cross-site request forgery)? Tutorial & Examples | Web Security Academy, n.d.)

The project is estimated to take approximately 6 months to complete.

Major milestone:

• 16/4/2021: Finish the initial process and start the planning process.

• 4/6/2021: Finish all the planning works includes prototyping the architecture for databases, UI/UX Design, and main features of the site, start on coding and implementing.

• 13/8/2021: Finish all the coding works, start building and testing until ready to deploy.

• 9/9/2021: Finish deploy the final products. After finish, continue to maintenance and gather customer’s feedback.

(2115 words)

Kalman, G., 2021. 10 Most Common Web Security Vulnerabilities. [online] Toptal Engineering Blog. Available at: <https://www.toptal.com/security/10-most-common-web-security-vulnerabilities>

Portswigger.net. n.d. What is CSRF (Cross-site request forgery)? Tutorial & Examples | Web Security Academy. [online] Available at: <https://portswigger.net/web-security/csrf>

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