ITP-2 Project

Your team has been asked to prepare a project plan to install an IT system in a small dental clinic. Dr. Bob is in practice with his son, Dr. Robert Jr. The current practice and dental office is in a “store-front” in a strip-mall. The practice employs one dental hygienist, two dental assistants, and one receptionist/bookkeeper. The receptionist keeps all patient and practice records on paper in file folders. The staff of the dental clinic have no computers or other IT tools.

Drs. Bob and Robert Jr. have been offered the opportunity to expand the office into the store area adjacent to the current office. This would more than double the space for the practice. Coincidently, two of Dr. Robert Jr.’s classmates from dental school would like to come to work for this practice. With the additional space, the office would easily accommodate these two additional dentists, with expansion room for two additional dentists in the future as the practice grows.

Bringing in the two new dentists will require hiring of 2 more hygienists, 2 more dental assistants, a full-time bookkeeper, and a part-time receptionist.

The current office has 2 dental chairs in semi-private areas, one hygienist chair in a semi-private area, the reception and waiting area, plus a private room for files and a central area for the X-ray machine, enclaves, and other dental equipment. The new area will be have a similar design to provide working area for all of the new members of the dental clinic.

Dr. Bob and Dr. Robert Jr. have identified $150,000 to provide an IT system that will be modern and will make the practice more efficient. The cost estimate is just that, an estimate.

The doctors would like to move to on-line banking capability for patient payments and payments to the practice’s suppliers. They would like to allow patients to make appointments electronically. They would like to have immediate access to dental organizations to help with diagnoses, as well as to keep up to date on new dental procedures. And they would like to have an IT system that allows them to accept and process dental insurance claims and billing.

While Dr. Robert Jr. has some experience working with computers and IT systems, Dr. Bob has none. He is very old-school and old-fashioned. Unfortunately, he will be your point of contact and the person you will be working with as you “fill-in” and finalize the requirements and move to the design and implementation of the IT system. This means that you will have a need to define and explain terms as you work with him.

As you begin to plan the ITP project, keep in mind that until now the client has had no IT system and has had no IT staff. In addition, there is no networking, LAN, or Internet installed, and no productivity software or other applications. You may assume that Internet connectivity is available in the area, however (whether via ISP or satellite or whatever). Dr. Bob is the major stakeholder and your point of contact for this proposal. Your instructor will fill the role of Dr. Bob and major stakeholder. So all questions for the client should be directed to your class instructor. Your team may consider clarifying the requirements, including the available funding, through Private Message email interviews with Dr. Bob.

Explanatory Notes and Tips

For those not intimately familiar with dental offices, they are rather similar to medical clinics or doctor's offices -- something that everyone has experienced – and there are some level of complex government health care regulatory requirements and privacy requirements to deal with. So you may need to address some basic privacy requirements.

Other things were omitted in order to both minimize the length of the assignment document so that you don't bite off more than you can chew, and to be realistic . In real world project management, it is very typical for the clients to be experts in their own business areas but have little knowledge of IT or especially of projects. Consequently they have little understanding of what kinds of information are needed to do a project, and especially of what levels of detail are needed. They also have little knowledge of technical IT details that may be important for an IT project but aren't their field of expertise. The clients often genuinely don't know what they want or need. They don't know what IT can and can't do for them, so they don't know what to ask for or what's reasonable or unreasonable to request. They also speak a different language than we do. The result is that their requests are often quite vague from our point of view (even on the occasions that they seem specific from their point of view). This will be the case with Dr. Bob!

So what happens? The project team must ask . The project team has to spend a lot of time eliciting requirements, assumptions, constraints, business rules, and so forth; especially requirements. This is usually iterative, takes a lot of time, and continues (though hopefully decreasing) throughout the project. I'll try to reduce the iterative and incremental nature a bit in order to speed things up a bit for this class. Nevertheless, we intentionally want the project management experience to be realistic, so there are a lot of open ended things in the project scenario that the teams will simply have to ask about.

Who does the team ask? The client, of course. In this ITP class project, the professor serves in the role of instructor and also in the roles of the client, project sponsor, and functional business stakeholders. So when you need more information than you are given -- which will occur, especially during the project charter and WBS phases -- don't guess, please ask!

Please post your ITP WBS assignment in your Assignment Folder; please include your last name and "ITP-2" as part of the file name (example: Jones - ITP-2 - WBS).

There are three parts to this assignment:

1. Assignment for the ITP-2 Project Deliverable - Part 1 - WBS

Review your project charter and the overview of the ITP posted in the Syllabus and in the previous project assignment.

For example, if your project were to paint a bathroom, the major tasks might be:

1.      Prepare bathroom

2.      Buy paint

3.      Apply paint

4.      Clean up

Please note that these are each SINGLE verb statements. Please do not merge tasks, such as “research and buy the paint.” Each task should be ONE verb!

This is the beginning of your WORK BREAKDOWN STRUCTURE.  So your first draft WBS should look like this (example only shows first two major tasks – your WBS should look like this for ALL major tasks):

 1)     Prepare bathroom

a)      Scrub walls

i)       Fill holes

ii)     Sand holes

b)     Tape edges

c)      Cover floor

2)     Buy paint

a)      Measure bathroom

b)     Select color

i)       Select texture

ii)     Purchase paint

iii)   Purchase painting supplies

Notice how each major tasks moves into lower and lower tasks.  This is called “decomposition” as something big becomes broken into smaller and smaller pieces.

Your WBS deliverable for grading would be even more specific and concise.    

As you finish, please move to Part 2 of the assignment and include this effort with your WBS in Microsoft Project.

2. Assignment for the ITP-2 Project Deliverable - Part 2 - Durations

· Add project task durations to the lowest level task (sub-sub tasks) to build to the project schedule. Do not add durations to the higher level (sub and major tasks) levels. (MS Project will eventually roll-up the durations to the higher level tasks, and calculate them automatically for summary roll-up groups. Therefore, do not enter hard-coded durations or dates in the lower-level tasks or in the higher-level summary groups.) Durations should include hours, days, and weeks of time posted in the Gantt view. If you are using Excel, provide the durations in the lowest level tasks ONLY, as you will do in Project. For example:

2) Buy paint

a) Measure bathroom

b) Select color

i) Select texture – 3 days

ii) Purchase paint – 2 hours

iii) Purchase painting supplies - 2 hours

· In MS Project do not enter hard-coded dates – in other words, do not enter dates at all. Just enter durations as measures of time and let MS Project calculate the dates.

· In MS Project, do not use "manually scheduled" tasks. Rather, use "automatically scheduled" tasks. Auto-Schedule is on the tool bar at the top and includes push-pins and blue arrows. When manually scheduled, the dates are essentially hard-coded (set to a defined date) and not allowed to automatically adjust when the task durations and critical paths change

· In MS project, the higher level tasks are "roll up" tasks and should have no work themselves. Don't enter a duration for these tasks. Their timespan will be automatically calculated by MS Project as the sum of the timespans of their component sub-tasks as part of the algorithm that Project uses to calculate the schedule.

· Try to avoid overly small (micromanaged) or overlay large durations (which bite off more than you can chew). Rather, try to keep them reasonable, perhaps a week or two, each.

Submit Parts 1 and 2 as a single Project (.mpp) file. Include your name in the file name and post in the Assignment area for ITP-2. Be careful to post in the right place.

It should look like this in Project:

3. Assignment for the ITP-2 Project Deliverable - Part 3 - Questions

Read and think through the options and alternatives suggested by these questions before you build your WBS. Then finally, when your WBS is completed, answer the following questions and submit them as a Word doc in addition to your WBS file (above

1. Does your WBS include everything in your team's charter and all deliverables (promised deliverables to the client organization customer)? Does your WBS address tasks that were not discussed in the Project Charter? If so, what are they and how did you decide you needed the additional tasks?

2. Does your WBS include project management tasks necessary to manage the project, as well?

3. Did you develop your WBS top-down or bottom up approach?  Why? To answer this question, please define the terms first. This is an opportunity to include additional research to answer the question completely.

4. Did you use a product-oriented WBS, or a process-oriented (e.g., SDLC phases) WBS, or something else?  What are the definitions and how did those definitions affect your decision? Why?

5. It is often a good idea to prepare the WBS in an OUTLINE in Word instead of Excel, or Excel instead of Project. This helps team members visualize the order of the tasks and how the tasks might decompose into lower levels. Did you do this (use Word or Excel first) or did you only use Excel or Project? If you only used Project, did you find yourself rearranging the order of the tasks as you were inputting them or as you were finishing the WBS?

6. Did you initially approach it graphically (e.g., like an organization chart) or tabularly (like a list or table), or something else?  Why?

7. Did you work with your teammates to determine the major tasks or did you do it all on your own? How well did it work?

As you prepare for the next assignment, please discuss with your teammates how you will manage the WBS.  One possibility is to divide up the major tasks among teammates.  Each teammate would have responsibility for that “area” and all areas will be consolidated into a single Microsoft Project document.  However, all the team members' submissions taken together should cover the entire project WBS. You may use any other approach that works well for your team.  Any approach other than each team member doing the entire project WBS must be explained in each submission.

Please post the Word document AND the .mpp (MS Project document) in the Assignment area. Please include your name in the file name and be sure to post in the right place (ITP-2).

Afterward, each team member should post his/her WBSes in the LEO Group area for merging and for consolidation into a single team WBS for the next ITP assignment.  

Does it seem as though perhaps there is not enough information to complete the project and the WBS? If so, please ask the client/customer (your instructor).

Grading approximate breakdown by areas include:

· General: Structure, Format, Mechanics, Style (~5%)

· WBS accomplishes the project (~20%)

· WBS, technical (~30%)

· Schedule (durations) (~35%)

· Questions (~10%)

Rubrics and Grading for the ITP-2 Project Deliverable

Spelling, punctuation and formatting are worth a significant portion of the grade/points earned. In other words, if a WBS is graded as a 8.4 but has several writing/editing errors, the grade for the assignment could be as low as 6.0. 

To earn 90-100% of the points available for this assignment -

All requirements of the assignment are met.  The WBS includes more than at least 10 major tasks and at least 60 lower level tasks in 4 sub-levels (major task, sub-task, sub-sub task, sub-sub-sub task).  The tasks are ALL single verb statements, and subtasks (lower level tasks) are indented to the appropriate level. The WBS is logical, complete, and flows well from beginning to end.  The WBS includes a title line.  A final task (with no sub-tasks) defines the end of the project. The textbook and at least 2 references are used from academically credible sources are used to help build the WBS. A Reference Page is included. All questions in Part 3 are answered in a writing style appropriate for a senior level course; background is included and decisions and reasoning for decisions are included. The WBS has durations for lowest-level leaf node tasks (work packages). Summary roll-up groups have no hard-coded durations assigned (though if MS Project is used, it may automatically calculate their durations). Durations include minutes, hours, days, and weeks in whole numbers (no decimals!). There should be a single start task and a single end task, both with zero duration. MS Project is used (vice MS Word or Excel), the Notes feature is used to provide supplemental information, and at least two other features of Microsoft Project have been used and discussed in the text document. "Dangerous" MS Project features are not used. A Reference Page is included. All questions in Part 3 are answered.