Development of project specification

Task 1 – Development of project specification

Analysis the factors that contribute to the process of selecting the concerned change.

In this section, we provide an elaborate analysis of the factors that contribute to the process of selecting the concerned change (CRM development and implementation at McDonalds).

McDonald’s is the world’s leading foodservice retailer having over 34,000 local restaurants that serve close to 69 million people in a total of 119 countries every single day (McDonalds,2013). An estimated 80% of the franchise’s restaurants globally are owned as well as operated by several independent men, women and families. The main factor that has led to the selecting the concerned change is the apparent loss of profits/income. Last year, it was reported that the global chain’s net income fell by 3.5% for the very first time in 9 years; from $1.51 billion to close to $1.46 billion. This took place as its total sales fell by 0.2% to about $7.15 billion (Grimes,2012).The other factor for adopting or selecting the concerned change is the need to gain a competitive advantage over CRM has been noted by Ballantyne (2005) to be an important tool for the creation as well as gaining of a competitive advantage in an environment marked with stiff competition such as the one in which McDonalds its competitors. operates in.

Project selection is noted by Mantel et al (2010) to be the process of choosing a specific project or a set of critical projects that are to be implemented by a given organization. Due to the fact that projects generally demand a substantial amount of investment in regard to the money and other resources and coupled with the fact that both are usually limited, it is necessary that projects that are selected by an organization provide an excellent return on investment on both the capital and resources invested.

The high level of uncertainty that characterizes the modern business environment has made project selection to be a critical aspect of project management. This is because it makes the difference between operational life and the ultimate operational death of an organization.

The decisions arrived at during project selection are high-stake due to their strategic implications and are highly. That is why it is critical that the best tool or framework be adopted when arriving at this step. A successful model must be able to accurately capture all the critical elements of the decision.

The factors that led to the process of selecting the concerned change can be subdivided into three main subcategories;

Mission factors;

McDonald’s brand mission is to be their customers’ favorite place as well as way to eat. Its worldwide operations are perfectly aligned around a global strategy referred to as the Plan to Win, which effectively center on an exceptional level of customer experience of People, Products, Place, Price and Promotion. The company is also committed to continuously improving its operations as well as enhancing its customers’ experience. CRM is a tool for realizing such an objective and mission.

Process factors;

The selection of CRM was guided by the resource-based view of McDonalds that revealed that it has the resources and competencies needed to implement the project fully.

Implementation factors;

The company has in the past implemented IT-based solutions such as e-SCM system for the management of its supply chain. The ability to implement these projects depends on the company’s ability to pull together all the resources and competencies needed to implement the project fully.

Decision process for CRM implementation

The implementation path

An outline of the project specifications for the concerned change

Costs

Time scales

Scale of operation

Standards

Legislation

Ethics

Sustainability

Quality

Fitness-for-purpose

Business data

Resource implications

According to Burke (2003) the steps involved in the development of project specification are; the setting pg the project goals, setting of the project deliverables, setting of the project schedule as well as setting of the supporting plans.

1.3 Project specification

The development as well as implementation of an enterprise-wide CRM system at McDonalds will be carried out according to the following systems specification;

Costs

It is important that the development and implementation costs be maintained at a minimum. Equally important is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). To ensure that the costs are maintained at a minimum level, McDonalds would have to implement a cloud-based enterprise-wide CRM system .The cost of any type of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution should be considered in terms of hard costs (such as software licensing, implementation consulting fees, hardware fulfillment, IT labor) as well as soft costs (integration ,employee downtime, training) Even though it still comes as a surprise too many people, the soft costs would normally exceed the hard costs by a solid factor of two or more. Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM implementation costs are considered to be lower than traditional licensing as well as on-premise software installations. Internal costs however continue to apply. McDonalds must be ready to invest at least $5,000 in the initial hard costs.The project cost should however be close to $ 50M.

Time scales

CRM project implementation takes time.Bigger CRM projects which affect several areas a given business normally entered into without enough time, human resource as well as money being allocated to both the planning as well as management of the roll out across the business. As a consequence, two things usually happen: the loss of the original business objectives, and as the main project advances forward, the realisation that the value from the investment hasn’t made clear to project stakeholders.  As a consequence, they get frustrated and the entire project becomes regarded as a cost as opposed to a business initiative that should deliver a return on investment (“ROI”). The project should be fully implemented within a year with a consideration of the timescale as well as time for staff raining.

Scale of operation

The operation will be enterprise-wide covering all the McDonald franchises. A parallel application will also be deployed as a free download to mobile devices from the mobile internet portals.

Standards

The CRM will be built and deployed according to the approved industry standards as envisioned in the standard UML standard for use in the analysis and design of the CRM system. The CRM must also meet the standards dictated by ISO 27001,Safe harbor as well as SSAE16 SOC1 Type II

Legislation

The fact that McDonalds is a multinational franchise means that there are serious legal issues to be considered when deploying the CRM solution. For any business to legally transfer any data from the European Union to the U.S., the company or other firm must publicly certify that it would comply with the EU Safe Harbor principles, which perfectly aligns to the EU’s privacy rules.

Ethics

The CRM solution will not reveal any private and confidential customer or company data without consent. Confidentiality of information must be at the highest level.

Sustainability

The system must be operated from terminals that are socially and environmentally friendly. All the equipment must conform to the FCC rules and regulations and must have the lowest level of carbon footprint.

Quality

The quality of the CRM solution must be the highest possible due to the sensitivity and value of information contained and exchanged within the framework.

Fitness-for-purpose

To ensure that the project is “fit for purpose”, a parallel project dubbed “optimize” will be deployed.

Business data

Business data will have to be treated with utmost confidentiality.

Resource implications

The CRM implementation shall not take up more than 4 % of McDonalds ‘resources. If need be the company would have to outsource the service in order to ensure that it concentrates in its key competencies.

Project Life Cycle

The project life-cycle is noted by Westland (2006) to be a framework for dividing the project up into several more manageable phases

Concept and initiation

Design and development

Implement or construction

Commissioning and handing over

Burke (2003)

Task 2 – Planning for the launch of a new product, service or process

Produce a project plan for the concerned change.

Project planning is an important component of project management. For key areas must be covered. These are;

Step 1 – Setting of Project goals

Step 2 – Setting of Project deliverables

Step 3 – Setting of Project schedules

Step 4 – Setting of Supporting plans

Project goals

A project can only be defined as a success if the needs of stakeholders are met at the level of their expectations. That means that anyone involved in the project (either directly or indirectly) will be able to see what they set out to achieve. The stakeholders need to be identified, and includes the following;

The project sponsor

A senior executive in McDonalds corporation who must be committed to the project, stay informed, clears all roadblocks, allocate various resources, manage all types of saboteurs (individuals invested and interested in maintaining the status quo), and well as acts as the cheerleader for the project. Without a dedicated executive sponsor, the process of implementing CRM would fail.

The end-user of the project outputs

McDonalds Corporation franchisees and the top executives

The project manager and the project team

A key member of project management team would be the Project Manager. Even thought it may be necessary for McDonalds to employ a third party consulting firm and/or the software vendor to help with the implementation, it is necessary to have a Project Manager from McDonalds who is to be designated as the official leader of the implementation team and effort. This individual should be in a position in the corporation that will enable him/her to effectively assemble and mobilize the internal resources necessary to complete this project. The project management experience is an added advantage since his experience within the primary areas where the CRM software is to be used.The project team must also contain representatives from the various areas or departments who will be using the software. They will need to communicate their groups needs as well as champion the product to their various group. Finally, McDonalds must also include a specially designated CRM software administrator. The Project team will therefore be involved in the process of designing how users will carry out their work on the CRM system. Finally, the entire team will take part in the Model Office Review in order to validate that all is in order for subsequent rollout.

Identify appropriate resources to handle the project.

The resources to be used are;

Resources refer to the various items that would be needed for the completion of the CRM implementation process. In this case, McDonalds would need people/manpower, financial resources, vehicles, buildings and technology. The concept of resource scheduling would have to be taken into account for the process to be a success. The idea would be to allocate the limited resources on the basis of the priority that is given to the various project activities.

Estimate the cost all resources required for implementing the project.

It is important that the development and implementation costs be maintained at a minimum. Equally important is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). To ensure that the costs are maintained at a minimum level, McDonalds would have to implement a cloud-based enterprise-wide CRM system .The cost of any type of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution should be considered in terms of hard costs (such as software licensing, implementation consulting fees, hardware fulfillment, IT labor) as well as soft costs (integration ,employee downtime, training) Even though it still comes as a surprise too many people, the soft costs would normally exceed the hard costs by a solid factor of two or more. Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM implementation costs are considered to be lower than traditional licensing as well as on-premise software installations. Internal costs however continue to apply. McDonalds must be ready to invest at least $5,000 in the initial hard costs.The project cost should however be close to $ 50M.

Propose timescales for the management and implementation of the project.

CRM project implementation takes time. Bigger CRM projects which affect several areas a given business normally entered into without enough time, human resource as well as money being allocated to both the planning as well as management of the roll out across the business. As a consequence, two things usually happen: the loss of the original business objectives, and as the main project advances forward, the realization that the value from the investment hasn’t made clear to project stakeholders.  As a consequence, they get frustrated and the entire project becomes regarded as a cost as opposed to a business initiative that should deliver a return on investment (“ROI”). The project should be fully implemented within a year with a consideration of the timescale as well as time for staff training.

2.5 Plan an appropriate strategy for the implementation of the project.

The strategy to be used for project implementation will be a generic one derived from the work of Burke (2003).The project life-cycle is noted by Westland (2006) to be a framework for dividing the project up into several more manageable phases

Concept and initiation

Design and development

Implement or construction

Commissioning and handing over

Burke (2003)

Task 3 – Implementing the project

Describe how to implement the project in accordance with agreed specification.

Due to the complexity of implementing a cloud-based enterprise-wide CRM project, it would be necessary to contract a competent vendor such as SAP (will be evaluated and chosen competitively).This vendor however work hand in hand with a project manager and sponsor derived from McDonalds.In regard to the timescale needed to implement the project, CRM project implementation takes time. Bigger CRM projects which affect several areas a given business normally entered into without enough time, human resource as well as money being allocated to both the planning as well as management of the roll out across the business. As a consequence, two things usually happen: the loss of the original business objectives, and as the main project advances forward, the realization that the value from the investment hasn’t made clear to project stakeholders.  As a consequence, they get frustrated and the entire project becomes regarded as a cost as opposed to a business initiative that should deliver a return on investment (“ROI”). The project should be fully implemented within a year with a consideration of the timescale as well as time for staff training. In regard to the project leadership, a key member of project management team would be the Project Manager. Even thought it may be necessary for McDonalds to employ a third party consulting firm and/or the software vendor to help with the implementation, it is necessary to have a Project Manager from McDonalds who is to be designated as the official leader of the implementation team and effort. This individual should be in a position in the corporation that will enable him/her to effectively assemble and mobilize the internal resources necessary to complete this project. The project management experience is an added advantage since his experience within the primary areas where the CRM software is to be used.The project team must also contain representatives from the various areas or departments who will be using the software. They will need to communicate their groups needs as well as champion the product to their various group. Finally, McDonalds must also include a specially designated CRM software administrator. The Project team will therefore be involved in the process of designing how users will carry out their work on the CRM system. Finally, the entire team will take part in the Model Office Review in order to validate that all is in order for subsequent rollout. As indicated earlier on, the strategy to be used for project implementation will be a generic one derived from the work of Burke (2003).The project life-cycle is noted by Westland (2006) to be a framework for dividing the project up into several more manageable phases

Concept and initiation

Design and development

Implement or construction

Commissioning and handing over

Develop appropriate measures to monitor and evaluate progress and outcomes of the project.

Monitoring and evaluation is a key component of project management implementation. In this case, several measures will be used to monitor and evaluate progress and outcomes of the project. They include the following; the level of expenditure on CRM implementation, the amount of customer service activities reduced or replaced, Number of businesses showing some signs of improvement as a result of an CRM implementation, net value added to the corporation, the increase in profitability noted, qualitative data on information on levels of satisfaction, employee and customer motivation; customer attitudes as well as behaviours.

3.3 Describe how to monitor the implementation of the project.

Monitoring is the entire process involved in the process of recording inputs, the activities as well as the outputs of a given project.

Evaluation however, is a retrospective analysis of a given project in order to establish whether its main objectives as well as targets have been successfully achieved, what the project impacts have been as well as if it has provided the much expected value for money .It also establishes what can be learnt in order to to support future project as well as and policy development.

The process of monitoring and evaluation is the main idea to the understanding, the developing an as well a the process of improving effectiveness in the process of meeting the project objectives as well as the needs of partners and project stakeholders.

A monitoring framework must be able to collect information on the following;:-

Management information on the various project inputs and activities;

The Information that would enable progress towards the attainment of target

Information to be used to assess the extent to which the project is contributing to the profitability of the company.

Information that will attempt allow for the a project’s unique contribution/successes to be assessed.

The purpose of a monitoring framework in this case is to collect, albeit on an ongoing basis, the information (both quantitative and qualitative) that can inform the delivery as well as assess the progress towards the attainment of the target or project goals.. Collection of information about the project’s performance on a more regular basis will provide a mush more ‘real time’ evidence performance as well as inform on the progress against the set objectives. It would also provide an early indication of any pertinent issues in the project implementation process.

As noted earlier, monitoring and evaluation is a key component of project management implementation. In this case, several measures will be used to monitor and evaluate progress and outcomes of the project. They include the following; the level of expenditure on CRM implementation, the amount of customer service activities reduced or replaced, number of businesses showing some signs of improvement as a result of an CRM implementation, net value added to the corporation, the increase in profitability noted, qualitative data on information on levels of satisfaction, employee and customer motivation; customer attitudes as well as behaviours.

Task 4 – Evaluating the outcomes of the project

Describe how to analyze the outcomes of the project in terms of the original project specification.

The original project specifications and the analysis of the project outcomes in terms of these project specifications are as follows;

Costs

In regard to cost, the project will be analyzed if it was over or under budgeted. It will be important to calculate the various costs involved in the project implementation and then compare them against the originally budgeted amount. The analysis revealed that the project cost $4M less that the projected amount due to various factors such as foreign currency fluctuations, inflation and reduced material and technology cost.

Time scales

According to the original specification, the project should have been fully implemented within a year with a consideration of the timescale as well as time for staff raining. However, the project took 8 months to develop and implement instead of one year.

Scale of operation

Te original specification indicated that the operation would be enterprise-wide covering all the McDonald franchises. A parallel application would also be deployed as a free download to mobile devices from the mobile internet portals. As earlier predicted or set, the scale of operation is enterprise-wide and the mobile application was also developed accordingly.

Standards

The CRM met the standards dictated by ISO 27001,Safe harbor as well as SSAE16 SOC1 Type II.

Legislation

The developed and implemented CRM system conforms to all the EU Safe Harbor principles, and perfectly aligns to the EU’s privacy rules legislations.

Ethics

The CRM solution has not at the moment revealed any private and confidential customer or company data without consent. Confidentiality of information has been and will continue to be at the highest level.

Sustainability

All the CRM equipment conforms to the FCC rules and regulations and have the lowest level of carbon footprint. The system conforms to all the sustainability requirements/specifications.

Quality

The system’s quality is impeccable.

Fitness-for-purpose

To ensure that the project is “fit for purpose”, a parallel project dubbed “optimize” was indeed deployed.

Business data

Business data is being treated with utmost confidentiality.

Resource implications

The CRM implementation has taken up about 3 % of McDonalds ‘resources. This is less than the 4% which was earlier on predicted or set. If company had to outsource the service in order to ensure that it concentrates in its key competencies.

Evaluate the outcomes of the project.

The outcomes of the project are the reduced of expenditure on customer services, the amount of customer service activities were reduced, the number of businesses/outlets showing some signs of improvement as a result of an CRM implementation in terms of responsiveness to customers and profitability increased, net value added to the corporation, the increase in profitability has been noted, qualitative data on information on levels of satisfaction, employee and customer motivation; customer attitudes as well as behaviours shows a positive gain.All these points to an increased profitability and improved competitive advantage.

Make justified recommendations to improve the project based on the evaluation in 4.2.

The company should dedicate more resources in the implementation and improvement of its CRM system to capture all elements of their consumers.

Produce a report for all project procedures used in the project.

The procedures used in the project are numerous. They range from project specification to project implementations. These processes are tailored to capture all elements of the project. Concept and initiation, design and development, implement or construction and commissioning and handing over.Project planning too is also an important component of project management. For key areas must be covered. These are; setting of project goals, setting of project deliverables, setting of project schedules and setting of supporting plans. Monitoring and evaluation is one the final step. The development of this CRM project management report detailed all the activities that were carried out in order to develop and implement the cloud-based CRM solution at McDonalds. The project procedures used in this project started from the analysis of the factors that contributed to the process of project selection..This was the followed by the development of project implementation, a process that involved the choosing a specific project or a set of critical projects that are to be implemented by a given organization. Due to the fact that projects generally demand a substantial amount of investment in regard to the money and other resources and coupled with the fact that both are usually limited, it is necessary that projects that are selected by an organization provide an excellent return on investment on both the capital and resources invested. This step was the followed by the production of the project specification. Project planning was then carried out next. Project implementation then followed and then followed by a meticulous project monitoring and evaluation. Recommendations then followed and finally project presentation to the management.

Describe how to present the outcomes of the project to the senior management team of the organisation.

The outcome of the project will be presented to the senior management team of the organization through well formatted PowerPoint presentations. These presentations must be accompanied with detailed noted of all the steps. Emphasis should be placed on the most important outcomes such as profitability and increased competitive advantage. It is best to animate the slides and use sounds as well.

The project outcome indicated that the implementation of the project led McDonalds to realize a sale increase of averagely 6% within the first six months of implementation. This therefore means that the company’s profitability was improved due to CRM implementation.The other thing that was realized by the company is a competitive advantage over its competitors as predicted by Ballantyne (2005).The net value added to the corporation was greater,an increase in profitability was noted, qualitative data on information on levels of satisfaction showed an improvement , employee and customer motivation improved and positive changes in customer attitudes as well as behaviours were also seen.

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—– Software Runaways: Lessons Learned from Massive Software Project Failures, (Prentiss