Current Issues and Impact on UNICEF Child Care

The purpose of the project is development of a new system in UNICEF child care. The child care facility has been facing issues in managing their donations and maintaining stock of their products. UNICEF child care takes care of children ageing between 6 weeks up to 13years of age and has grown popular due to their contribution to the society. The new system will help them manage their organizations in a better way.

The UNICEF child care takes care of children by providing them with babysitters, food, nannies and teachers. The organization has flourished over the time and they serve more than 2500 people on a daily basis. However, the payment and ordering processes are still manual which is problematic for the parents to pay and for the centre head to order required inventory. The parents have to go to the firm’s website to get the bank details and make a transfer of funds to the respective account. This process is time consuming and cumbersome for the parents. Moreover, the organization does not have automated system for ordering and inventory management which causes wastage of resources.

As opined by ul Hassan, Ahmad and Zuhaira, (2018), project statement is developed to outline the project deliverables, requirements, constraints and assumptions. The key success factors are also defined within the project so that it can be followed to attain the desired result. The current project will consist of developing a new information system which will facilitate in online transaction of funds and management of inventory in a better way so that resource wastage can be reduced.

As stated by Alias et al., (2014), project objectives are the direct and intended outcomes which are derived based on the scope statement. This will be developed according to the requirements of the stakeholders. In this current project, the objectives are as follows:

• To investigate the current issues and identify the requirements of the new system
• To communicate and discuss with the team members about the project objectives to distinguish between their job roles
• To spot the hardware and software required for the new system
• To develop the new system for facilitate the online transaction and inventory management
• To incorporate the system within the organization model
• Testing of the new developed system for required modifications
• Reshaping and launching of the new system

Project requirements are tasks or conditions that will have to be fulfilled in order to complete the project.  The requirements in a project will provide a clear picture of the things that will have to be done (Haron et al., 2017). These will be used to align the resources along with the objectives of the project. There are major benefits in effectively defining the requirements of the project are cost reduction, effective change management, increase in success rate of the project and improvement in communication among the stakeholders. The requirements of the current project are as follows:

• To identify the requirements for the change management initiative
• Developing a system that can auto generate  response when payment has been made
• To develop systems that keep records of all the clients
• To develop inventory management system to avoid wastage of resources

Project Statement

The restrictions put on the action of the project team are known as project context. There are mainly six project constraints that they will have to deal with and they are quality, time, resources, risk, cost and scope (Shiohama et al., 2016). The constraint triangle shows that scope, time and cost are the three primary factors affecting the quality of the project. The project constraints are interrelated and impact of one factor will have a significant influence on the other factors in the project. The constraints in the project are time, resource and budget. The time span is fixed and cannot be changed so the project will have to manage risk factors and uncertainties in a better way. The resources are limited due to the budget constraints so over allocation of resources will have to be avoided. The project team will have to develop an effective communication plan so that role of every member is well defined. Therefore, the project manager will have to monitor and control each process on a regular process which will be essential for maintaining the integrity of the project.

In every project there are certain predefined assumptions which have to be taken into consideration before executing the project (Kerzner, 2017). The assumptions of the project are as follows:

• The internal stakeholders, departments and sponsors of the project have fully supported the project that has been undertaken
• The headquarters will fulfil the additional requirements for the successful execution of the project.
• The project purpose and objective have been communicated to all the departments

As stated by Muriana and Vizzini (2017), risk management plays a vital role in success of the project and it consists of identification of risk factors, evaluation of the risk factors and mitigation of  the risk factors based on their priority. The risk factors can be categorized into three categories such as external risk, internal risk and technical risk. The risk factors are mitigated according to level of damage they can have on the project. The probability of occurrence of each of the risk factors is the measure of risk priority.

External risk

Internal risk

Chow, Woodford and Lambe, (2014), states the input processes within the project required for achieving the desired goals of the stakeholders. The inputs in a project will depend on the project processes and they can be like documents, equipment, information, software, plan and money. However, the outputs in the projects are mainly recognized as deliverables in the project. This will consist of components like software, hardware, contracts, applications and assessment results.  In this present project, the deliverables of the projects are as follows:

As put forward by Montoya and Persson, (2017), the achievements in different phases of the task are known as the project milestone. These are tasks within the project schedule having duration of zero days and they do not have any influence on the overall timeframe of the project. However, these are important tasks as it signifies completion of important phases within a project. However, this will change depending upon the project approach taken by the organizations.

Project Objectives

The summary schedule shows that different phases and tasks that have to be performed in each of the phases (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017).  The project schedule shows that the overall estimated time for project is 173 days and the project will commence from 6^th April, 2018 and the finish date of the project is 4^th December, 2018.  However, there may be changes in the schedule depending upon the risk factors and changes in the deliverables of the project. Even though the buffer time has been allocated to each of the tasks there are certain uncertainties which can affect the project time span. The schedule shows the allotted time for each of the tasks and the schedule for the current project are as follows:

The summary budget shows the estimated budget of the overall project along with the budget for each of the tasks (Abran, 2015). However, the budget will change if there is change in resource allocation and deliverables. Moreover, the risk factors may affect the time span of the project which in turn will have an impact on the budget. The budget of the current project has been described in detail in the table below:

Conclusion

Thus, it can be concluded from the project charter that an effective plan has been developed for developing a new system for the UNICEF child care service. However, the implementation and the success of the project will depend on the mitigation of the risk factor, development of an effective communication plan and identifying the project requirements in a correct way. 

References

Abran, A. (2015). Software project estimation: the fundamentals for providing high quality information to decision makers. John Wiley & Sons.

Alias, Z., Zawawi, E. M. A., Yusof, K., & Aris, N. M. (2014). Determining critical success factors of project management practice: A conceptual framework. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 153, 61-69.

Chow, A. F., Woodford, K. C., & Lambe, N. (2014). Using project deliverables and project management for timely completion of student projects. Journal of Emerging Trends in Economics and Management Sciences, 5(3), 323.

Haron, A., Sahibuddin, S., Yusoff, H., & Osman, M. H. (2017, May). Systematic Approach Based on Best Practices to Develop Requirements Engineering (RE) Guideline in an Organization. In Information and Communication Technology (PICICT), 2017 Palestinian International Conference on (pp. 126-131). IEEE.

Kerzner, H. (2017). Project management metrics, KPIs, and dashboards: a guide to measuring and monitoring project performance. John Wiley & Sons.

Kerzner, H., & Kerzner, H. R. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Montoya, J. H., & Persson, K. A. (2017, April). The Materials Project: Milestones, Challenges, and Opportunities in High-Throughput Computational Materials Science. In Meeting Abstracts (No. 35, pp. 1666-1666). The Electrochemical Society.

Muriana, C., & Vizzini, G. (2017). Project risk management: A deterministic quantitative technique for assessment and mitigation. International Journal of Project Management, 35(3), 320-340.

Shiohama, R., Washizaki, H., Kuboaki, S., Sakamoto, K., & Fukazawa, Y. (2016). Investigating the relationship between project constraints and appropriate iteration length in agile development through simulations. International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 54(4), 311-322.

ul Hassan, I., Ahmad, N., & Zuhaira, B. (2018). Calculating completeness of software project scope definition. Information and Software Technology, 94, 208-233.