Week Twelve - Project Management

Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management.

The triple constraint refers to the assessment and making time, scope and cost of project changes. The value to project management is that it helps a person to comprehend on how resources are to be assigned in bigger view. 

 Fig 11.4 Project management interdependent variables

Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning

Two primary diagrams that are frequently used include:
 A PERT chart which shows the tasks and relationships of a project. The PERT chart comprises of two things: a dependency and a critical path.
The other diagram is a Gantt chart where it is a chart that shows when each task is due to completed. The names of tasks are placed on the vertical side of the chart and the time in which the task is to be completed is placed horizontally.

  http://hsc.csu.edu.au/ind_tech/design/3291/computer_applications.html

Figure 11.8 A PERT chart example

Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success

When ensuring success a project manager must focus on:
• Managing People
• Managing Communications
• Managing Change

Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed.

Week Ten - Customer Relationship Management and Business Intelligence

What is your understanding of CRM?                                           
 Customer relationship management (CRM) is that it's a widely implemented strategy used by companies  to gain insights into customer's shopping and buying behaviours, in order to:
- To increase customer loyalty and retention
- Identify the best and worst customers
- Individualise services to cater more interactions with customers

Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.
The two primary components of a CRM strategy are operational CRM and analytical CRM. Operation CRM supports traditional transactional processing for day to day front office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers. While, Analytical CRM supports back office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal with the customers

Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments
Marketing CRM technologies for marketing help the enterprise identify and target potential clients and generate leads for the sales team. Three marketing operation CRM technologies:

1.       List generator – compiles customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns

2.       Campaign management system – guides users through marketing campaigns

3.       Cross-selling and up-selling

·         Cross-selling – selling additional products or services

·         Up-selling – increasing the value of the sale

Sales CRM technologies involves using software to streamline all phases of the sales process, minimizing the time that sales representatives need to spend on each phase. This allows a business to use fewer sales representatives to manage their clients. Features include:

·         Calenders to help plan customers meetings

·         Alarm reminders signalling important tasks

How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?
By using list generators sales department can use . List generators are able to provide information on precise features of an organisation e.g. a marketing campaign would have list of customers in a geographic area and it can to arrange the lists of each customer in an area. Other strategies include campaign definition, planning and systems and cross sell or up sell.

Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses
Business Intelligence refers to the tools and analysis that provide access to data for strategic decision making in an organisation, e.g. data mining. Business intelligence has a value to an organisation in many different ways and can be used for many different aspects such as PivotTable on Microsoft Access. Business Intelligence is used for any tool that gives a longer length assortment of decision making and encourages types of decision making such as patterns and trends, e.g. allows business to do a SWOT analysis, identifying strength and weakness and competitor's strength and weakness to gain a competitive advantage.
http://etl-tools.info/en/bi/datawarehouse_concepts.htm

Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem
If there is too much data an organisation may have limited knowledge on where data is or who their competitors may be. Hence may be unable to make the best strategic implementation due to insufficient tools to back up data and support decision making to their strategic goals. The solution approach that they could take is business intelligence where it helps an organisation make decisions. Functional areas of an organisation can make decisions where they can be able to see more data analysis and reduce the latency of information in making good decisions.

What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?
The two possible outcomes a company could get from data mining are that it can increase profits, improve sales and confined resources. Another two outcomes include cluster and statistical analysis. Cluster analysis is the searching of equal or non equal but alike data in the many types of databases. However to undertake the cluster analysis, behavioural traits need to be clearly identified through physically separating the individual information into set groups. Statistical analysis assesses the data trends through the assistance of a regression analysis and statistics. Statistical analysis gives opportunity to workers in an organisation a large variety of statistical capabilities in order to construct things such as statistical models. Through examination of the models, companies can extend to forecasting, prediction, validity and the comparison and contrasting the number of models to identify which is the better alternative for an issue within an organisation.

Figure 9.8 Cluster analysis example

Baltzan, Phillips, Lynch, Blakey. 2010. Business Driven Information Systems. McGraw Hill. Sydney, Australia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics#Key_terms_used_in_statistics

 Week Nine - Operations Management and Supply Chain

Define the term operations management

Operations management is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources (including human resources) into goods and services.


Visit the link to gain further information about operational management
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeeTy3YaMu0

Explain operations management’s role in business

Operations management role in the business is to manage the core processes used to manufacture goods and produce service. There is a range of interrelated activities the OM team must do in a business, in order to add value to their products These activities:

·         Forecasting

·         Capacity planning

·         Scheduling

·         Managing inventory

·         Assuring quality

·         Motivating and training employees

·         Locating facilities

Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology

Managers can use IT to heavily influence OM decisions, including :

·         What: What resources will be needed and in what amounts?

·         When: When should the work be scheduled?

·         Where: Where will the work be performed?

·         How: How will the work be done?

·         Who: Who will perform the work?

Explain supply chain management and its role in a business

A Supply Chain management (SCM) involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximise total supply chain effectiveness and profitability in the business.

It's role in a business is to "design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand and measuring performance globally."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_chain_management#Importance_of_supply_chain_management

List and describe the five components of a typical supply chain

A supply chain is a network of organizations and facilities that transforms raw materials into products delivered to customers. A typical supply chain is a made out of five components which includes:

1.        Supplier - provides the resources, raw material to manufacturer

2.        Manufacturer – creates the product

3.       Distributor – Distributes the product to the retailers/ sellers

4.        Retailer -  Orders product from distributers and sell to consumers

5.       Customer - Consumer who purchases the product. 

Supplier > Manufacturer> Distributor>Retailer>Customer

Image1: illustration of a typical supply chain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_company%27s_supply_chain_(en).png

Define the relationship between information technology and the supply chain.

 Organisations must technologies that can effectively manage and oversee their supply chains. Business have started using information technology in their SC to create integrations or tight process and information linkages between functions within an organisation. Business also taking advantage of the technology advances in the five SRM components have significantly improved companies’ forecasting and business operations. Thus, provide companies with greater visibility over the supply chain inventory levels.

Figure 8.10 Factors driving supply chain management